Timeless Ideas | October 31, 2020
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.
― J.K. Rowling
II.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
― Oscar Wilde
III.
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
― Albert Einstein
Ideas
I.
In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you're going to be here, be happy and enjoy the experience.
Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul
II.
The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.
Robert Greene in The Art of Seduction
III.
This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same succession of events. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans look at different parts of the same data and never converge to the same opinions. Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Articles Worth Reading
I.
How to heal through life writing
Uddipana Goswami | Psyche
Traumatic life events engulf us in chaos and uncertainty. Often, as a coping mechanism, we shut out the world and withdraw within ourselves. In extreme cases, we become fearful of community and human contact. Trauma takes a heavy toll on our emotional and mental health, and continues to haunt us even when we have physically emerged from the life events that caused it. Trauma leads to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and manifests in the form of anxiety, depression, anger, exhaustion or oscillating emotions. For people dealing with trauma, writing – and especially life writing – can be very therapeutic. Learning to write about trauma helps you to process the painful experience, and gives you the life skills to overcome it
II.
Thucydides and the Plague of Athens - What It Can Teach Us Now
Chris Mackie | The Conversation
Thucydides’ account of the plague that struck Athens in 430 B.C. focuses on the social response, both of those who died and those who survived. Thucydides offers us a narrative of a pestilence that is different in all kinds of ways from what we face. The lessons that we learn from the coronavirus crisis will come from our own experiences of it, not from reading Thucydides. But these are not mutually exclusive. Thucydides offers us a description of a city-state in crisis that is as poignant and powerful now, as it was in 430 B.C.
III.
Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings
We have been socialized to believe in and grasp after the happily-ever-after future of every meaningful relationship. But what happens when love, whatever its category and classification, dissolves under the interminable forces of time and change, be it by death or by some other, more deliberate demise? In the midst of what feels like an unsurvivable loss, how do we moor ourselves to the fact that even the most beautiful, most singularly gratifying things in life are merely on loan from the universe, granted us for the time being?
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