Finding order in randomness. Finding randomness in order.

Setting medium to long term goals is overrated (and even harmful at times). I know how controversial that sounds. But hear me out. You have this goal and you are working towards it. Come what may you won’t give up. Perseverance. You are a fighter. You don’t give up. You achieve your goal and feel great. You are so proud of yourself. And so are others around you. So what’s wrong with that?  I think setting a medium or long term goal is like putting a blinder on. You are focused on that goal to the exclusion of other things. Read that again. Because you have the blinders on, you could miss something that could be even better. It’s exactly like taking a walk with a blinder on. You know your destination (your goal) and you are determined to reach it. You walk and don’t look left and right. And in doing this, you miss some amazing paths which could have led you to an even better destination.  So living a life based on set goals is limiting. Instead, life should be lived based on fu...

 I am a scatterbrain. I am not very organised in most things in my life. My apartment is kind of a mess at times with books and things all over. I tend to do things last minute and am quite bad at planning. I think it comes from my perfectionism, but rather than looking at these (and other aspects of my personality) as defects, how about I treat them in a neutral way. As long as I am not causing active harm to others out there with these facets - they are not good or bad, they just are. So a better way to think about myself would be - everything about me that doesn’t cause active harm to other humans (or myself) is to be judged in a neutral way. I am not allowed to label it as a “defect” or a “disorder”. I just call it a facet of my personality. And as with most things these facets give me certain advantages and also certain disadvantages. So let’s take my lack of organization for example. Based on the above I don’t see how it could be causing any active harm to anyone else. So i s...

It is easy to judge someone as good, or bad, or fun, or boring, or malicious or a criminal (like the legal system does). But putting a blanket judgement on a person shows an inherent misunderstanding of what a person is. A person is not good or bad - his or her ideas (beliefs, impulses etc.) are what are correct or incorrect (rational or irrational). It's the ideas that need to be corrected. We need not stop at blaming the ideas (as opposed to the person). The ideas (in most cases) did not creatively emerge in the person's mind. They were installed there by mechanisms. And those mechanisms need to be corrected as well. For human beings those mechanisms are - culture (broadly, which encompasses things like - parenting, religion, social norms, beliefs etc.), negative life experiences like trauma, disease, other people with incorrect ideas etc. So making a judgement on a person and blaming the person is the same as making a judgement on badly cooked pasta and blaming the pasta for...

When you have a wound that's healing, and you touch it, you get a pleasant, satisfying feeling. It is difficult to describe, but touching a scab and playing with it and the feelings that it engenders are enjoyable in a way.  We play with our emotional wounds in a similar way. When we read a novel or watch a movie that tingles our scabs, it is actually the same kind of satisfying pain that we are experiencing. Writers, artists, musicians  - they are also touching their own scabs in some way when producing their work. And readers who read them are doing the same. The common thread is the shared pain - the shared scabs that we are all touching. And it is enjoyable and satisfying in a perverse kind of way.   I wonder how much of music, art, literature and their popularity is just people touching their own scabs. I would say a vast majority of it. Which also brings the question - if you don't have as many emotional wounds from the past, perhaps you are missing out on the ...

There are 2 worlds we as humans experience - the physical world governed by the laws of physics, and the mental world enabled by a physical object, namely our brain, but which gives rise to "worlds" that may or may not ever have a direct physical manifestation. All ideas and thoughts in our brains can be completely expressed in the physical world but many of them do not have direct physical manifestations. The creative interactions, evolution and improvements of ideas can only happen in one object in the universe that we know of - the human brain. This seemingly simple idea is probably one of the most important pieces of knowledge I have acquired in the last couple of years (I have David Deustch and his books/podcasts to thank for this). The world of ideas, knowledge is a different world altogether from the physical world. And there are many of these abstract worlds - mathematics, morality, art etc. And the theories that govern them are not physical i.e. they are beyond th...

I have been in my "head" a lot of my life. Intellectualizing everything. Having a largely analytical mind doesn't help with that. Not that it is all a bad thing - but life loses some flavor if I am in my head most of the time. The other day I was at the museum with a friend seeing a new exhibition. The first half of it, I was in my head - thinking what the artists were trying to express. Intellectualizing art.  Then I realized that is not the point of art. So for the next art installation I deliberately shut down my mind. I stopped thinking and all the chatter and just tried to feel. And it was a beautiful experience. I felt sadness, I felt fear, I even felt some excitement. And I didn't think. I just was there, experiencing.

My past has made me. It is what it is. I thank the good and the bad for it has molded me. It has made me into this unique creature that has never existed and will never will. This is me. The raw and the authentic. The whole and the broken. I am not perfect - very far from it. I feel like I have this hole inside me. And I don't know what to fill it with. I know nothing external can fill it. I have to fill it. But my attempts to fill it with things give rise to other beautiful things. To poems, writings, ideas and knowledge seeking. It takes me places. So why should I give it up. I am this way. I accept me. The good, bad and the disgusting. And I show it. If you don't like it, you are free to go. If you can't handle it, you are free to leave. But I am here. I will be around for me. Always. Till my last breath.