I was listening to this piece of music on the bus and I had some new ideas about it. It’s melancholy but hopeful and quite confident. It says that life is hard and there’s only a little hope in a dark world, but if we keep walking steadily across this overworld, we will find opportunities for both intimacy and greatness, and we can have confidence that we’re going to come across them.
The sense of ‘find’ here is of coming across and calmly approaching, full of the knowledge of the significance or lack thereof of what we’ve found. I don’t mean stumble upon and be pleasantly surprised; we’re to at least some extent expecting these opportunities.
The flute in the track, especially when it climbs to its highest note, expresses our individual fragility as we attempt big things.
All my lessons were cancelled today and so I ended up spending about 18 hours refreshing the Guardian live blog and election results page, occasionally going off to get some lesson planning done. And now at last they have the 326 sits for a totally unquestionable Commons majority. The country is going to burn. There is no-one to stop the vast majority of what they intend to do.
I have felt today an actual interest in something outside of myself and the people immediately around me: I really care about this. I didn’t expect to: I haven’t followed the election campaign at all and actually failed to vote because my postal vote arrived on polling day (next time I’ll be sure to vote by proxy). My cousin told me that there’s more to Britain than the welfare state. For me, there really isn’t that much more to Britain outside of whats left of the welfare state, qua country, that I have a positive emotional reaction to.
I don’t know how I can turn this interest into action just yet. But I do feel a change of perspective today. My own personal career and future just became a lot less important to me. This is a step forward. Now it’s time to disconnect from the 24-hour news once more, and try to get on with doing something worthwhile.
Edit 2029Z: Polly Toynbee sums it up:
Every time Labour fails, the key issue is not their ejected MPs nor the great Westminster game, but the hardship imposed on the low-paid and hard-pressed. Every Tory government makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, draining public services dry.
Ignore Cameron’s urbane manner, he is driven by a deep anti-state ideology that will leave the welfare state and the public realm unrecognisable in five years. That is what Labour’s failure means.
Recently a child at my school asked me “Who are you?” and then when I told him I’m a teacher, he said “Are you Korean?” as a quite genuine question. This warmed my heart immensely: he didn’t assume anything at all about me thanks to the colour of my skin.
Here’s three articles I read on Thursday:
This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities
Depressing stuff.
I just finished watching the final season of Legend of Korra, which finished in the final quarter of 2014. The franchise has received a lot of positive commentary for its strong female characters and willingness to tackle serious ethical and political issues: it looks at the struggles of individuals and of whole societies. I don’t think that the first three seasons of Legend of Korra achieved very much, but it came together in the final season.
I was interested to read through this self-help piece which claims to offer a modern and up-to-date understanding of clinical depression. I came across the article while reading commentary on the end of a TV series I just finished watching; someone on a message board linked to this to help people finishing the series cope with its end.
Have you ever considered that perhaps we need not be bored with any situation? If we have some understanding and control over the mind, maybe we don’t have to be bored. Without changing the conditions, we can overcome boredom. Could it be just a matter of changing our attitude? Could it be simply seeing the way things are now and being able to accept them as they are, without being overwhelmed by an excessive thirst for something new? Then, in that moment of accepting the ways things are now, we can experience fulfillment and peace.
Everything is interesting if you look closely and open your mind to it. There is fascination in the smallest thing: a grain of sand, a flower, the light of the sun through the trees, the stars at night, in the silence or in the noise. It can all be interesting once the mind arouses that interest. Notice that the mind arouses interest rather than arousing craving for something else. The mind can generate interest with equal ease. If you generate the interest, you have the gratification of being interested. In other words you feel alive, you feel animated, you may even feel excited.
Really? I can’t yet convince myself of this.
A few years ago I was really interested in productivity hacking, that is, creating and sustaining habits that make one more productive. I’m thinking of productivity here not as making or creating stuff. Instead, I understand productivity hacks as ways of using time more efficiently, especially when it comes to boring routine stuff that enables more interesting stuff. If the routines that oil your life take less time out of that life, you win because you’ve more time to do all the other stuff.
My friends made a lot of fun of me when this interest of mine was at its peak and I look back and realise that I was spending a lot of time trying to become as efficient as possible at not actually doing very much. That being said, I did get some good habits out of my productivity hacking hobby, along with a really bad habit. I’ll write briefly about both of those.
During my first year in Korea one thing that I complained about was that I lacked a sense of purpose. I didn’t have a clear next step to achieving big, longterm goals in my life. I wasn’t worried that those goals weren’t neatly circumscribed: it wasn’t my having dropped the goal of becoming a professional philosopher that was troubling me. Despite dropping this goal, I still knew that I wanted a life that bore similarities to the life of a professional philosopher, and that also bore similarities to a bunch of other archetypes. The issue was not having a shorter term concrete goal that would push me in the directions of some medley of the archetypes I look up to. continue reading this entry