Essays and Thoughts
A desperate attempt to justify the existence of college writing classes by articulating the importance of writing well, in order to make me feel better about how I'm forced to take them instead of the other 3700 courses offered at Harvard. Why Learn Writing? The Short Answer So we can articulate, communicate, and think with … Continue reading Writing Well
A short piece that I wrote for a UChicago friend. She probably didn't expect the reply to be so long when she asked me "What is the meaning of life?" and "What is the meaning of love?" But you don't get what you want in life. You get what you need. "Well, I got an … Continue reading Meaning of Life. Reprisal.
Well, one of my UChicago friends asked me this. And here's my reply. I don't think she expected it to be this long. Nor do I believe instagram is designed for this kind of communication, but such is life. Answer to “What is the meaning of life?” and "What is the meaning of love?" I don't … Continue reading Art, the Antidote to Meaninglessness
A Strange Idea: The worst crime Zoom classes are committing against humanity is depriving kids those real-life serendipitous opportunities to fall in love.
What is the antidote to transience? The fact that everything enters and everything goes? The futility that bubbles out of death and dying? What can anchor us and provide us with meaning in the symbolic order of identities, where one thing is equivalent to another? (E.g. money, status, abstractions. Not terrible in themselves, but often … Continue reading Man the Maker
"Mom, can you not care about me so much! Just leave me alone!" The above line has been a recurring theme in my teenage years, with an almost-always too concerned mother (a rather fortunate thing, though I am focusing here on the torturous aspects). What troubled me was the fact that she could not stop … Continue reading Care. Concern. Love.
A short meditation on Home. Heidegger said that we are Dasein, being-there. As such, we live in a place, (in distinction to a mere environment) and thus, a home. This is determined already by us as zoon echon logon—the language speaking animal. For it is a miraculous fact of symbols that it can point to … Continue reading Home
"Better Never to Have Been," is the slogan of anti-natalism. Procreation is immortal and selfish. It is better for the human race to be extinguished. We have a pro-natal bias that has to be corrected (especially in a democracy, because the more people that are born under a certain demographic group the more power they … Continue reading Anti-Natalism
Kierkegaard: "Hope is a pretty girl, who slips away from one’s grasp." And again (!), "He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he … Continue reading Hope Contra Kierkegaard
“Higher Power”. “Inner Child”. “Trauma”. A 21st century technological inept human being cannot but cringe when those words are uttered. Indeed, the entire 12 Step program is cringe and corny all the way through. Its simplicity verges on brutality, One almost cannot help but treat it with irony and sarcasm. Because it really is ridiculous. … Continue reading 12 Step
Warren's Brain Dumps 