Monthly Musings
Food for thought - April
If you’ve had enough of brain rot, let me offer you some food for thought!
Small snacks – light, easy, not too filling
The main course – highly nutritious, but sometimes harder to digest
Decadence-free desserts – pure pleasure
Enjoy!
Small snacks
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Friedrich Nietzsche
“Sooner or later you have to give up hope for a better past.” Irvin Yalom
“The heaviest armor is the one we wear to hide our truth.”
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Your biggest project in this short life is yourself. You are your own architect. So will you spend your life demolishing yourself? Will you let yourself become an abandoned structure of decay? Or will you build yourself up into a majestic cathedral?
The main course
Every time you run away from the truth instead of embracing it, you are proving to yourself that you don't trust yourself enough. You worry the truth will hurt too much, like you're too fragile to handle it. But are you? And is this making you stronger or weaker?
“Various studies, predominantly by Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, show that when the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathetic, charitable, and honest. Metaphorically, the frontal cortex says: ‘Screw it. I’m tired and don’t think about my fellow human’.” - ‘Behave’ by Robert Sapolsky
This made me wonder: could it be that one reason why people are selfish, greedy, and devoid of empathy is that they work hard, are stressed, experience burnout and mental issues or simply carry the weight of many small and big problems that normally arise every day?
What if a barrier towards higher morality and well-being for us all is the fact that our lives are relatively comfortable, but also stressful and filled with so much noise we need to sort through, including on every social media platform we use?
When your desire to see yourself as a good person is greater than your desire to be a good person, you won't even realize how much you're failing. Why? Unless you have the strength to see your failures, you will be blind to them. You will let yourself stray so much that one day you'll struggle to recognize who you've become. The sad part? You just wanted to feel like a good person.
Have you ever watched footage from a slaughterhouse? Ever seen animals being abused when they are helpless, right before they are killed? If you eat meat, just spend 5 minutes looking at that.
Does it upset you? If yes, you already have the morality of a vegan, you just need to make your behaviour align with it.
"The darkest places of hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." - Dante Alighieri
When you are trying to persuade someone, you may think that you need more evidence, a better argument, or a clear explanation. Many times what you actually need is a person who is willing to change their mind. All the evidence in the world is nothing to a person who refuses to accept it.
Scott Barry Kaufman recently launched his new book called “Rise Above”. He’s been on several podcasts to promote it and was interviewed by Sam Harris and Michael Shermer (both worth listening to). He wants to help people move away from the victimhood mindset and become more empowered to live a better life. I love the way he balances empathy for people’s pain with empowerment so they can grow from it. He’s not coddling people and acting like their trauma and their suffering is a life sentence or an excuse for bad behavior. But he’s not telling people to just ignore their feelings and pull themselves up by the bootstraps either. In his words, he “offers honest love”. Whether you experienced trauma in the past, whether you see yourself as a victim of your past, your circumstances, or yourself, or whether you need some encouragement, I think that this book can help. I’ve recently started listening to the audiobook version and I can’t wait to learn more!
“We’re living in a time when we identify so strongly with our victimhood that our potential has taken a backseat to our pain.” - Rise Above, Scott Barry Kaufman
“The people who tend to rise to power are not the people that society needs in power. And unfortunately a lot of people who would make really good powerful people don’t have that ambition. So a big part of my research and activism is getting those people in power who would make good leaders.”
Listen to the podcast here
Another wonderful source of inspiration for me was Africa Brooke. I’ve been following her on social media for a while, but watching an interview with her blew my mind. Africa is the perfect embodiment of what it means to be grounded in your truth. She is incredibly open, self-aware, honest, and assertive in a balanced way that I have never seen in anyone else.
“Your tendency to self-sabotage is as smart as you are.”
Listen to the podcast here
Decadence-free desserts
The latest song from my favorite band: Sleep Token. They’ll be launching the new album in a few days and so far their new songs have been wonderful. A major theme on this album is the price of fame, but they also sing about how they fear they’ll be forgotten, how they suffer in silence, and a desire for closeness and consistency in their relationships - both personal and public, with their fans. And I love the meanings embedded - like the name of the song being Damocles to represent how threatened and vulnerable they feel in the spotlight. I am genuinely amazed at their skill and they are now my favorite artists. You might think they’re dramatic when they say that their fans don’t just listen to their music, they worship but I promise you, they are using the right word.
I have started to love AI art recently and there are two accounts who consistently post images I like. Here are some of them by two accounts I like mendezmendez and MO.
