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Here's the weekly Amazing Things & Ideas newsletter. Find one original idea from my side followed by the Amazing Things & Ideas List.

The Perpetual Nature of Goals

There is no end to what the human mind can desire. Perhaps that’s good for progress in civilization (with strings attached). But it isn’t always so for the individual.

It’s easy to be caught up pursuing something that’s only supposedly of interest and meaning but later find out it completely isn’t.

It’s easy to delay enjoyment until after fulfilling a goal and almost immediately return to the default chase phase due to the emergence of a new goal.

It’s thoughtful to chase with curiosity. To chase with passion. To chase with interest, meaning and excitement.

New problems will arise with new goals to be fulfilled. Always. That’s just their nature. Rather our nature.

But breaking free from being caught up in unworthy goals and being absorbed in meaningful ones is a choice. It’s just hard to come by. Hence the rat race metaphor.

I have a podcast now

Before this week’s Amazing Things & Ideas List, I just want to say I now have a podcast. I published the first episode which I recorded with Brett Hall (@ToKTeacher) just yesterday.

We talk about knowledge in it’s philosophical sense, people’s capacity to create explanatory knowledge, evolutionary psychology, free will and the meaning of life in this first episode. You can listen to it here:

Back to the usual now…

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• Edmund Burke on society (hinting on our moral duty to create a better future):

  “It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained except in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

• Socrates on the best way to live:

  “We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.”

• A book suggesting the irrationality of faith (belief without reason):

  The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
  

  Quoting the book’s epigraph in Douglas Adams’ words:

  “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

A post from my blog this week:

• “Because I say so”

  “Mom, can I […]?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t.”

  “But why can’t I?”

  “Because it isn’t good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I say so.”

  [Moans with disappointment, accepts defeat.]

  A blog post on the explanation-less, creative and critical power hindering, curiosity impeding four words: "Because I say so".
  
  Read it here.

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Thank you for reading.

Onward, 
Arjun