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Tag Archives: Philosophy of Life
PROMPT: Feel Bad
Daily writing prompt
What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it?
Kindle Reader. Do people engage in habitual activities that they feel bad about? I understand the occasional excessive pile of ice cream or hedonistic cheeseburger, but continually doing something one feels bad about seems self-rectifying.
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PROMPT: Outdated Technology
We’d be better off if the bleeding edge of weapon technology were the pointy stick — not just because of atrocities averted. Also, we’d all have to be more capable in such a world — there is no imposter syndrome among people who have to kill a deer or fish with a spear they hewed themselves. Also, if you are cheesed off with one or more people (or the world,) it is entirely different (and more calming) decision space if one has to go out spearing them individually than if one can spray them with automatic fire from 50 feet away. You’d still have the option, but you’d have to want it more and to accept the inevitability of consequence more fully. Finally, it is quite hard to run an authoritarian dictatorship if your army has weapons of similar capability to any random person.
I don’t know for sure whether “an armed society is a polite society,” but I suspect it is if the pointy stick is the pinnacle of armaments.
I know this makes it sound like I was around in the pre-Bronze era. I was not.
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PROMPT: Lifelong Learner
I aspire to be, but in the immortal words of Monty Python, “I am not dead yet!”
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PROMPT: Habit
Getting up every morning.
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PROMPT: Chapter
Daily writing prompt
What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
Chapter 7. Chapter 8.
NOTE: Incidentally, I would not title a chapter of my memoirs “The Hard Years,” so as to avoid the assumption that that was when I worked in porn. People would either skip said chapter… or skip to it.
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PROMPT: Anywhere
I could happily live any number of places — e.g. several places in Southeast Asia, the Caucasus (particularly Georgia — though with language concerns,) Taiwan, and South America spring to mind. As long as it’s neither brutally hot / humid most of the time nor Winter more than three months a year (and isn’t pricey,) I can probably learn to love it.
I would point out that if this is a forever and always deal, I’m not in. I don’t want to / plan to live any particular place for the rest of my life.
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FIVE WISE LINES [July 2026]
Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.
Sufi Saying
[S]ome day you will be old enough to
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe
start reading fairy tales again.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Mahatma gandhi
Learn as if you were to live forever.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael,
Pablo Picasso
but a lifetime to paint like a child.
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PROMPT: Chaos
A little of every kind of stressor is good for us. A human is a system of antifragile systems. Our bones get denser if we load them. Our muscles get stronger when we cause microtears in them. And our minds can cope with a wider variety of experiences when exposed to a wider variety of experiences.
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PROMPT: Lesson
Daily writing prompt
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
Just because a message has merit does not mean there is benefit in its delivery. For example, telling a person who is on fire and mad with itching not to scratch or telling a person to not be a jackass when their core nature is jackass. Saying such things will not nudge the state of the world and can only release the puff of hot air that creates chaos — like Edward Lorenz’s proverbial butterfly in Brazil that causes a tornado in Texas.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 