Thought provoking
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
His way of perceiving the world intrigues me. I find it highly entertaining and mood-lifting to think such a way. I wish to gleefully dance along to the rhythms of the song that is earth, despite not really comprehending what is happening. It’s fine that I don’t know what’s going on, sometimes I don’t need to; sometimes it’s better if I don’t. I at least need to know the basis or general idea of what’s happening and I’ll be fine. I’ll be happily humming to the music around me, carrying about my day.
The importance of privacy is such a sacred value of our modern-day society. I can’t believe we completely ignore how invasive and constricting our tech-companies are such as Microsoft or Google with them apathetically stealing our data to turn profits to data brokers. We know ads are personalized, but we don’t know why? Sorry? How can you not know it’s because the corporations that provided you your laptop or your phone are also the ones trying to do what they can to make money from your identity, and to strip that right of privacy so they can continue their own streams of money?
It really baffles me, but I continue my life knowing this and it not necessarily bothering me all the time. I do wish something could change though. Having people like my friend Ethan would really add some benefit to us all as he was actually one of the first people to make me aware of this thing to do with URLs and how they sneakily incorporate additions to track what you do down to what letters you type.
I’m at least glad that messages like this and people like Ethan exist, otherwise we would be in much deeper shit than we would realize. The world needs more awareness like this, it’s sacred, it’s a value to our society.
Reality Is Evil is an Aeon article that discusses things such as the topic of entropy, thermodynamics, metaphysics, and other such things. It initially starts with an abrasively pessimistic outlook on existence as we know it and then further justifies the view with the explanations our current knowledge of science has been able to give us. It mentions things such as how entropy ties into this idea of our world being much less positive and happy than we believe it to be as things naturally progress into nothingness - disintegration if you will.
In my opinion, the article does a decent job at explaining how the world works in this regard and is an interesting article overall, but there is almost a sense of dramatized language in some areas which then dies down as the middle-content of the article shows. I will say that it is good on how it can motivate us to take back what we’re constantly losing, or at least take back what we can before it’s too late. I found this to be nicely educational regarding physics and science, I was not bored by the explanations or the content that discusses science but rather intrigued by it - wanting more ever so slowly.
This article in summary makes you think about our world in a different light to what we’re comfortable with. It tries to provoke our feelings to react so we can consider what this is actually trying to tell us. I am of the firm belief that it should be shown to others to discuss and even argue about as it’s without a doubt a great conversation starter or discussion topic.
I agree with this as someone who’s mind is highly visual in behavior. My mind is terrible at recording what people said, or remembering the entire structures of songs if not listened to into oblivion. But I can remember things I’ve seen from years ago that no others seem to be able to recall until I mention it. My mind works in strange ways that cannot necessarily be explained other than something such as neurodiversity with examples such as my synaesthesia (chromaesthesia, time-spatial, grapheme-colour) and my epilepsy.
Trying to use the concept of human language (written or verbal) to explain how I think is such a frustrating task that I’m unfortunately confined to having to do, as visual demonstrations of my thoughts and what I’m trying to say is much more tasking of effort. If there was some sort of technology that could accurately visualize my thoughts onto a screen for others to see, I would spend whatever it costs to buy it because so many times have I needed something like that in my life. I often lose some of these thoughts, or alternatively have them almost imprisoned in my head due to not being able to convey them neither accurately nor coherently/comprehensibly for others to understand. People always stare back sideways as if I’ve spoken complete gibberish, and honestly it does tend to feel like I am.
Words fail me in general, so it only makes sense that they cannot convey what I think properly. However, I am able to express anything around these thoughts such as this note on the quote by Bjoerk. I believe I’m able to resonate with this as she is an artist to the core of the definition, and I’m someone who likes to create, and comes from a family with creative interests such as cooking, sculpture, drawing, painting, etc. It can alternatively be that I just straight up, have a weird, atypical brain that others seem to struggle to understand how I work.