One of the important ways in which modern people differ from ancient people, is that modern society has mastered risk. That is not to say that each individual has mastered risk, but that each individual has at their disposable extremely powerful tools, passed down from great thinkers, that allows them to understand risk better than … Read more
The ironic part about get-rich-quick schemes is that the people who buy into them invest many years trying to get rich “quick.” But why are they so attractive? It could have something to do with “loss aversion” – the idea that people prefer to avoid losing 100 dollars than gain 100 dollars even if there … Read more
The Illusion of Separateness The biggest taboo of all is knowing who we really are behind the mask of our self as presented to the world. Through our focus on ourselves and the world as it affects us, we have developed narrowed perception. – Alan Watts, The Book To understand what Watts is saying, we … Read more
In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), Rieff describes modern society as completely different from the past. Previously, society was marked by “religious man” – and then, many centuries later, by “economic man”, and now, in the current stage, by “psychological man.” And this new type of individual differs from ancestors in the way he … Read more
In The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time, I discussed the trade-off of modernity, which recapped the ideas of A Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch. The belief of modern society, and perhaps even more so in the future, with the rise of techno-utopianism, is the belief that a combination of multiple autophile behaviors will be … Read more
In Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer makes an interesting remark about the pitfalls of reading too much. He refers to Alexander Pope’s poem. Forever reading, never to be read. Alexander Pope When you read the thoughts of others, you are allowing their flow of thoughts to steer you in one direction or another, even if … Read more
Ivan the Fool is a short parable by Leo Tolstoy first published in 1886. It presents Tolstoy’s philosophical critique of militarism and commercialism. Ivan belongs to a peasant family. He has two brothers. One of his brothers is a soldier, the other is a fat merchant. Ivan is the story’s hero; he is called a … Read more
Should you become a specialist or a generalist? In a previous post, I argued that unless you were a genius or a polymath like Leonardo Da Vinci, you should specialize. If you are normal, it will take you a long time to become good enough at something to be able to innovate or add value … Read more
In the last few decades, the possibility of downloading our thoughts into a computer has been discussed. And just as with the internet, the first people who talked about mind uploading were small in number, and eccentric in character. But now, the idea of human-machine intelligence has entered into the mainstream. Ray Kurzweil predicts that … Read more
The image of a forest burning is tragic. Forests capture carbon. And carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas emitted by human activities. Changes in forest carbon can mitigate climate change or make it worse. But forest fires are important. They help the natural cycle of woods’ growth and replenishment. They clear dead trees, leaves, … Read more