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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.

Sixteen years of existence

This week I celebrated my 16th birthday and shared a few ideas and questions on my mind through this blog post. Below are 10 of those specially (and perhaps lazily) selected for this newsletter edition. Each one can potentially be heavy food for thought:

• Are you going to wait for death to enjoy life too?

• Some die at 25 yet aren’t buried until they’re 75.

• Curiosity takes you places structure cannot.

• One of the most important questions you might ever ask yourself: “Are you letting yourself be guided by fear or by love?”

• Make sure you’re having fun. Otherwise you might as well have been an investment banker.

• You tend to dislike ideas by people your emotional human self hates. Separate ideas from people to have greater judgment.

• People aren’t inherently bad. There can be good intentions behind evil actions. The bad ideas that a person holds in their mind are the cause to why you think a person is bad. Separate ideas from people.

• “Experienced” people that tell you the world or the Internet is a dark place, a dangerous one either haven’t seen as much as the world as they claim to or they have (unbeknownst to them) fallen into a dark human tendency to remember bad events more vividly than the good ones.

• Reasons to hate are seemingly stronger than reasons to love.

• Take nobody’s word for it. Not even yours.

• Perspective is everything.

If you’re intrigued by this, why not read the whole blog post with 30 other such musings.

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• Question:

  “Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution, if we're so free?”

  — Jonathan Larson, tick, tick… BOOM!

• On the difficulty in conveying thought through words:

  “Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”

  — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

• Naval Ravikant on the selfish reasons to be moral:
  – The following is Naval’s Twitter thread on “Selfish morality” unrolled for ease of reading:

  • The selfish reason to be honest is to clear the mind of exhausting lies and to navigate towards people and situations where you can be completely authentic.

  • The selfish reason to love is that it feels better to be in love than to be loved (but don’t expect much back).

  • The selfish reason to be ethical is that it attracts the other ethical people in the network.

  • The selfish reason to be temperate is that overindulgence desensitizes you to the subtle everyday pleasures of life.

  • The selfish reason to be humble is that the more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be.

  • The selfish reason to be faithful or dutiful is that it gives you something to care about more than your self.

  • The selfish reason to be thrifty is that living far below your means frees you from obsessing over money.

  • The selfish reason to be honorable is that self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.

  • The selfish reason to be calm is that anger burns you first before burning the other. (A cool and calm person is more effective than an angry and agitated one.)

  • The selfish reason to forgive is so that you can move on with the rest of your life (but you can’t fake it or rush it).
    The selfish person realizes that happiness belongs to the self-less.

A post from my blog:

• “The inexplicit nature of norms & why we sit down to eat”:
  There’s a lot of inexplicit knowledge (knowledge hard to convey through words) that is contained in certain cultural norms. Due to that we accept some norms without there even being a reasonable explanation behind them in our minds at least. This post questions something we all do—sitting down to eat—and we see the answer to why we do so isn’t quite an easy one to explain.
  
  Read the post here.

If you liked this newsletter, I encourage you to share it for others to see it too.

If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or criticisms, I'd love to hear them from you; please write to me by replying to this email or DM me on Twitter.

Thank you for reading.

Onward, 
Arjun