The tragedy of ignorance
Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing very well. It strikes me that this is a formal way of me say I want you to be happy. If you remember last week's email, I talked about a lot of the stories we frame our existence around and how they...
The arbitrariness of it all
Hello everyone, I hope you have all been doing well and that my letters are making a humble contribution to this. Aside from well-being and our ability to enhance it in others, I see no real basis for meaning in this life. Fortunately, this is more than enough. "Happiness...
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How to cut through suffering
Hello everyone, I start these emails the same way every time, but I do hope you are doing well. I was wondering, have you ever heard the term avidya? It means ignorance in Sanskrit. In Buddhist traditions it is believed that ignorance is the root of all suffering. That is;...
The Tragic and Utopian Visions of Human Nature
The Blank Slate is a book about the question of whether we are nature or nurture. Are we born like blank slates to be written on by our life experience or do we have an innate nature that remains consistent through our lives?...
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Quote
Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong.Steven Pinker
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How far we have come
There are two biases that seem to be affecting all of us for the worse, that I would like to bring to your attention. 1. The Availability Bias[1] We judge the likelihood of events and the state of affairs based on how easily we can recall the data. Think...
Don't Stress
In life we come across a whole myriad of different kinds of situations, each requiring us to respond in different ways. Not knowing how to address the different vicissitudes of life is a cause for much of the difficulty in it. There isn’t a single clear cut solution to...
The Thousand Finger Garland
This is my rendition of an ancient tale. This is not the original story. I did not create the events in it.[1] There once lived a miserable man. He was profoundly dissatisfied with everything in his life. Nothing he tried to do, ever seemed to go right. No one...
What is Morality?
Where exactly do we draw the line between what we call good and what we call bad? What is it we hope to accomplish by walking a straight path in life? The purpose in this piece is to make the case, that morality is concerned with safeguarding the well being...