At 22 I started an MFA program in fiction writing because I was going to pen the great American novel, then maybe get a PhD in creative writing, which would inevitably win me a tenured professorship (it was 2008 when you could almost plausibly still believe things like this). I’d wind up in a cute college town with four seasons and crunching fall leaves under my boots and live a cozy, creative life. A year later it dawned on me that academia was a crumbling tower, the people in my MFA program were curiously incurious about reading and writing, and how I imagined things might work was not how any of this was going to work. I fled.
Clipping
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web > Academia is a crumbling tower
[https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/remembering-things-that-havent-happened]
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web > If you are ill
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38636640]
Tangentially related, if you are ill, I would implore you to read Seneca’s Letter 78 to Lucilius [0]:
You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, the same end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill-health, that you have escaped.
There is, I assure you, a place for virtue even upon a bed of sickness. It is not only the sword and the battle-line that prove the soul alert and unconquered by fear; a man can display bravery even when wrapped in his bed-clothes. You have something to do: wrestle bravely with disease. If it shall compel you to nothing, beguile you to nothing, it is a notable example that you display. O what ample matter were there for renown, if we could have spectators of our sickness! Be your own spectator; seek your own applause.
And if you have lost, or are losing, someone you love, read Letter 63 [1]:
So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: “The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed.” If we take the word of Attalus for it, “to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?”
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web > Variety in life is fractal, not just travel and drugs
[https://www.avabear.xyz/p/talking-to-sasha-chapin-about-unconventional]
“I think complexity is fractal and you can find it anywhere when you become interested in something. I use to associate a complex and varied life with adventure, broadly construed, like travel and drugs and eating different things, pushing yourself in various ways. And now I think complexity can be found anywhere … One of the things that can make a life worth living is finding the complexity that you’re interested in and continuing to pursue that.”
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
When we overprotect, when we become so neurotic about the perfection of our children’s every experience and waking moment, we don’t protect them from sliding along the behavioral spectrum. We push them along it.
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books > Simplicity Parenting (Kim John Payne)
By overprotecting them we may make their lives safer (that is, fever free) in the short run, but in the long run we would be leaving them vulnerable, less able to cope with the world around them.
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web > Did I miss anything
Poem 013: Did I Miss Anything?
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth 40 percent of the grade for this term and assigned some reading due today on which I’m about to hand out a quiz worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what each woman or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter This is the last time the class will meet before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom is a microcosm of human experience assembled for you to query and examine and ponder This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here
— Tom Wayman
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web > Drugs for depression are missing the trip
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949336]
Beyond the importance of controlling the placebo effect, I am worried that a lot of the drug-depression research is overlooking an important possibility: that the thing about ketamine/psilocybin/etc that is helping with depression is not some latent property of the molecule, but rather the actual transcendent experience of the trip. In other words, the trip is the point, not the mechanistic neuro-tinkering [0].
Importantly, this tracks with what we know about the protective effects of things like religiosity against depression. As such, the qualitative experience of the drug might not be something we can (or should) do away with. I would even go as far as suggesting that an absence of transcendence in one’s life is precisely what causes a large segment of people to become depressed in the first place, and that perhaps drugs are helpful only insofar as they produce a transcendent experience.
This isn’t to say we can’t take a scientific approach to treating depression, but that has to be balanced with something profoundly metaphysical: the actual qualia of life experience. Wellness isn’t the absence of disease; it’s the presence of thriving, and that includes within it a component of things like hope, inspiration, and elevation above the ordinary. We used to have various ceremonies designed to turn us towards the numinous, but we’ve pretty systematically dismantled those in favor of a grounded hyper-rationality [1]. As a scientist, I can’t really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need.
[0] If you’re a materialist, you might object that neurological machinery is not differentiable from qualia. Fair enough! I even agree! My point is simply that medicine needs to consider qualia as a major parameter in the treatment of depression. Fixing depression is not like fixing a car.
[1] I suspect most people here are familiar with Nietzsche’s “God is dead quote”. Many people in my entourage are floored to discover that he correctly predicted the dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, neuroticism and nihilism that is present in modern life.
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web > Irrationality makes my live empirically better
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949878]
It only sounds silly to our modern sensibilities, which I am increasingly considering regressive on the specific question of “what is a life well-lived”.
To a pre-modern society that considers e.g. dreams to be vehicles of important meaning, religiousity to be a good thing in measure, idle time to be a gift and introspection to be one of the major points of existence, it doesn’t sound silly at all. It sounds wise.
I’m a scientist by training and an engineer by trade, but as an empiricist, I am forced to admit that my life has gotten better by making room for the irrational, superstitious, obliquely-associative, self-contradictory omginternets to exist. Make of that what you will ;)
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books > The Wise Man's Fear (Patrick Rothfuss)
No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”