mind

Day 2490, power.

Daily picture 

Do we have the power to lift ourselves up? 

I am afraid we can't. Like the crane in this picture: powerful, tall, and mighty but incapable of lifting itself up, it can only lift a crane like itself like we can another. 

And the crane is not weak for this failure; sure, it gets its power from somewhere else, but besides that, it can move around, stand strong against nature, and counters the loads it carries with flair. 

The crane is a mighty structure for what it's made for.

Day 2487, three.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
Mixed Opinions and Maxims

197 What binds and divides. -Doesn’t what binds human beings together-an understanding of their shared utility and liability-lie in the head, and in the heart what divides them -their blind selecting and fumbling in love and hate, their tendency to turn toward one at the expense of all others and their resultant contempt for general utility?

236 Two sources of goodness. -To treat all human beings with an equivalent benevolence and to be good to them without differentiating among persons can be just as much the emanation of a deep contempt for humans as of a fundamental love for humans.

281 Doors. -Like the man, the child sees doors in everything that it experiences or learns: but for the former they are entrances, for the latter always only passageways.

Day 2485, nothing matters.

Daily picture, Quotes

Revealed: Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s
The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found.

The Guardian, Today.

Can you imagine that meeting at Exxon’s headquarters in the seventies: “Fuck it, let the world burn down; it will only hurt our grandchildren, so why would we care. Make sure that this gets buried. Next point on the agenda, pay raises for us…”

Nietzsche was worried about the future because he saw the first signs of Nihilism in his time. Nihilism was also described in books written by Dostoyevsky at the end of the nineteen hundreds, around the same time that Nietzsche started writing about it. In short, you could say that Nihilism means the belief that there is no meaning to be found in life, and thus, everything is aloud. The scientific revolution had already eroded the belief in a God with its fatherly control by his time. Nietzsche, an atheist, realized that humanity was not ready to live without parental supervision. World war I and especially 2 have proven this suspicion, but a newspaper article like the one above also shows that we are still not capable of thinking for all of us but mainly for ourselves. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly religiosity of some people these days. They are also under the spell of Nihilism, their religion is tailored to fit their personal needs, and there is no fear in these people of a disagreeing God.

It is not easy to find meaning in a meaningless world. In a few million or billion years, the son will swallow the world, and we will all be forgotten by the universe. We have to give meaning to it ourselves, and as a grownup, we should be capable of finding pleasure in the idea that our children and their children and our neighbors and their neighbors will thank us one day, when we are long gone, for the world we left them.  

“Nihilism appears at that point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust any “meaning” in suffering, indeed in existence. One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain.” Fredrich Nietzsche                                            

“There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.” Emile M. Cioran

“The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from Nihilism.” Albert Camus

Day 2482, don’t understand.

Daily picture, Poetry

I hear people say that the world is in a bad place

and then I feel so left out

no one has ever told me where the red line is

where the world is good on this side

and bad on the other

Is there an objective way to determine if we live in a bad time and that there were good times in the past? There are bad things that we can agree on; if you have two answers right from the ten questions they asked you, you did poorly, but you can’t say that that pizza is bad because you didn’t like the taste, someone else might love it. There are, of course, exceptions, a pizza with a layer of sand is probably universally bad, and Hitler also falls in that category but if you talk about Trump, for instance, is he universally bad? I personally don’t like what he does, but he has not murdered millions of people as Hitler did, and he is probably nice to his wife and children. He didn’t step out of the womb and thought: “now I gonna be an asshole.”  His genes might have paved the way for that role, and his surroundings gave him little chance to adopt a more… cherishing role in life.

As far as I can see, people call each other evil because they use their own personal standards and not a more universal one. This is why I don’t understand why people say that we live in bad times. Compared to what? The past is gone, and we don’t know how those people felt, lived and thought especially if they could compare there lives with ours. We now live much healthier and have much more comfort than even 50 years ago, most of us would not last in those times, especially woman and minorities. There is no reason not to know that we humans are not so good at remembering the past, our own past or that of the country we live in.

 

 

 

Day 2480, joyous.

aphorism, Daily picture

Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, All Too Human II
The Wanderer and His Shadow

173 Laughing and smiling. -The more joyous and self-assured his spirit becomes, the more a person forgets how to laugh loudly; by contrast, a spiritual smile continually wells up from within him, a sign of his astonishment at the countless concealed charms of a good existence.

Day 2475, pipe dreams.

Daily picture

My resolution last year was to write more constructively. I want to write a book, but I have difficulty focusing on one goal. Instead, I get distracted fast and follow many small ideas while never following one to the end or stringing them together.

I also struggle with doubt. I doubt my ability to learn how to write, and I doubt my message.

I know I have to be patient. I sometimes write longer pieces on my blog and re-read them once or twice before posting it, but I always notice many more mistakes when I re-read it a couple of days later. I also know that it is important to plan ahead and not, as I do, just write what comes up and see where it ends. Anyone that writes knows that it is not easy to delete an hour’s worth of work when you know it’s going in the wrong direction or nowhere.

But writing is one thing. In a couple of years, you can just tell your writing program what you want the text to be about, and it does it for you as GPT-3 does now already in a certain way. My biggest problem is that I want to write about life, and not just in a cold way how I see it but in a way that you can get some meaning out of it. I struggle with the thought that for thousands of years, people have written about life and what it all means, and though we have come a long way in understanding it in the sense that life for more people is now much better than it was 3000 years ago, we still have not come closer to a possible answer. Thousand of really smart people have written and preached about it, but with little effect besides some more tolerance for each other’s differences. After all, we don’t burn our witches anymore with fire but on social media, and we also no longer advertise the slave markets as they did before. Now you can at least say that you are free no matter where you come from.

I feel like a musician who hears a cool tune in his head but is unsure if he has heard it before or if he has the time to learn a musical instrument to let others hear this song so the listener can decide the value of it.