yuhrish

Life is certainly much simpler when we agree with each other, but it’s also more prone to illusory thinking.

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort. Everything nature does is perfectly well-suited to what it does, and it cannot be otherwise. This is why non-doing comes with a felt experience of effortlessness, when it seems like everything is working exactly the way it’s supposed to be.

But forget the closeness of a tightly-knit community to soothe our aching hearts. Most of us will settle for something far more basic: evidence of our existence. Talking about ourselves is one way to prove we exist. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the parasocial pseudo-intimacy of the influencer economy. When I see an influencer... See more

The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that modern commercial societies have a way of conjuring desires for things that no one longed for in the first place.

“If there’s no price, you are the price.”

And so even though the game everyone is claiming to play is choosing ideas based on what brings value in the long term, the game they're actually playing is choosing ideas based on what wins in an often dysfunctional and highly adversarial social environment .

Mill’s Trident. The Trident holds that (a) if an opinion is true, silencing it robs us of truth; (b) if an opinion is partly true, silencing it deprives us of knowledge we lacked; and (c) if an opinion is false, silencing it still harms us because answering objections strengthens understanding.