TSS #036 - April 21st, 2024
a few notes, quotes, and questions
Good afternoon and greetings from Austin,
No travel this week - so highlights outside of work include catching up on life admin (mostly cleaning my room and doing laundry), some reading and writing (mostly reading), and taking yoga+fitness classes at ABP.
Yesterday at the coffee shop, I was still trying to think of a theme for this week’s study…so uhh, today, I will just be sharing “a few things.”
Hope you enjoy :D
a few notes
from the Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert:
on hubris, progress, and death of the universe:
“Overreliance on the explanatory power of hubris is itself a form of hubris, a meta-hubris. And without hubris pushing us, however blinkered, forward, would there be any progress at all?”
“Don't we need hubris to enable and justify advances in technology? NASA seems to take hubris in stride; they see occasional disaster as the fair cost of spaceflight.”
Expansion of the universe will ultimately lead to a “cold” death — when the entropy of the universe goes to 0.
But this is trilliions of years away — imminently, we are facing a heat death.
on two kinds of happiness:
stability happiness: good job, loving family, dependable american-dream prosperity.
intense experience happiness: dizzying highs and crushing lows in quick succession.
the theory: Young people prefer the second kind of happiness - taking lots of risks because the lows improve the highs. As we get older - the pressures of conformity increase and we strive for the first kind of happiness.
BUT! We continue to prefer our painful memories — stable life may be happier, but unstable life is more INTERESTING…“Being happy on a day-to-day basis, doesn’t make us happy overall.”
Are we nostalgic to our pain?
on the unreality of memory…and emotions
“Some stories suggest that through injury or illness - we lose the code to our memories. If we can no longer embody the method of encoding, we lose the memories entirely. We forget how to remember them. And then finally what was remembered will lose its significance.”
“Bergson’s idea that perception and memory are coterminous suggests that we do not experience reality as it is, and then warp it in recall, but that even the first time we live through X, we are already experiencing our warped version of X.”
“Are emotions real? Biologically innate things or are they a concept that humans made up, like money?”
If emotions are a construct, what part of our conscious experience is not?
Are emotions ideas? Reducing all expression to thinking?
Or the opposite? Ideas are emotions - and that thinking is reducible to feeling?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
a few quotes
that I am pondering:
“We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency ‘the narrative fallacy’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.”
— Ken Liu
“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”
— Roger Ebert
“If you pay for the microphone, you get to say what you want to say.”
— “Charlie Tuna”
a few questions
that I am asking myself:
What does “enough” look like to you?
How do you know when you are balanced / what does “balance” mean to you?
What boundaries do you need to set to make your life better?
As always, if you’ve made it this far, thank you.
If you have any questions, comments, or ways I can improve this newsletter, please reply to this email!
ML,
Jimbo Wingdings
(p.s. - this sequel is AMAZING and I love it so much)
Just getting around to a couple of your letters - I love that quote by Ken Liu on telling your own personal story. I often pride myself on being able to enrich my own story while also /telling/ it in an interesting and funny ways. The way we are perceived is just as important to others as it is to ourselves.