Eros and Thanatos (Week 24 of Wisdom)
Freud and his [predecessors ](https://unearnedwisdom.
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Rule 8: Tell the Truth or at Least Don’t Lie (12 Rules For Life)
When Peterson was later asked which rule he found hardest to follow, he said it was this one. Don’t Lie A form of lying (to yourself) and to others is to espouse overly simplistic “truths” about the world.
The Discovered Self
Many thinkers including Kierkegaard, C.J Jung, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Rogers, and Plato have all written about the discovery of the self. To Kierkegaard, there was only one greater tragedy than failing to become…
The Unreasonable Signature
Eugene Wigner famously observed the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” highlighting the striking phenomenon that abstract mathematical concepts, formulated without explicit reference…
Madness From Civilization
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 Simulation Argument
Imagine you’re playing a really advanced video game, so advanced that the characters in it think they’re real. Now, what if our whole world was like that game, and we were all just characters in it? That’s the basic…
Tough Times Create Strong Men (or Reveal Them)
We’ve all heard the saying “tough times create strong men.” But is that really true? Does going through difficult experiences make us stronger, or do they just reveal who we already are? While it’s impossible to give…
What Matters Most
What Stops You From Doing What Matters Most? What Matters Most* Incomplete Advice There’s a book about entrepreneurship called “Millionaire Fastlane”.
What is the Best Jordan Peterson Book?
Jordan Peterson is a polarizing figure in the world of psychology. Some people view him as a prophet, while others condemn him as a charlatan. Although he has published several books, the majority of his work has…
Heidegger on Authenticity
In his book, Being and Time, German philosopher Martin Heidegger quotes the following about authenticity: “For to be revealed from out of concealment, this is the essence of truth. Truth is the disclosure of that…
The Problem with the Regret Minimization Framework
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, once came up with a heuristic to make decisions called The Regret Minimization Framework – the idea is to project yourself into the future and look back on your decision from that…
Chapter 18: Science Fiction (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Escaping the Matrix Science fiction today commits a grave error, it conflates intelligence for consciousness. This is why most works in this genre imagine a future war between man and machine.