Finding order in randomness. Finding randomness in order.

I have been thinking about what love is. The English language (or maybe all languages for that matter) is limited in the fact that it has only one word to describe the blanket of emotions/states of mind we call “love”. I am not talking about romantic love. The fact the default association of the word “love” is to romantic love is perhaps a side effect of the romantic movement that started a few hundred years ago. And what a successful movement it has been in changing society, family structure and our lives completely in the process. What we take for granted now when it comes to romantic love was an alien notion just a few hundred years ago.  I digress. What I want to really talk about is love in a universal sense. The love of things and ideas and experiences. What is it? What happens when we say we love something or someone? Is the love of person fundamentally different from the love of something else - like one’s work, or hobby or a book or art or even a pet? I think it is not fun...

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 ...