Philosophy

Sonder

“Poetry is the language that sits really close to feelings that defy language.”

Muffled whispers and hidden vistas

One of the topics that has been incredibly alive in all of my conversations over the last few years is authenticity. This theme has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks.1 Hundreds of people that I speak to are stuck at their desks doing something that they know is ultimately pointless, but do so out of a fear of presenting their own authenticity to the world. As a result, they keep manifesting lives devoid of the one…

We're all hydrogen atoms that learned how to talk.

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. Carl Sagan

Therapy speak is making us miserable

I had a client who described a lot of their problems in therapy language. I told them something like: “hey, I believe that psychotherapy was really useful for you at the time—but consider the possibility that the pathologizing language you picked up from that culture is distancing you from your experience and causing you to consider normal things problematic.” They stopped using therapy framing and found that their inner life…

Attention is first philosophy

1\. Attention is the practice beneath all philosophical practices. Nearly every contemplative tradition—Stoic, Platonic, Christian monastic—was built on attention as the foundational practice. Practices like fasting, physical training, and meditation exist to guard the stillness attention requires. Philosophy, in this sense, is a discipline of perception, not mere argumentation. 2\. Distraction is a perennial human problem,…

Simone Weil is awesome

Going down the rabbit hole of learning more about who Simone Weil is.

A considered life

The lesson to take from Nietzsche is that we all may not fully understand the implications of our most cherished values, our personal beliefs, or actions, and live our entire lives in ignorance or self-denial, unconsciously undermining ourselves and others. How do we avoid this? We need to make sure that the belief systems we occupy, and the values we deeply attach ourselves to, are actually serving us and those around us. We…

A short intro to Baruch Spinoza's philosophy

Baruch Spinoza: The Philosopher Who Saw God in Everything Baruch Spinoza stands as one of the most radical and influential philosophers in Western history, yet his ideas remain surprisingly relevant to modern concerns about meaning, freedom, and our place in the universe. Born in 1632 in Amsterdam to Portuguese Jewish refugees, Spinoza would eventually be excommunicated from his community for heretical views—only to produce a…

Dare to feel

Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of breaking with tradition and being nobody-but-himself in his art. With an eye to that unassailable creative integrity…

We're all unique protons and electrons

Most human beings are elementally similar but structurally different. Every living being around us is elementally similar, most are roughly the same few elements, but the arrangements of those carbons, protons, neutrons, electrons are different. That arrangement is what makes you you. That is the unique pattern for every species on Earth, and even for every individual. Seven billion humans, billions of animals, other species,…

Now is the time for fun

I’m not trying to push you in any direction, honest. If you get everything totally wrong, too bad, but you’ll still be remembered forever for trying. Even Pontius Pilate has immortality of a sort. Both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Beff Jezos have their page in the textbooks assured. If you’re a well-off Silicon Valley person, you’re already well-placed to join them. So participate in the discourse. Create some art. Donate to a cause…

Gitanjali 48

On the joys of writing

What I didn’t realize was that writing a Substack would also reignite my intellect. Over the first five months, I posted an essay nearly every week. I’ve always read a lot, but before, the words passed through me—my mind a sieve. Now, I keep dozens of running files in my notes app about topics I hope to write about. Before, spare moments were taken up by mindless scrolling. Now, they’re spent writing and editing. Substack…

G.K. Chesterton on miracles

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. G.K. Chesterton

We are a collection of particles but...

From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a…

My little heart

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person…

Virtue cannot be known without knowing vice

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the…

Learn some philosophy

It might sound banal but I'm still amazed at how much good content is available for free on YouTube. Got example, here's a list of curated channels about philosophy.

Charlie Munger on dealing with setbacks in life

Here is a summary of the video based on the transcript. Video: How Charlie Munger Survive Life’s Hardest Moments... | Final Interview with CNBC 2023 Channel: YAPSS This video features a segment from Charlie Munger’s final interview with CNBC, where he discusses resilience, personal tragedy, and the progress of civilization. \ \[00:00\] Marriage and the Iron Rule of Life The interview begins with Munger reflecting on his…

On having a philosophy of money

A few thoughts on people doing dumb shit with money.

We are borrowed stardust

I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is…

Philosophy understood as a way of life

Hadot isn’t saying philosophy-as-life disappeared after antiquity and medieval times, leaving only professors in universities. He notes that the existentialists, for instance, carried this tradition forward. Other scholars—like Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure—have shown that it runs through Socrates, the Stoics, medieval and early modern thinkers, Descartes, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Foucault. My own…

The death of silence and the loss of contemplative spaces

An essay about how the loss of contemplative space is robbing us of our humanity.

Stephen Hawking on the philosophy of life

Guest: You have said you do not believein God. Do you have a philosophy of life that helps you? Stephen Hawking: It is clear that we are just an advanced breed of primates on a minor planet orbiting around a very average star, in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. BUT, ever since the dawn of civilization people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world. There ought to be…