When someone dies, you don't read out a list of accomplishments. You talk about who they were.
Yet in an ever-changing process, we see but slivers of them across chapters, never capturing the full self. Our lives are but our own to live. The story it becomes is just one of many we could've had.
Many people don't know what they want, so their story is not theirs to tell, for they never set the narrative in the first place.
Finding the betters of material goods is important because we live in a constructed world. Without electricity, food, or good shelter, one has a radically different conception of what is important and what is not. But when people reap the rewards of a society they did not build, they forget that importance in their decadence.
On a personal level, buying is ultimately an act of deciding, and the quality of decisions one makes under limitations affects their quality of life and the world around them.
Every object we see is a hallucination: a chair, table, and so on do not actually exist. They represent the crystallization of human thought, effort, and energy. What we see as a nice house, beauty in a person, and strong institutions is just the reduction of entropy and the increase in quality of thought: and that itself is very precious because life itself is a bubble that persists against entropy and the environment.
Those best able to crystalize their thoughts into the world are the catalysts who set the zeitgeist. The artifacts they leave in their wake serve as an attractor for others to follow.
People hunger for quality, prestige, and competence because this reduction of entropy is inextricably linked to their own persistence and life.
The artifacts produced by people give a sense of consistency to them. The more thought and energy put into things, the more others can clearly see a defined sense of self.
A mental conception was needed to create our material world. Constructed goods, writing, photos, music, and speech transmit strong mental conception across time. When we admire a beautiful city, we spend time in the beautiful minds of people from long ago.
I feel as if many arrive at a societally common standard: default house, default media consumption, default laptop menu bar setup. Someone who accepts what they're told won't change the world. It's that constant itch that causes people to change things until they're right.
This is true for knowledge as well. To the perceptive, a default answer often just seems wrong, which impels one to read, understand, and see things at a fundamental level. We don't need to teach more words and how to repeat said words, but a real meaning and feel for the world as it is.
And that lets one see and define things in their own terms. We live in an established society, so we have to see the peak. Otherwise everything we do is a reaction to something else, keeping us trapped in another's world.
Rarely do we have practitioners instead of instructors as our teachers. Rarer yet is the student who can understand. Quality has a shine of its own.
A social situation never exists in perpetuity: that is the nature of change. Given the innate drives of understanding, learning, and systematizing, I won't force something where it shouldn't happen. And once I came to understand the fundamentals of who people are, the environment, and why people emit certain signals, most of what others did seemed to wash over like noise, so I have become at times too comfortable in solitude.
Yet I still find myself searching. I haven't quite found a city that provides me with a sense of place. I've lived in Atlanta and smaller cities in Georgia, rural Ohio, Cologne, Dresden, Metz, Boston, Greenville (South Carolina), and visited countless more for a few days to get a sense of it such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Beijing, Shanghai, Sofia, Munich, Berlin, and maybe some more. But the truth be told, I probably just haven't found the right people.
I think people are important, without which life becomes so much duller, but I have to respect them. And if I do this for someone else without meaning it, I would lose a little bit of respect for myself each time.
It's difficult to really get to know everyone you meet, given how
many people you
Or it can dissuade them. Even a fool, when he keeps silent and doesn't post online, is considered wise.
However, texting is a dimensionality reduction: a poor representation of someone in real life: their intonation, their values, their habits, or who they essentially are. Video is often better, but not perfect, and quite hard to do well. Audio works too, but it's much more background podcast than foreground reading. People have limited attention spans. Writing seems to get to the heart of things.
The basic purpose of life is simple. The consumption and projection of energy to maintain homeostasis and existence. No food, water, air, or shelter: no life. People are capable of doing this to different extents and value this at different levels. If one feels this is met, then they can try to find the next level: self-esteem, meaning, and so on.
Another look at what life is "about" is a path-dependent series of experiences. Would we say someone who lived an entire life in an empty room lived?
Love is a feeling generated to enhance the cooperation between individuals to further their life and interests. There are many different types of love: love for humans, animals, and others in general; infatuation; romantic love; parental love; group feeling, and so on. Each serves its own purpose. Seeing the types of love clearly is important.
Love is the nature by which people labor for one another; all wealth comes from labor and labor can come from love. But only with property rights and security do people have incentive to labor to make things better. By creating divison in the family such as cultural practices that make children pay rent, the outsourcing of natural things (friends for therapists, care amongst a family) is given to the state.
I don't think I'd like to date again until I'm more set in my life, career, and health. But I generally think that not hurting yourself (whether through substances or certain behaviors) is an act of self-love and for those around you. I think the basics for any positive relationship are straightforward. Try not to act out the following: selfish, lying/inconsistent, lazy, narcissistic and only able to consider one's worldview, dismissively stubborn, dirty, rude, and fiscally irresponsible.
I love excellence, competence, and insightfulness more than most people.
The unit of human life is not the individual; it is the group or human civilization. All organisms: bacterial biofilms, multi-cellular life, herds of deer and flocks of birds and schools of fish and packs of hyenas, a forest, and so on represent the interconnected nature in which a group comes together to pursue its own survival.
Asking if engagement with a human increases the fitness of the group is the primary question. This is the end goal of interviewing which so few people explicitly say: the addition of an individual that increases the overall fitness of the group to pursue its objectives (in modern economy generally "making money from other sources," printed by the government) and the assumed alignment between interviewing processes and the long-term performance of an individual.
Yet we should not wholly accept a utilitarian calculation of net benefit summed over the entire group if it comes at the harm of others in the group.
Relationships and love can be thought of in the same way. Does a pairing increase the long-term fitness of the group? This also explains some short-term relationships. All parties must ask themselves if an engagement is of benefit, but if you're not sure, meeting people and having fun along the way is a good way to find out.
The day homelessness ends for sure is when a group derives benefit from their labor and abilities, of which they have very little. This is why the most open events have the lowest quality (the public internet, free networking events).
Something I've come to realize is the very limited influence each human has on the world. Many leaders head organizations they cannot control. So "changing the world" comes across as naive when it comes from someone who hasn't acknowledged this reality. But you can still have a grim determination to do so from the bottom: self, family, community, city, state, country, and so on.
You can have compassion for others, to treat strangers and the environment with respect, and help others where you can. In difficult situations, however, group feeling is the first priority for the allocation of resources.
Any individual that does not adhere by this principle will harm themselves and is acting irrationally. I wish that kind people were more selfish to protect themselves, and as for the takers: Good and evil are a line drawn in each man's heart, yet those who are kind and impartial can be found even in Wiesel's own life in concentration camps, and people themselves change across time and place.
Recognizing that we live under scarcity, that humans compete with each other through non-violent means such as money and court systems so as not to damage the overall fitness of the group through violence (imagine if your liver fought your heart), and that such material constraints are present in the world is the first step to improving the world.
The premise that "the world is the best it has ever been" and "here are many scientific articles proving it" is nothing short of delusion when one can look outside and see the large amount of automotive pollution, substandard "food" on supermarket shelves, and increase in metabolic diseases.
Scarcity is an absolute fact. It is necessary to admit reality.
A common perspective in society is the genetic doctrine or neo-Darwinist doctrine, by which diseases such as cancer are blamed on genetics, the role of the environment is underweighted compared to genes, escaping your background is impossible, and there is a general idea of survival of the fittest: culling the weakest members and defective genes.
This is wholly wrong and inhumane. This is a type of pessimism, believing one cannot change their fate due to genetic determinism. It leads to a "good enough" attitude and excuses for not working toward difficult goals, believing the result is already determined. While people are born with different natural abilities, it is clear that increased material wealth and nutrition lead to better outcomes for children and that the recovery of populations is often possible.
You see it all the time through studies tracking family background through generations, obsession with partners who are a certain trait rather than seeing the circumstances which generate a person, articles about twins separated at birth who end up with coincidentally similar lives, and certain belief in a genetic factor for diseases such as breast cancer, leading to premature and harmful prophylactics.
Of these, physical health and mental conception take priority. Mental conception is different from mental health; it is someone's education, ways of seeing the world, etc. We see that material assets are secondary to physical health and mental conception. People lacking character and dignity will destroy material assets.
Depiste the importance of social wealth, the traits of the modern world lead to a stratification by ability and differentiation by material assets, which makes group feeling, family, love, and history less important.
Money is just a claim on others' labor and materials, not the end goal of wealth. The purpose of life for me is to pursue all types of this listed wealth and to decrease entropy, and enjoyment/socialization comes with others as a part of the journey, not an end of its own self.
Given the above statements and what appears to be blunt statements about group competition, the material nature of life, love as a mutually beneficial association, the allocation of resources, it may surprise some that some things I hold the highest are:
Parts of my personality not so common compared to the above but that I also hold include:
That being said, I'm usually able to blend in well enough with most groups because I can understand them, even if I am not them. But over the long term, people always need to express themselves and who they are.
I'm socially aware enough to consider what other people are feeling in a moment but also the 2nd and 3rd order effects (4th order is stretching it), so if you're also socially aware and competent and act on it we will appreciate each other.
I'm not sure if the answer is to work only with people who have similar values or to work only with people who have mutual interests. I can recognize a need of the latter at times but prefer the former. There are only so many people you meet.
It's a bit hard for me to stand being around "all the time positive" people—they strike me as fake from the moment you first talk to them and they start smiling at you with empty eyes. Their emotions and existence are without contrast (summer cannot exist without winter; joy without sorrow). Everything said is calculated through multiple layers of filters; words change based on the context as they try to fit in.
I cannot run laps or take established hiking trails easily for this reason. I simply do not think it is worthwhile to do what is not real.
I get less annoyed by things as I get older because I recognize the things that are out of my control and take active effort to extricate myself from such situations, so the following can be considered a list of situations that I leave due to it not being preferable.