Category: Philosophy

  • Labels and Life

    For everyone that thought my points about labels were uncalled for, take a look at this video if you haven’t seen it already. Positive affirmation is as powerful as negative affirmation. Continuously telling someone that they can’t do something or be a certain way eventually convinces them that it is true. I wish people would stop being so reckless with their lives. I wish people would stop believing that they always need fixing. I wish people would just learn to be real and stop pursuing the fake ideals that they gluttonously swallow from Hollywood, Bollywood, etc.

    (Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

  • A Brain Dump

    Looking across the table at my daughter leaves me wondering if she’ll ever grasp the extent of the struggles and sacrifices that I and many others have gone through just so that she may have a normal life. She already takes so much for granted which goes against so many principles that I always thought were established laws of nature, so much so that I foolishly assumed that she would automatically adopt them as her own.

    I’ve been cautioned before about not being able to change the genes of a person, but being the pragmatic idealist that I am, words like that do nothing more than spur me on to prove that idealism still has a place in this world. I’m not so sure any more. There was a time when I was unshakeable in my views about what principles could or could not be compromised in life, but these days it seems as if nothing is sacred any longer. Reciprocation is a luxury while selfish individual rights supersede everything else. 

    This must sound extremely selfish since a parent’s role by default is supposed to be a selfless one. I don’t think selflessness exists. It’s a nice idea, and makes for really wholesome use in the embellishment of people’s efforts, but at the root of it all, of everything we do, lies a single common thread that contains just two words. Gratitude and affirmation. There is only so much any individual will do for the sake of the greater good, before we expect that greater good to return the favour. 

    There is no balance any more. The echoes no longer just remind but now they taunt as well. Echoes of what this world is and for what it was created. I once heard a wise man say that this world was created for respite, not justice. I hate how true that statement is. For this reason the good will always be trampled upon while the usurpers will continue to flourish – in this world only.

    Looking at my daughter tonight made me realise how insignificant we can be in the face of the most significant challenge in our lives. How oblivious others can be about the sacrifices we make on their behalf, while they live as if the world owes them everything leaves me staring vacantly at the future. 

  • Einstein on life…

    leydaslessons:

    “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” ~ Albert Einstein

  • Question – Pompous Pursuits

    doctorofnothing replied to your post: Pompous Pursuits

    what do you do? but yeah… most academic pursuits are vocational training no matter how you label it. after all, that’s the point of existence within the modern framework.

    I’m an IT professional with a really weird job description. Actually, I’m not even in IT any longer, but as fate would have it, I now define policies, strategies and processes to guide the interactions between IT and the Business divisions of the company I work at. I guess, in a nutshell, I create order out of chaos. I implement good governance and common sense where none exists. 🙂

    I agree that most academic pursuits could be viewed as vocational, but I guess this is a good time to bring in that issue of context, right? Problem is, far too many people don’t apply their minds sufficiently when they start out studying, or maybe that’s just the case with people in the industries that I’ve encountered. My generalisations would typically exclude people in the medical, legal and engineering fields since those are very specific streams of study that can be and is applied directly and practically to their chosen career path. But given that I’ve debated circles around people who claimed to hold doctorates in various disciplines, while I myself have barely even finished high school without any tertiary studies, it leaves me somewhat disillusioned to see the glaring gap of common sense in people that spend so many years of their lives acquiring knowledge that they’ll never use. 

  • Pompous Pursuits

    Apparently I use too big words in my business emails at the office. I was ‘reprimanded’ today by a very senior member of the organisation regarding my use of ‘big words’ when questioning or explaining issues in email. This is hilarious in a number of ways, most importantly in that the people that generally accuse me of such nonsense are academically superior with one or more university degrees and other nonsensical acronyms embellishing their CV’s and email signatures in their efforts to be taken seriously by those of us that are intimidated by vacuous theory.

    This further cements my view that academic pursuits, unless vocational by nature, are a waste of a good mind. It pumps largely unusable rubbish into the heads of intelligent beings and turns them into zombies trying to unravel mysteries and conform to expectations established by their own pompous pursuits. Academics rarely make a significant contribution to humanity. Only that 1% that are able to practically apply their knowledge to improve their quality of life and the lives of those around them actually enjoy any return on investment, both monetary and otherwise, from their years of self-inflicted torture.

    It reminds me of individuals that I’ve often interviewed as potential candidates in various roles in IT within my team that proudly proclaim their BSc degrees as having been significant achievements in their lives, only to slip back and cringe in their seats when I ask them how much of what they studied is actually still relevant or can be practically applied to their chosen careers. We need a college or university degree to be developed around common sense. Maybe that way it will finally become as common as it needs to be.

  • Life Lessons From Forrest Gump

    Nothing amazing was ever achieved through conformance, and non-conformance is by its very nature a painful experience. Human nature, through its inherent survival instinct will avoid pain if left to follow its instinct. But we’re a step above animals, because we have superior intellect, reason and choice. If we cower, we reduce ourselves to animals. But if we persevere, we’ll become masters of our state, rather than victims. When we’re in this state of mastery-consciousness, we’re automatically administering the cure for so many spiritual illnesses that plague our society independent of race, religion, culture, social standing or material worth.

    Life Lessons From Forrest Gump – CJ

  • Sometimes

    sometimes, they’re just beaten into submission

    and we assume their lifelessness is actually death

    when in fact, they’re just cowering out of fear

    hoping that no one will notice them

    but then they wither away because they were not noticed.

     

    sometimes, we find that the smallest things have the greatest impact

    but fail to notice that the small things were actually the big things

    but we were too distracted to notice.

     

    sometimes, life happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes, death happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes…we over-think life while forgetting to live

  • Random thoughts about creation and manipulation

    I believe that this earth is a closed system. Nothing can be depleted or destroyed to the point where it is not recoverable. Everything alters their state subject to the manipulation that it is subjected to, but that altered state either makes it usable or unusable. If unusable, appropriate manipulation can be brought to bear on it that will recover it into a usable state once again. 

    Therefore, our ability to deplete natural resources is in fact only limited to our inability to recover what we’ve altered. I disagree with the premise that the earth will be incapable of sustaining life in years to come because it will be over populated. It can never be over populated but it can be, and is abused. It’s our abuse of the resources at our disposal that leads to the massive disparity in quality of life between nations and geographical locations. 

    The greater our ability to responsibly balance how we consume, the greater will be our ability to restore and sustain the availability of resources that we have at our disposal. Even the conception and birth of a baby is a result of resources in some form or another being consumed. The mother, through the nourishment that she provides her body, influences the quality of foetal life, as well as the subsequent birth. Just because it is all a result of extremely complex chemical reactions does not imply that something is being created out of nothing. 

    What exists, exists. How we manipulate that will determine how many beautiful or disgusting permutations of the combination of our resources can yield subject to our limited intellectual and physical abilities. The more we grow to understand this world and everything it contains, the greater our ability to influence its form and function. But we must never forget that we are nothing but manipulators of what already exists, and therefore we should not delude ourselves about our capabilities. 

    This realisation, for me, further establishes my views about the atheist philosophies compared to that of the theists, who are now more fashionably called creationists. Man has never, and will never create something out of nothing. Nor are we able to truly grasp what nothing is, because it will always be thought of in the context of the absence of something. And as we know, the absence of one thing creates a condition in which something else is manifested. Think about it. All we do all day is alter the state of things. Things that already exist. 

    The search for the beginning of creation will never end, because every single time we think we arrived at the smallest particle known to man, we fail to conclusively answer a simple question. What causes that particle to assume the characteristics and properties that it does? There is always more, and the only thing that limits how much we understand of how much more there is, is our limited knowledge and our limited abilities to delve deeper than we already have.