And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
While we share the vast majority of our DNA with other great apes, a few distinct biological and behavioral traits set humans apart:
Bipedalism: We walk upright on two legs. This evolutionary shift freed our hands to carry objects, craft tools, and perform complex gestures.
Cognitive Capacity: The human brain—particularly the neocortex—is disproportionately large and densely packed with neurons, allowing for abstract reasoning, problem-solving, and profound self-awareness.
Complex Language: We are the only known species to use highly structured, symbolic language to communicate nuanced ideas, record history, and share knowledge across generations.
Cumulative Culture: From mastering fire to splitting the atom, humans pass down technological and cultural innovations. We continuously alter our environment to suit our needs rather than merely adapting to the constraints of our habitats.
Humans (Homo sapiens) are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and large, complex brains. (Wiki)
The human condition is perhaps best understood not as a singular state, but as a series of tensions: the gap between our desire for permanence and the reality of our transience; our need for connection versus our inherent solitude; and our drive to build systems of order in a chaotic, unpredictable universe.
(AI generated Chat GPT)
Work in progress !
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life" Albert Camus
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own
miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have
paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability
but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our
survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that
awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just
be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself.
For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type of his own—a type of commonplaceness which will not for the world, if it can help it, be contented, but strains and yearns to be something original and independent, without the slightest possibility of being so.---Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." -Friedrich Nietzsche There is no reality except in action.” “Il n’y a de réalité que dans l’action… [L’être humain] n’existe que dans la mesure où il se réalise, il n’est donc rien d’autre que sa vie” “What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.” “Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose.”
“Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....” ― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
FIRST CALL | People who drink in bars in the morning AM in New York City
"There are two kinds of people I can't stand, drunk people when I'm sober and sober people when I'm drunk."
A Divorce Attorney's Thoughts On Love and Marriage-James Sexton
The Man With No Legal Identity
Deep in the woods of rural Appalachia is a man that lives alone on his land. He grows his own food, has no government ID, his overhead is $140 a month, and he possesses a claimed happiness by being free from the system, inspired by faith.
The Man With The Seven Second Memory
The remarkable and poignant story of Clive Wearing, a man with one of the worst cases of amnesia in the world. Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive was struck down in 1985 by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds.
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