Is that too much courage? Oh wait, in fact there is no such thing, it’s only cost optimisation and packaging design.
I find it unacceptable to buy a ten dolla’ sticker to make useable all these “pro” devices . This is nonsense. People who use their 3k laptops for showing off and entertainment are the vast majority. Of course if you ask the market you’ll get the obvious answer that glossy is “what people prefer”. That is a stupid argument, though. The people you ask do not spend 7 days a week, 10 hours a day focusing their eyes in and out to the reflection of themselves.
I used to have a Toshiba portable with matte, five years ago and got it replaced by the company with a Mac. I already had an iMac at home. Yet, was a non retina non laminated screen which simulated the reflectiveness of an old CRT.
Staring at the glossy retina made my head hurt, my focus drop and my eyesight only last for 30 minutes.
I fiddled with brightness, white point, warmth, the position in my room, you name it – to no noticeable result. I had the same issue using my iPad and my iPhone, but less annoying because I use those devices less. Until one day I got the matte sticker. OMG! I can focus and look at the damn screen for as long as I want. I can work outside, in the shade, with full brightness, which before was literally painful. The difference is staggering.
Do you have the courage to buy a five dolla sticker and try matte? Maybe you’ll like it! Then, when the marketing at Apple “asks the market” they get the answer which makes their courage work:
“Yes, we’ll buy your damn matte screen laptops and devices, you cowards!”
I have no idea if a mega expensive Moshi matte sticker is better than the cheap five dolla’ one I got. I live at an edge of the world, where I have to wait two weeks and pay half the price for shipping for such a luxury product.
This plastic thing makes my life so much better … I expect it should have been an option from the first trillion dolla’ company in the world: a five dolla’ coating!
There isn’t anything in nothing that may become something.
It is important to understand nothingness and the repercussions that its existence has on your existence. If nothingness exists, only then is existence truly absurd. Otherwise, however weak the something is, there is purpose.
Purpose is merely the existence of a next step in a process.
So, what is nothingness anyway?
It is definable only by comparison: nothing is the opposite of anything. No matter, no dimensions, no space, no thought, no scale, no direction, no speed, no time and, most important: nothing to be defined exists in nothingness.
If, say, before the Big Bang there was nothing, it can only mean that nothingness has a property which makes is create a Big Bang but that is contradictory because there is no something in nothing to create anything from.
We need to be clear on nothing. Nothing is no thing.
Nothing is not emptiness, because emptiness contains the borders of itself. To define something as empty you need to explicitly define a cavity.
Nothing is not absence, because absence is limited by its object, while nothingness is unlimited. In absence only the named absent is not. In nothingness nothing is.
Nothingness is not void because void contains space. Nothing contains nothing, not even empty space. Empty space, aside from the fact it isn’t really empty, is still something, space, so at least one degree removed from nothing.
Nothingness is dimensionless too simply because there is no space. No space, no dimensions.
Death is not nothingness either. Death is non-existence, for both us and all other living things all over this universe. Unless we’re alone, in the entire infinite universe, which raises a lot of hope. But hope always bears disillusionment, so let’s not hope.
Let’s think.
Non-existence is simply being merged with everything-ness. That means there is no self sustaining process anymore. Non-existence is not really about self perception. A person with head trauma who is in a coma but breathes on their own still exists, because there are self sustaining processes that run. Some of the processes stopped or are failing, but others work, and they run.
Nothingness is not lack of perception. Even if all awareness and consciousness would vanish, there would still be something left behind, that is, everything else. The tree that falls without being heard is its own thing. And I know that because the universe in which this tree exists is made of rules. Rules upon rules and all these rules precede consciousness and perception.
That’s why I think our universe is infinite in both dimensions, and directions.
Infinity is necessary because something exists.
Infinity is far more plausible than nothingness because of this paradox:
if there is a limit in dimensions or directions, it means that right next to that limit there is nothing,
therefore, nothing envelopes everything,
but each thing has a size which adds up to the size of everything, yet nothing has no size
so the fact that something with no size envelopes all the size
makes it not be nothing, but a something
Infinity is far more plausible than circularity too because, by definition circularity implies a circular edge, which again should be enveloped by nothingness and that is paradoxical. There could be circularity inside infinity, if this infinity is self generating it is bound to repeat, but not outside.
So, now the big question, if there has always been something from which everything happened, what is it?
This dream that I’m dreaming is my reality. Yet, this idea, “reality”, as if there is any “fakety” to oppose it …, what do we mean by it?
The real is opposed to the imaginary and reality is a summation of everything that is real, as in not imaginary. But what if I imagine something that is identical to it’s real counterpart, does that make the imaginary more real?
So far there is nothing in our understanding of the very small or the very large that suggests anything completely fundamental about the universe. I mean, think about it. Energy, the most basic thing must be considered as is, a self defined concept that we mount our entire theory on. Which is extremely useful but it is made up, it is not a fundamental property, like mass, for example.
Completely fundamental means that something is so basic that it cannot be expressed as a sum of parts, like say the electron was once believed to be. The truth is reality is very imaginary so far.
Most of the stuff around you, below you and above you is empty space.
Most of what you perceive is mediated by various fields interacting with each other, not direct experience.
The size of the universe is ridiculous. Not to mention that the idea of size is, again, imaginary when applied to “how big is everything”.
The DNA copies itself. It just happens. There are little worker proteins who just happen to unzip genetic information and copy it piece by piece.
And we call this “reality”. Are we serious? Everything we discover at fundamentally small or large sizes is just description, not explanation. And descriptions are all imaginary.
All reality is rooted in imaginary because we’re unable to get any information as fundamental explanation. The Big Bang, a real event rooted in an imaginary state, the state of before the Big Bang. The singularity, a reality entirely engulfed in the imaginary. This one is effectively funny:
“a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space”
A one dimensional point. We can’t even draw in one dimension. A dot is a circle no matter how small we make it. We have to imagine the idea of “one dimension”.
So the process that I am lives in a real reality enveloped in imaginary concepts, but the imagination is merely a part of the process, so it’s like I am enveloped around myself. And so are you.
This dream that we’re dreaming is our reality.
Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.
— Rigveda 10:129–6
That is why the docile uninvolved annoy me so much.
There is no God willing to torture you for an eternity, because eternal torture is boring.
There is no eternal happiness either.
Eternal happiness requires both eternal awareness and your freezing in a particular state, but if you don’t change awareness is zero, therefore happiness is maximum right before it changes you so that you lose it. This paradox makes heaven weird.
There may be eternal bliss, which is the unaware perception of completeness. Some orgasms and some meditation, sometimes bring a fleeting bliss, both lowering your awareness.
But, if you don’t fall back, is bliss still enjoyable or suffocating? Really, I don’t see why eternal bliss should necessarily be a reward.
If your self is beyond biological processes, maybe upon the end of life support the self remains imprinted in the stuff that this particular one or all universes are made of.
However, missing perception, you will very likely be lost to yourself.
There is an actual objective and “scientific”, as in not wishful thinking, point in that information is never lost, and if and only if the self is not at all phenomenologically explainable, but instead it is pure information, it may stick around forever, bound into what ever it is that all these “particles” spawn from.
There may even be the possibility that biology devised neural tissue to be so amazing that it acts like a dream catcher fishing out past selves from the fabric of the universe.
But all that, as soon as the speculation feels good because it serves our hopes and wishes, all that is probably false.
Being a human in this day and age got limited. I feel like those kind of questions which were asked once with great reverence, are today barely referenced as conversation starters. People don’t want to go in depth anymore. What scarred me is that the shallowness is not the kind you find at careless teenagers but a deep one, a shallowness rooted in certainty.
We know there is no life after death. No one ever came back, all reports have been debunked a zillion times and currently all culture revolves around a lust of life sentiment feeding a fear of missing out because you only live once.
We know there is no God. Every single attempt to represent God turned out to be a business enterprise. I think right now God has the worst PR problem in history. Not to mention the ubiquity of suffering and injustice which world wide instant communication made known. We’re clearly on an abandoned gem, struggling to survive our peers in a terrible hostile universe.
We know there is no objective truth. Mathematically proven, socially over researched: truth is always relative. Recently we started to learn there are no lies either.
We know right and wrong are political constructs. All ethics eventually got perverted into enforced mass control. History is chock full with reinterpretation and rewriting.
We know there is no soul. Countless MRIs sum up in an impressionist painting of the “soul”, all chemicals and electric currents. No EKG ever picked any other presence than that of a hard working heart.
We know society is as bad as it has always been. There are ten documentaries a week exposing this, amirite. The rulers are as powerful as ever, and their mischief as boring as ever.
So then, what is there to think about? Does a temporary being, a short lived creature holistically aware of itself, despite all its efforts to dull this awareness out, have any business pondering existential or metaphysical questions? Is it fair to ask this of it?
Existence is also known too. The rate of normative behavior is accelerating each decade, revolutionary social spikes are to be found only in dystopia and all non normative behavior tends to be already in the stage of mental illness. Easy is success.
The universe is boring. It only takes mathematical equations to predict what it does. Finding out each equation is not boring, but once found, triviality ensues.
This is probably some effect of advancing tools, or maybe of the increasing density of our civilization, or an effect of our incredibly disturbing loud loneliness. Replacing solitude with noise is a skill.
Yet all this certainty makes us less human. In my opinion the great differentiator which creates the meaning of “human” is our unrelenting running “I don’t know”. The more certainty, the more automation. The more automation, the less attention. The less attention, the less novelty. The less novelty, the shorter the life.
This, dear Marcus, is so scary. I must miss a button or something, because I just can’t begin to live. I can’t. I am alive, hence I am living. And I fear death because it is so unreasonable.
I think we should all fear death. We should. Death sucks. You know why? I know you do Aurelius, because you’re dead, but, oh, all of us nodding philosophically at your wisdom appear to not know. We don’t seem to know that death is permanent.
We fear not beginning to live while we squander our life looking for the start button.
The world’s most valuable commodity is time
Are you kidding me?
I am certain this is false, because no one ever gave me nothin’ for showing up. I gotta do the work, follow up and push through.
As long as you live, keep learning how to live. –Seneca
Damn I hate these quotes. You’d imagine they have some depth but in reality they are tricks of the intellect. I believe Seneca was making fun of future idiots. So it says that I should continuously learn, which is ok I guess, tiresome but ok, but then wait, I should learn only one thing: to live. You all know how to live don’t you? I mean if you didn’t you’d all be zombies browsing medium.
So what would learning how to live mean as a metaphor? It isn’t about breathing, homeostasis or anabolism, right? It is about, here comes the joke: assimilating life recipes made by others!
That is just cruel Seneca! In your time there were no professional content producers and no listicles.
In as much as I agree with a majority of what yu said, I feel I should also add something in line with the subject.
Awesome! 🙂 Shoot.
I too have heard the expession money does not buy happiness countless times and I too agree that money does buy freedom and freedom to a degree constitutes “happiness”.
Not really. There is no natural connection from freedom to happiness, in no degree. They are two completely separate things, and the only thing is one is more likely, because of biology, to be happy in a state of freedom. It’s maybe a correlation, but that’s all.
With that said, it did not make sense to me that every rich guy should utter the message in one way or another.
They should because they are rich and that means they have the time to utter such messages instead of the other message 🙂 That means, you either help or STFU, amirite? Why bother otherwise?
If you are not rich, sour grapes and all, you may shout that being rich is not that great, there is no ethical burden here. “Not rich”, not poor. If you’re poor, you must survive instead of living, which kinda sucks.
It’s not like they formed a club (I’m not sure though, they might have one) and decided, heck let’s tell this people that being wealthy is not all that.
Everyone is in a club. There is a natural conspiracy phenomenon where people collude in groups based on opinions and mentalities and then defend their mutual interest.
However, in this case, the club is not strongly formed. It is though the club of the not helping rich philosophers. They don’t know each other but like all humans they will smile and nod at the opinion of the others like themselves.
It is way more common for this message to trickle down from the circles of the wealthy than any other message. From tech billionaires to Hollywood stars to trade stars, they write, speak and advise that money is not really important, all while flying their private jets.
The thing I have come to discover with money is not so much as making it, but rather managing it.
It depends. Spending money rationally is not really management. Management is when you empower your money to produce more wealth. That is simply another activity, just like any other. It may be a hobby, a part time occupation, a full time occupation, a passion, an obsession or an addiction. Only at the later stages it actually is a problem.
And secondly, one which resonates with the subject here is: unless you can be content with the progress you have made so far, and that you enjoy the process to accumulating weatlh- getting to that point of being rich won’t help really. You’ll still be miserable, the only difference is you’ll be miserable and wealthy…something I presume is far worse.
The process of wealth accumulation is not really experienced. Success and failure are experienced. Wealth accumulation is an observable, if it happens it is positive, reinforcing feedback.
It is not worse to be miserable and wealthy, it is better, simply because if you manage to crawl out of your misery there is a soft cushion of wealth to lay on, and you know it. The not rich know there is nothing welcoming outside of their sunken soul. The poor cannot even become miserable, because they have to survive and surviving is a miserable experience overall.
Happiness begins from withing, and much like what DHH said..should not be pegged on materialism
Well, maybe. I believe happiness is extremely particular. Happiness is when you do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place, with the right people etc.
There is happiness rooted in materialism.
“Should” is not allowed anywhere near happiness, because that is what makes dominant culture be dominant: asserting their recipe,
To get A people should B, only if they would C. Bleh.
They say money can’t buy happiness. But did you ever try to buy it without money? 😉
Ha!
I tried to buy happiness with so many things, money included. True story.
I tried to buy happiness with work.
I got happiness with so many strings attached, I couldn’t enjoy a second of it because I was so busy untangling all those strings.
I tried to buy happiness with health.
This was a shady transaction. I got depression, the opposite of happiness. Depression is so damn expensive I quickly ran out of health but found I got addicted to the void. The withdrawal was an excruciatingly boring isolation in numbness.
I tried to buy happiness with love.
I got happiness but alas, I am not a being of infinite love, I put a higher price on my love than what the happiness factory was offering. Negotiation bore no fruit, but I found out I can make my own brew of happiness out of love. Who knew.
I tried to buy happiness with time.
Worst idea ever. I became a resource. That’s what the happiness factories use for the happiness of some, the time of others. My time became a raw material, no added value. I felt like Russia, important but with an economy the size of Italy. It sucked. I quit. Being. Russia.
I tried to buy happiness with patience.
Patience did buy me joy. Joy is the next best thing, when you can’t afford happiness or when your happiness is unachieveable. In no way I could trade neither patience for happiness, nor joy for happiness. In fact I found that the joyful are no longer customers of the happiness factories because they don’t make the plus sizes of happiness that fit a joy filled soul.
I tried to buy happiness with detachment.
Detachment once bought me a ticket for a visit inside the happiness factory and witnessed the illusion. I lost my detachment and found my disillusion.
I tried to buy happiness with money.
Money bought a lot of pleasure and fleeting instantaneous happiness. The problem was that it was a monthly fee. Actually a daily fee and in the terms and conditions it said that when the money runs out you automatically get enrolled in the free offering of constant stress.
I tried to buy happiness with faith.
They didn’t deliver so I wasted my faith.
I tried to buy happiness with reason.
The bodyguards kicked me out of the store, while the staff yelled behind me that they have the right to select their clientelle. There was indeed a fine print I didn’t notice in the education society gave me.
I have seen in my brief existence a lot of people. I am grateful to be me.
I am grateful that I can let go. I’ve let go of everything that went too far away from me. This makes me light. I don’t have no special skill, I simply have a light grasp from birth. Practically and metaphorically.
I am grateful I feel joy and enthusiasm with voracious abandonment. No inner numbness ever plagued me. I am naturally drawn to the unfamiliar, while fear settles in later in the adventure.
I am grateful I feel pleasure and pain, and I am also grateful I enjoy certain combinations of them. No outer numbness ever covered me. I have no idea what it is like to want to refuse an invitation.
I am grateful my mind is alert, and it answers back when I ask things. I have a great companion in myself and that lowers my need of approval to bare minimmum. I did nothing for this to exist, it was there as a response to being unpopular as a kid.
I am grateful I care and am polite by default. I don’t do suspicion unless you intentionally hurt me and I know it. This frees my mind a lot. But I invest no effort in this, I just work that way since forever.
I am grateful I learn easily. I don’t even learn, it is an unexplainable state, for which I am grateful. I am merely immersed in something until I eventually feel like I know. Because of this I am a notorious underachiever, but I feel constantly safe, safe enough to risk and feel alive.
I am grateful I can relax. I just can. I see the blue sky or smell the air and suddenly nothing is immediate, important or catastrophic.
I am grateful I constantly doubt myself, it keeps me alert, but I couldn’t have done it without my native self love. Genetic? Maybe. Narcissistic? You bet. But doubt constantly keeps me tight.
I am grateful my will can grasp my feeble ego and straighten it up, whenever I actually don’t know and make a fool of myself. I suffer little when disillusion hits. I never drown in tears. I cry but magically bounce back up. I don’t do anything for it, I just suddenly feel better.
I am grateful I can always enjoy the brightness of our star and the light of this world. It is engraved deeply within me that this brightness and shine of the world is the one thing that will spark in my dying mind before I go.
I am grateful I can lie to myself about many things, but I always know I am lying. I never learned that, I just did it to face my childhood, and in time got accustomed to it. I think it is impossible to learn doing this as a grown up, and I also think this is the reason most personal development techniques fail.
I am grateful I can silence worries by thinking of things that don’t worry me. It is not a skill, I don’t know how I do it, I think it is a native talent and that it cannot be taught and it is, I believe, the reason most mindfulness techniques are bullshit.
I am grateful for the tenacity of my explaining, even when I’m not really sure of myself. Words come to me and I’ve never searched more than three seconds for self confidence. I find it, although I don’t know where it comes from.
I am grateful for my upper averageness. I have no obvious or special talent, or if I do I am too lazy to perfect them. But with very little effort I often appear to be better than the mean, I glow by default when not fully confronted by higher value. I did not learn nor practice this, it’s been there by default.
I am grateful for being detached. Detached from missing out, detached from future losses, detached from past losses.
I am grateful for the carelessness of my parents, parents who, at the very least, had the common sense of not being against anything — other than my marriage. Luckily by then I was grown enough to know better and their carelessness forced me into myself. But they let me be. I had no braids of emotional pain to untangle. My pain was free flowing and easy to trim.
I am grateful for finding love. I never searched for it, I am grateful for being saved that meandering anxious search.
I am grateful I dream in colour and for all my flying dreams. My dreams are so realistic I sometimes make an effort to not remember them as memories. I fly so easily and so often that I sometimes feel crushed by the weight of the awaken conscious.
I am grateful for being curious and peaceful about it. My curiosity burns like a warm late summer evening, my curiosity keeps me away from existential angst, but it doesn’t leave burns nor does it make me too thirsty for the truth. I have the kind of curiosity which makes me able to be alone. That is just the way it is, it is not a skill nor a talent.
I am grateful for being alone just enough time to take a hold on my quirks, to explore and see them there. I am grateful for the power to be quirky with myself without judging myself for it. I am grateful for every single quirk that gets out of the closet and is accepted by those towards whom I am also grateful. I just happened to have that much alone time, not more, not less.
I am grateful for my hair, which is going away, for my looks which in a very manly way become apparently better, for my height, for my bone structure and overall health. I am grateful towards my pancreas for not giving up once. Overall my body does well against my consistent persecution of it. With this too, I have nothing to be proud about, just grateful.
I am grateful for all my priviledge. I am male assigned, mostly able bodied, mostly caucasian, mostly straight on a Kinsey scale.
I am grateful for falling asleep. I couldn’t go on without it. I have no insomnia, my pillow is always soft. With pain, with sickness, with longing and with sorrow, I’ve always got shut eye and awaken with that feeling given by magic restoration potions.
I am grateful for every single thing that is right about me and that keeps me away from the torment, suffering, doubt, worry, chaos, depression, sadness, waste, angst, aimless wandering I see around, but I have no merit whatsoever and no advice on how I do whatever. I am me and I am grateful for it.
These are all defaults. They were things I had or discovered I had with almost no compromise.
I have no idea how you could become me.
I have no clue what you should do to learn easier, sleep better, be healthier, be happier, and enjoy living as much as I do.
I don’t know, because I am not you. I am me.
I am grateful to be me and I wish you’re grateful to be you.
This is the formula of happiness. No go be happy! Just kidding …
(a rebooted response)
It is exactly this line of thinking that, in my opinion, underpins unhappiness, said Alex Schiff in an article.
But it does sound believable right? Happiness = Reality — Expectations. After all we’re our biggest enemies in the race to happy-land.
Isn’t it true that should we lower our expectations, happiness would soon ensue?
No.
bad news
The formula is good, but the interpretation is wrong.
People expect all formulas to be as simple as 2 + 2 = 4, but in reality most formulas have meaning attached, that is a certain correct interpretation that makes them valuable.
In this case, the problem is that:
Expectations are always maximal
Expectations = education x culture x personality. How can you lower that? Be stupid, be ignorant, be a simpleton. Otherwise prepare to be unhappy.
If you get this, then you’ll work to maximize Reality!
If you didn’t get that, you’ll work you ass off to lower your expectations to lonely monk limits. Then, when expectations will be close to zero, we’ll get to:
When you get to bare reality (it bites by the way) it will slap you in the face because reality is rough, simple and it ain’t got no time for you. Because if reality was so darn pretty and a constant source of happiness, then you wouldn’t have had any Expectations to begin with, amirite?
good news
Humans are transformative beings which create constant change. We change ourselves, we change others and we change everything around us; after all humans are the only beings on this planet who are in a constant race with the limited time they have, perpetually running away from it (change, by the way, makes time go slower).
more good news
Expectations are the product of education, culture and personality. The product, not the sum. A small dent in your education, culture or personality produces a huge dent in your Expectations. Yet education, culture and personality are the strings we’re all playing our existence on, so prepare for updated levels of Expectations the older you get.
We also shouldn’t mix concepts here. Expectations are not the same thing with entitlement or privilege. Also, spiritual paths such as mindfulness or thankfulness are just as well grounded on Expectations. These paths only guide you towards your Expectations, they will not magically make reality any prettier, than the ruthless bitch that bytes everyone, which reality is.
Maximize reality so that it overcomes your expectations. Then, only then, happiness results. Happiness may be specific and complicated but it does have one advantage: it is an essential state. Like any essence, one small drop of it and, kaboom, you’re happy! That means you need to maximize reality just a tad over your expectations, and keep reality a tad up as your Expectations grow.
Simple? What’s more beautiful than a happy human being?
