Posted on February 24, 2021 Leave a Comment
One of the more pernicious side effects of our mediagenic age is how one dimensionally perfect the lives of individuals appear to those on the other side of the screen, prompting feelings of fear and self-loathing from onlookers at how few fabulous parties they attend, scenic landscapes they visit, and beautiful people they are surrounded […]
Posted on February 21, 2021 Leave a Comment
With our prodigious minds, we can recall fond memories throughout our years: birthday parties surrounded by friends and families, the first time we fell in love, the day we received our first A+. But, it is the irrevocable fact of life that one cannot have pleasure without pain. Just as we have fond memories filled […]
Posted on February 18, 2021 Leave a Comment
Almost everywhere we turn we are encouraged to express ourselves. Social media platforms extol us to share whatever is on our minds, advertisers promise their products will manifest our deeper-selves and reveal them to the world, our employers inform us we can ‘speak up’ about any issue without fear of reprimand, our friends remind us […]
Posted on February 17, 2021 Leave a Comment
It seems like a preposterous thought. How could I be anyone other than me? Of course, you can’t. But that isn’t exactly the point Heidegger is making in his hefty work, Being & Time. Heidegger asks us, ‘how much of you, is really you?’ And to what extent, following Krishnamurti, are we ‘second-hand people’, copying, […]
Posted on February 14, 2021 Leave a Comment
In a society such as ours, which glorifies the flawless, unblemished and perfect, we have a conditioned (but by no means natural) desire to hide our flaws, minimising the parts of ourselves that are damaged, warped, or otherwise ugly, in the hope that we too will appear as an object of perfection and therefore, worthy […]
Posted on January 29, 2021 Leave a Comment
In his work Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl remarks that while being able to imagine a future beyond the camps did not stop death, it did create the opportunity for life. He observed that with sufficient imagination, we can tolerate the intolerable. He was, after all, a survivor of the holocaust. While our problems […]
Posted on January 22, 2021 Leave a Comment
Nietzsche criticized those who wished to abolish suffering. As an outcast who lived by himself in a small cabin and died alone, he likely knew suffering well. But this does not mean he was necessarily unhappy with his life. Suffering, according to Nietzsche, was what made life beautiful and, ironically, enjoyable. In a form of […]
Posted on January 13, 2021 Leave a Comment
Imagine the following situation, Your girlfriend has just left you. Bewildered and listless, you sit down at the table outside where you shared so many happy memories together. You think of how she used to throw her head back and laugh when you made a particularly witty remark. You remember how she would meticulously roll […]
Posted on January 10, 2021 Leave a Comment
One thing we are very good at is ‘putting things off’. It has been a while, but we will call our parents tomorrow; we are just too tired to do it today. We will start that diet regime, but after just one more hamburger. We will become more understanding and empathetic, but later, because what […]
Posted on January 6, 2021 Leave a Comment
With tender and invisible threads, we are inextricably bound to one another. Although we choose to live mainly through shadowy abstractions of the ‘I’ and ‘me’, they only momentarily disguise the indisputable truth: we cannot live without each other. Of course, there are those who try. They retreat into the mountains, or run away on […]