the task of education

"Like Rousseau, Kant criticizes parents who have their children taught solely with an eye to their career prospects and making money, and rulers who see schools and universities as nothing more than training grounds to maximize the efficiency of their subjects. Instead, it is the task of education to improve the world by turning individuals into better people: "Good education is exactly that from which all good in the world arises." "

— Kant: A Revolution in Thinking by Marcus Willaschek

“Why Aren’t Smart People Happier?”

In Experimental History, his Substack, Adam Mastroianni asks a basic question in an essay called “Why Aren’t Smart People Happier?” Intelligence helps people solve problems and understand situations, so smart people should be leading happier lives, but they are not. He says it’s because we too narrowly define intelligence. We give people multiple choice tests in reading, math, history and language, and we think we are identifying people who have general intelligence that helps them think through a wide array of domains.

But in reality, all these different tests are measuring only one ability: the ability to think through defined problems. These are problems with stable relationships among the variables, there’s no disagreement about when the problems have been solved, and the correct answers are the same for all people. But life, he continues, is largely about undefined problems. How do I get my kid to stop crying? Should I be a dancer or a dentist? How should I live? In these problems there is no stable set of rules to find the right answer. One person’s right answer might be another person’s wrong answer. We need a word for people who are really good at solving undefined problems.

David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/opinion/good-essays-news-sidneys.html?smid=em-share

Resentment vs. Happiness

"...In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don't think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. I have not myself very often experienced people complaining about this sort of thing, but I don't like it when they do. If I'm teaching a course on race and racism, it's a bit weird that I'm not allowed to mention the N-word.

At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn't mean to. Let's start with that. Evidence can mount up that that's not what's going on. But that should be our presumption in a college classroom..."

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity in an Age of Essentialism
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professor-of-pluralism?bc_nonce=hpau1vwvsvdpy3tcevyy7a&cid=reg_wall_signup

Schopenhauer

"Nietzsche considered him one of his most important teachers, and Freud, astonishingly, thought him one of the half-dozen greatest individuals who had ever lived. One of the few professional philosophers to treat him as more than a crank was Wittgenstein, who perhaps saw in his work an anti-philosophy akin to his own."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n22/terry-eagleton/pregnant-with-monsters

Today

"The highest possible philosophy is to enjoy today, not regretting yesterday, not fearing tomorrow." - Robert Green Ingersoll

Last Bregman Reith lecture: Fighting for humanity…

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002nhld

Bilbo's "happifying life"

"My life went well because I was part of the victory over darkness. Victory over darkness! So a life well lived – a happifying life – is one that does not succumb to darkness. And while in my old life evil's ways to bait, beguile and betray always seemed so many, now they all seem as one.

All the same, Gandalf, I cannot say enough about quiet nights, time for quiet, even solitude, and the wide, true world. One wonders what good anything would be to anyone if there were no good world to be in. And this Undying world! – where the shimmering, undulating hills of light melodize with the open expanse above and the fresh rushing rivers glide over the glassy rocks below, as if there were a glowing ageless twilight in each stone!"

Philosophy Now
Dec '25

"9 Life Lessons" on Commencement Day, from Aussie comic Tim Minchin

"...Two: Don't seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn't evolve to be constantly content. Contented Homo Erectus got eaten before passing on their genes..."

Read the whole thing here. Sure beats the "eat more fiber" debacle of '21.

The gratitude lady responds to the question “Are you AI?”

And shares data…

Better than the proverbial apple

Way better. Thanks, Rhys!

Published 1920

Volume I... II

 

That wonderful letter to Henry Adams ("so happy...I can stand it no longer") is in volume II, p. 346.

Every day

Bregman’s 3d Reith Lecture

https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002n7rf

Wake up

Just kidding...

"A happy and virtuous consciousness"

 The AI farewell (below) is okay, but I want to leave you with WJ's near-terminal remarks to the gloomy historian and presidential scion Henry Adams (who thought the 2d law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy somehow entail the impossibility of human  happiness). These words, delivered practically from his deathbed, capture a commitment to lifelong happiness I think we'd all do well to emulate. 

"...I can stand it no longer."

To Henry Adams.

Bad-Nauheim, June 17, 1910.

Dear Henry Adams,—I have been so "slim" since seeing you, and the baths here have so weakened my brain, that I have been unable to do any reading except trash, and have only just got round to finishing your "letter," which I had but half-read when I was with you at Paris. To tell the truth, it doesn't impress me at all, save by its wit and erudition; and I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject. No, sir, you can't do it, can't impress God in that way. So far as our scientific conceptions go, it may be admitted that your Creator (and mine) started the universe with a certain amount of "energy" latent in it, and decreed that everything that should happen thereafter should be a result of parts of that energy falling to lower levels; raising other parts higher, to be sure, in so doing, but never in equivalent amount, owing to the constant radiation of unrecoverable warmth incidental to the process. It is customary for gentlemen to pretend to believe one another, and until some one hits upon a newer revolutionary concept (which may be tomorrow) all physicists must play the game by holding religiously to the above doctrine. It involves of course the ultimate cessation of all perceptible happening, and the end of human history. With this general conception as surrounding everything you say in your "letter," no one can find any fault—in the present stage of scientific conventions and fashions. But I protest against your interpretation of some of the specifications of the great statistical drift downwards of the original high-level energy. If, instead of criticizing what you seem to me to say, I express my own interpretation dogmatically, and leave you to make the comparison, it will doubtless conduce to brevity and economize recrimination.

To begin with, the amount of cosmic energy it costs to buy a certain distribution of fact which humanly we regard as precious, seems to me to be an altogether secondary matter as regards the question of history and progress. Certain arrangements of matter on the same energy-level are, from the point of view of man's appreciation, superior, while others are inferior. Physically a dinosaur's brain may show as much intensity of energy-exchange as a man's, but it can do infinitely fewer things, because as a force of detent it can only unlock the dinosaur's muscles, while the man's brain, by unlocking far feebler muscles, indirectly can by their means issue proclamations, write books, describe Chartres Cathedral, etc., and guide the energies of the shrinking sun into channels which never would have been entered otherwise—in short, make history. Therefore the man's brain and muscles are, from the point of view of the historian, the more important place of energy-exchange, small as this may be when measured in absolute physical units.

The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question.

There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths—so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.—It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly,

WM. JAMES. 

WJ's last published essay was inspired by his odd correspondent Benjamin Paul Blood, who was convinced that nitrous oxide and other "anaesthetic" substances provide a revelatory key to greater depths of reality. That essay concluded: 

...Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!”

-A Pluralistic Mystic 

But of course there is advice to be given, starting with his own: Be not afraid...

And:

Keep asking questions, pay attention, stay healthy, don't worry, be happy, enjoy the journey, don't be a stranger... 

And consider taking Existentialism (PHIL 4200) in the Fall.

To the continuing journey

I asked ChatGPT to draft us a farewell message. Not bad, eh? (But "onward through the fog" was my contribution, plagiarized by the bot.)

As this run of Philosophy of Happiness winds down once more, I hope you’ll pause—just for a moment—before the noise of the semester spills back in. Look over the path you’ve walked. You’ve wandered through Epicurus’s calm garden, felt Haybron’s steady analytic pressure, listened to Waldinger’s reminders that relationships shape the very texture of a life, and wrestled with Flanagan’s bracing insistence that “happiness” is too simple a word for creatures as complicated as we are. Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks surely left its mark as well—its gentle but unflinching reminder that time is both brutally finite and strangely generous when we stop pretending we can manage it like a spreadsheet.

Solnit, in Wanderlust, urged you to trust the wisdom of your own footsteps—to see that walking isn’t just locomotion but a clarifying act, a way of letting the mind catch up to the body. She reminded us that movement through the world can loosen the knots we carry, and that sometimes the surest route to understanding is the one taken at three miles an hour.

Rowlands, through The Word of Dog, asked you to look at happiness with a creaturely humility—to recognize that joy often emerges from simple, unguarded presence. His canine teachers, in their unpretentious intelligence, pushed back against our human habit of overthinking everything. They nudged us toward a happiness grounded in loyalty, companionship, and a kind of moral candor we too often forget we’re capable of.

And Bregman’s Moral Ambition refused to let happiness shrink to mere contentment. He challenged you to connect your well-being with the work you choose to do in the world—to imagine that purpose, decency, and impact are not luxuries but part of a fully realized life. If he was right, then happiness grows in proportion to the courage we muster to aim ourselves at something larger than our private satisfactions.

Taken together, these three "recommended" voices offered a quiet counter-current to the noise of the age: keep moving, stay present, and let your life lean toward the good. They’re not shortcuts—they’re invitations. And like everything else worth learning, they ask only that you continue, step by step, into whatever comes next. 

None of these authors promised easy comfort. Why should they? The world has grown no softer in the past two years—its uncertainties still swirl, its crises still test our patience, our courage, and our hope. Yet you’ve seen that happiness isn’t about sealing yourself off from difficulty; it’s about turning toward life with a fuller kind of attention. A willingness to stay awake. A discipline of noticing the small good things, and making room for them.

William James once wrote that our faith in life is a kind of wager—an imaginative leap toward possibility when the evidence is mixed. That wager feels even more necessary now. So carry what you’ve learned into your own days: that meaning and joy aren’t delivered fully formed; they’re built, reclaimed, and sometimes salvaged. That connection matters. That your weeks—however many of them remain—are worth spending on things that let you become more fully yourself.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. You do need to keep going. Stay curious. Stay generous. Stay alert for delight, even in hard weather. And as you trace the semester’s arc, remember the other companions who walked beside us.

Farewell for now—and onward through the fog.

I'll just add: don't fear Artificial Intelligence, make it work for you as a tool and not a replacement. You still have the responsibility and the joy of thinking for--but not by--yourself.

So go ahead and talk to AI, about your schoolwork or whatever, but be entirely transparent: clearly identify which statements are your own and which are AI's, and always corroborate its accurate information while calling out the hallucinations. Interact with it, don't passively absorb it.

I can't repeat Susan Neiman's message often enough: to be enlightened and grown up is to think for yourself, and to want to. Hannah Arendt was right: to be grown up is to love the world enough to take responsibility for it. It's what good parents do (and every responsible adult is a parent to the next generation, whether there are children under their roof or not).

So remember: no single stage of life is necessarily the best or worst. Be responsible, be happy, be good, enjoy your life, and share the joy.

Have a good break, and a good next semester. Maybe I'll see you next Spring in Philosophy in Recent American Fiction (Tuesdays at 6 pm, auditors welcome), or next Fall in Existentialism. 

If you're graduating: congrats, good luck, be happy!

Later. Au revoir.

 

Your turn, students

"It is far too easy to attribute failure to a generation, way too simplistic to blame those with the power to change society for the better who did not exercise such power. Most of the people I have worked with did the best they could under circumstances over which they felt little control. But the stark reality—as I have traced it in these pages and lived it over the past seventy-eight years—is that the richest and most powerful nation in modern history, the America that emerged victorious from World War II and whose democracy was a beacon for much of the rest of the world, is now coming up short. Trump and Trumpism are consequences, not causes. As I hope I've made clear, the causes have been growing for more than forty years. We could have addressed them. We did not. The responsibility to remedy this—to restore genuine opportunity, strengthen democracy, and contain the bullies—now falls to those who come after us. They include my wonderful, brilliant students."


— Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich

Philosophy Classes – Spring 2026

PHIL 1030 – Introduction to Philosophy  

3 credit hours Basic philosophical problems suggested by everyday  experience integrated into a coherent philosophy of life through  comparison with solutions offered by prominent philosophers.  

PHIL 2110 – Elementary Logic & Critical Thinking 

Principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, problem solving, and  the analysis of arguments in everyday language.  

Dr. Bombardi 

PHIL 3150 - Ethics  

Examines major ethical theories, the moral nature of human beings, and  the meaning of good and right and applies ethical theories to resolving  moral problems in personal and professional lives.  

Dr. Johnson, Mr. Easley

 

PHIL 3170 - Ethics and Computing Technology  

Exposes students to the fundamentals of ethical theory and familiarizes  them with some of the practical, ethical, and legal issues with which  they would have to deal as computer scientists.  

Dr. Johnson 

PHIL 3600 – Philosophy and Film  

Examination of the cinematic expression of philosophical issues and  development of philosophical issues in cinema.  

Dr. Newman  

PHIL 4020 – History of Modern Philosophy  

The development of philosophical thought from Hobbes to Hegel.  Offered spring only.  

Dr. Bombardi  

PHIL 4100 – Aesthetics  

The nature of art, aesthetic experience, and artistic creation.  

Dr. Magada-Ward  

PHIL 4400 – Analytic Philosophy  

Examines twentieth-century analytic movement including logical  atomism, logical positivism, indeterminacy semantics, ordinary  language philosophy.  

Dr. Slack  

PHIL 4550 – Philosophy of Mind  

Classical philosophy of mind (emphases: the mind-body problem,  theories of consciousness) and contemporary applications of philosophy  to psychology (emphases: logic and cognition, emotion and reason,  artificial intelligence).  

Dr. Bombardi 

MALA 6050 – Philosophy in Recent American Fiction [undergrads welcome to audit, meeting Tuesdays 6 pm]

We'll read three novels together (Richard Ford, Be Mine. Richard Powers, Playground. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction), and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel or on a specific author's life and works.

Dr. Oliver

==

And in Fall '26, I'll be teaching 

PHIL 4200 - Existentialism. 

"The nature, significance, and application of the teachings of several outstanding existential thinkers."

jpo

Ikigai

There is no direct English translation, but it's a Japanese term that embodies the idea of happiness in living. Essentially, ikigai is the reason why you get up in the morning.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170807-ikigai-a-japanese-concept-to-improve-work-and-life

Happiness Now

JUST OUT: Issue 171 dives into #Happiness: the pursuit of the #GoodLife, the tension between #pleasure and #purpose, and what it really means to #flourish today. With reflections on #Ethics, #Neurotechnology and philosophical classics re-examined. https://philosophynow.org/issues/171

One of the articles here includes a passage that may be of particular interest, in light of our early Experience Machine conversation, to Matthew:

"Imagine some mad scientists trying an experiment out on you. While you sleep, they hook you up to a Matrix-like experience machine without you realising it, then feed you preprogrammed experiences that resemble the kinds of experiences you would have had anyway if you’d lived your life in the real world. They leave you in the machine for the rest of your life. From the inside, nothing seems amiss; your subjective state is unchanged. Yet surely they have harmed you. By denying you a connection to reality – genuine achievements, real relationships with real loved ones – they have caused your life to go less well for you."

==

And in the previous issue:

Making of hell a heaven

Late in my professorial career, I keep discovering philosophers I'd never heard of. Is this guy any relation to Fred?

"…[John] Macmurray devotes as much space to spelling out an alternative to the egocentric bias of Western philosophy as he does to arguing against its theoretical bias. Regarding the theoretical bias, he concludes that 'I do' is more foundational than 'I think'. Regarding the egocentric bias, he argues that the fundamental unit of personal reality is not 'I', but 'you-and-I'. We can note a connection by observing that 'I do' implies a 'you' interacting with an 'I', but Macmurray's two criticisms remain distinct. Macmurray didn't argue for the importance of positive personal relationships, he started from it, observing that the most valued thing in our lives is the relationships central to them, giving our lives meaning. Sartre said "Hell is other people": Macmurray could equally have said "Heaven is other people." Both are true, but Macmurray is more inclined to dwell on the positive…"

Jeanne Warren
Philosophy Now
Oct/Nov '25

Thanks for your thoughts...

Final posting is now concluded, I hope you'll all read one another's posts and offer your insights. It ain't over 'til it's over, as a wise Yogi once said... See you Thursday for the exam.* jpo

 

*Revisit the relevant texts associated with the questions mentioned here... 

Posted for David

What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Time, Mortality, and Why Life Feels So Short 

There’s a moment most people hit at some point in their twenties, thirties, or even much later, the moment when time stops feeling like an endless horizon and starts feeling strangely finite. You look out and realize that whole years have gone by without you noticing quite how. (This feelings is especially potent in December) This is one of the core ideas in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: the average lifespan gives us about four thousand weeks to work with. Seeing the number written out is jarring, but it also brings something important into focus. 

The philosopher Martin Heidegger spent much of his career trying to get people to confront this exact reality: that being human means living within limits, and that our relationship with time is central to everything we do. Now, Heidegger is famously difficult to read, but his insights become surprisingly straightforward when connected to modern life. 

What follows is a more conversational walk through these ideas, with videos to deepen the experience if certain ideas spark something in you. 

 

We Don’t Just Live in Time , We are Time 

Most of us think of time as something outside ourselves — the clock on the wall, the dates on a calendar, the schedule we try to keep. Heidegger flips this idea completely. He argues that we are fundamentally temporal beings. Everything about us is shaped by time: the memories we carry, the actions we take now, and the possibilities we imagine or fear in the future. 

This short animated explanation does a great job introducing the idea in a way that doesn’t require a background in philosophy: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_nNEN7JUiM 

Heidegger’s point is that our past, present, and future aren’t separate compartments. They’re woven together. Your identity is constantly unfolding across time, and because of that, you aren’t a fixed thing. You’re a process. You’re always becoming. 

When you really sit with this idea, the modern obsession with “time management” starts to feel a little mismatched. You can’t “manage” time the same way you manage money or tasks. You are time. The question isn’t how to squeeze more into your schedule; it’s how to live well within the limits built into your existence. 

 

Finitude: Why Our Limits Give Life Meaning 

One of Heidegger’s biggest insights is that humans are finite. We don’t have infinite years. We don’t have endless chances. Because of that, every choice we make matters. 

This is where the idea of opportunity cost becomes emotional instead of economic. Every time you choose one thing, you are giving up countless others. That can feel stressful, but Heidegger and later philosophers like Martin Hägglund argue that this is exactly what gives life meaning. If you could do everything, nothing would feel significant. 

Oliver Burkeman talks about this beautifully in this interview: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9juUTtvCzI 

He explains that people often imagine that if they just organized better, they could truly “get everything done.” But the truth is deeper: the desire to do everything comes from a refusal to accept our limits. Anyone can make a to-do list. The challenge is acknowledging you’ll never finish it, then choosing what matters anyway. 

Instead of seeing finitude as something tragic, Heidegger frames it as the very condition that makes love, creativity, and commitment possible. If you had infinite time, nothing would feel urgent. Nothing would feel special. Our limits don’t reduce us. They define us. 

 

Authenticity vs. Autopilot Living 

Heidegger describes two basic modes of being human: authenticity and falling (sometimes called “the they-self”). These sound dramatic, but they’re actually very familiar. 

Authenticity is when you live with full awareness of your finite time. You don’t pretend you’re immortal. You take responsibility for your choices. You allow yourself to feel the weight (and the gift) of your time being limited. 

Autopilot is the opposite. It’s the state most people fall into without noticing. You drift. You go along with what others are doing. You chase distractions or busywork. You tell yourself you’ll “start living your real life” later, even though later never comes. 

Heidegger doesn’t think falling is a moral failure. It’s simply part of being human. The danger is when we get stuck there, when our whole life becomes something we sleepwalk through. Awareness of finitude pulls us out of autopilot. It wakes us up. 

 

Why Thinking About Death Isn’t Morbid 

A surprising part of Heidegger’s thought is his insistence that confronting death directly is essential for living well. Not in a dark or melodramatic way, but in a truthful one. Death isn’t an event that happens only at the end of life. It’s a presence that shapes life now. 

Most people avoid thinking about death because they assume it’s depressing. But Heidegger argues the opposite. The denial of death is what traps us. When we don’t face our mortality, we make shallow choices. We procrastinate. We hide from what matters. 

But when we do face it, honestly and quietly, something shifts. Priorities clarify. Petty stresses shrink. Love becomes more vivid. Presence becomes possible. 

This gentle video captures how a brush with mortality changes the way time feels: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7KXsX86uL0 

People who have near-death experiences often report that the world doesn’t look different, they do. They start paying attention. They start noticing the small miracles. They stop assuming they’ll always have more time. That isn’t sadness. It’s awakening. 

Your Choices Create You 

If time is limited, and if we are beings stretched across time, then every choice you make has a shaping effect on who you become. You don’t just make choices. Your choices make you. 

This theme appears repeatedly in Four Thousand Weeks: the idea that our lives gain meaning not from doing everything, but from committing to some things and letting others go. Scarcity is unavoidable. But it’s also the source of meaning. 

The alternative is trying to keep every option open forever. But options aren’t a life. Choices are. 

 

Living with Time Instead of Fighting It 

Once you accept all of this, that time is limited, that you are a temporal being, and that your choices define you, a surprising sense of calm can set in. You stop trying to dominate time. You stop trying to outrun it. Instead, you start trying to live with it. 

This doesn’t solve everything. You’ll still get busy. You’ll still get overwhelmed. You’ll still have days where time feels too fast or too slow. But a deeper awareness begins to grow: your weeks are precious not because they are many, but because they are yours. 

And that is enough. 

Good luck everyone, I hope we all make A’s. 

​What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Time.docx​

​

10000 Weeks

 These are just a few thoughts I had while reading Woman in the Dunes that wouldn't have fit it my time slot, so I apologize if it reads like a series of disparate verbal spasms. Without further ado:

 

Mind-Body Duality

    The mind-body problem in Western philosophy has always struck me as a little ridiculous, and I think Abe's mode of philosophical analysis explains why. In Western philosophy, we have a tendency to look for a third thing (r) that connects two phenomenon - an external similarity or noumenon that leaves the two objects fundamentally unchanged by the acknowledgement of this connection but establishes a relationship between the two. In Abe's philosophical analysis, and Japanese philosophical analysis by extension, the two objects overlap and similarity (r) exists in that overlapping, which is to say that all connection is intrinsic, that all things are interrelated and cannot be separated without losing a piece of each object.
    In the same way, the mind and body are discrete, true, but their interconnection is part of the definition of each, and as such they cannot be isolated. The mind would not be the mind without the body, just as the body would not be the body without the mind.

 

 Coming Unstuck from the World

    While the sand is dreadful, just as time is, and is a reminder of impermanence that gets everywhere, it too is inseparable from life. Humans are defined by not just their invention but also their limitation, and death is the limitation that births human experience. In Abe's world, sand equalizes everything, brings all injustices to a tepid end, forces one to face down life without distraction and attentively stare at death. In this world of sand, this ever present mirror that reflects the emptiness of all that appears before it, every ethic and all certainty crumbles before the 1/8mm grains - or, as Pascal would say, this sand puts reason in its place.
    In this way, Woman in the Dunes almost reads like The Stranger: just like Meursault, Jumpei seems innocent in everything he does because the sand so thoroughly eliminates rationalism. No matter the crime he commits, it's impossible to hate this creature who pays his taxes, fills out insurance forms, boards the train every Sunday, goes to the theatre every Saturday, laughs like an idiot at newspaper comics and cries at the image of an oak tree's leaves fluttering in the wind.
    Only, unlike The Stranger, Abe doesn't need to strip meaning from Jumpei's actions as Camus did. Where Camus expressed absurdity by showing man from behind a pane of glass - a comic philosophy - Jumpei simply exposes us to the world as it is, a plain world unadorned by nightly specials and concerts. The reader comes unstuck from the world by dint of this exposure alone. Even so, the sand is what ultimately drives Jumpei to embrace the woman; it is while dusting the sand from each other's bodies that they find companionship.  

 

Home and Venereal Disease

    In Zen Buddhism, the process of taking one's vows and committing to enlightenment is referred to by a single word. This term literally means "to leave one's home," and this is a useful way of understanding Abe's philosophy. In modern Japanese philosophy especially, I've noticed that one's ego, one's world of perspective, is also symbolized by "home." When Abe says that, knowing the meaningless of existence, we center our "compass on...home," he means that we necessarily take shelter in ourselves and our relationships with others to be insulated from the indifferent world. The village is, for Jumpei, also a kind of flight - his escape from the village is no different from his escape to the village after leaving his daily life. Both are characterized by a new perspective, by a hint of something more.
    On the topic of venereal disease. I didn't bring this up in class because the term is a bit impolitic, but sex is a core feature of Abe's work and worth discussing. He writes that "venereal disease is the greatest proof against the existence of soap opera," essentially meaning that this transmitted, almost banal form of disease thwarts what people might call passion. The world always presents something that precludes us from letting ourselves go. Onward from this point, Abe presents sex invariably as a clinical, almost nightmarish affair, a disorienting sandstorm characterized by leaden muscles and headaches and sweat and orange. There is never a refuge from the sand, not even in sex, where the person that engages in the act is a different person from the one who existed before the act and is left behind afterward. Before the sands, sex is no different from the moths' flight toward light - illogical, spastic, impulsive. In a word, mad.  

 

Radios, Mirrors, and Baths

    Abe writes that "radios and mirrors must touch something at the core of humanity." Regarding radios, it isn't too difficult to understand. They enable us to communicate with others, to hear all about the world, to separate ourselves from the sand for a time by listening to something other than its hiss. Mirrors are a little trickier. For Abe, they are worthless without somebody else to perceive you in them.
    I'll approach this from a few different angles. The first: there was a French psychoanalyst named Jacques Lacan who generated a great many theories during his lifetime. One of these is called the mirror stage. Without going into gratuitous detail, the gist is that we are introduced to alienation upon seeing ourselves in a mirror. We are forced to identify the specular image as "me," all the while feeling as if that "me" is not really "I." We are introduced to the separation between our ego and the actual "me" (the "me" in the world).  However, while we make the claim that the thing in the mirror is "me" all by ourselves, Lacan asserts that another must be present to say "yes, that is you," that we require another to ratify our existence. Sartre asserts the same; we discover ourselves in the presence of the other, we are just as certain of them as we are of ourselves and we gain no intimate self-knowledge without the other as a mediator. 
    I was playing an old game recently, an RPG from 1998 called "Xenogears." In this game, one character asserts to another that sacrifice is always noble on the grounds that "two is one." When one sacrifices themselves for another's true happiness, even if some sadness is left behind, the act is itself ethical because there is no such thing as a single person. Hearkening back to relation being intrinsic rather than external, interrelationship fundamentally changes both of the relatives - in fact, this game goes on to claim that the "meaning of humanity is interconnection," and I'm inclined to agree. For Abe, too, this must be the case: the mirror has no meaning without a subject and an other.
    Abe does also mention mirrors when talking about sex. He describes the "infinite consciousness of the sexual act," a person looking at another, a person looking at themselves looking at another, a person looking at another looking at themselves looking at another, an infinite sequence of mirrors, a dance of masks. 
    One of the most impactful sections of the story for me was the night Jumpei returned to the woman after his botched escape attempt. He feels everything is over, that this defeat is total, that his "dignity...shriveled up like the ash of a dragonfly's wing." Though most of Jumpei's despair in the novel was attached to rage and, through rage, hope, this despair is lucid and watery, devoid of anger and maybe even holding a little affection. Though he acknowledges that their tongues will be worn down in licking each other's wounds, it's no reason to stop the nursing, just as the inevitability of death was no reason for Rieux to quit administering medicine. And, amidst the sand, upon transience and impermanence, all the woman asks Jumpei is "shall I wash you?" He undresses without another word. It doesn't matter how profound the defeat is. Life always waits.

 

Responsibility

    A staple of the existentialist novel is a discussion of responsibility - either its supremacy or, more commonly, its irrelevance, and very few books take a middle ground. 
    Abe commits to none of these three. He refuses to offer his reader any stability, any belief, any assurances, but his refusal is just so gentle. Unlike Kafka, though Abe never allows his characters to retreat, never leads them back home, he always affords them a clumsy step forward. To Abe, it seems that answers lie in taking a single step, and that the meaning of responsibility lies in this step. And while he says nothing about a moral obligation to be kind to others, the relentless humanity of his novel can't help but imply it. If two truly is one, then to harm another would be to gnaw off your arm. If everything is sand, then one is not obliged to hurt others, and in a philosophy where movement is everything (literally everything), committing to the unobliged movement of causing injury is nothing short of a sin. For Abe, one might say that responsibility is living, without illusions, among the sands. 
    In this sense, Jumpei is us - an unwitting thing plucked from the chamber of contingency and thrust into an unintelligible world without consent. A being cursed and blessed with the ability to wish beyond our means. An escapee, a fugitive, eventually forced to fathom the world from within it. An illusory creature that clutches the arm of a loved one in the boundless empty sea and, in that random, insignificant movement, becomes human.
    And so, Jumpei's nasty hope, his extravagant hope, his hope for a world without sand for himself alone - because one wishing for the conditions of man to change must always wish all on their own - becomes a doctor. His hope is converted, through the sand, into a vessel of water from which every convict drinks.  

 

*P.S. Nietzsche keeps talking about how people look to metaphysics for security and the world as substances for certitude which further confirms my suspicion that he's the white Shankara. 

  

 

No Where Near 4000 Weeks

  Four Thousand Weeks is an incredible amount of time, in fact as of yesterday I’ve only been alive for 1095.9 weeks which is just over a quarter of the time described and it feels odd to count a lot of the early years as I was developing and didn’t have the agency to make many of my own decisions. I wasn’t hit by the cultural pressure to maximize every moment because my moments were already maximized by the milestones one reaches in early childhood. Things like walking and speaking. 

I’m lucky in a way that my parents have never stressed an attempt to c
ontrol time, they’ve always encouraged me to spend my time as I see fit. To do what I enjoy and simply push further than they are in life. My mom works incredibly hard for one main reason, so I don’t have to. She wants me to be able to focus on my schooling and my passions, and she works so hard for that to happen.

The most pressure I ever fell into where I felt like I really had to make the most of every second of every day was done to myself. My first two years of college I worked about 40 hours a week on top of being in school full time and attempting to hang out with my friends constantly. I felt like I had no time to waste, I had to get ahead, I had to make sure my moms effort wasn’t being wasted. And I felt myself burning out, my grades suffered for it, my work suffered for it, and I suffered for it. 

Even on Relatively Fun Days
I think you can see how tired I was

I felt completely trapped by the idea of the grind the idea that I should be working that hard and that if I can just tank through that strife then I can come out the end way sooner and way better than I would have going at my own pace. But I couldn’t escape the burnout, I was moving too fast. Doing too much. 

I felt like I sho
uld and it wasn’t until a very very long conversation with my mom that I determined that I don’t need to do that. Anytime I wasn’t actively grinding, when I was resting I Felt this guilt like I was being lazy or throwing away my moms effort. I had to take the time to make my plans as intentions and to embrace uncertainty. I had to make sure that I understood I needed to go at my own pace and that wanting certainty would only cause me anxiety. The most I can ever do is my best.

Absolutely Dead Eyes, and I loved my Job.

I still struggle with this idea, the idea that I’m not doing by best because I have done so much before. And it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that rest is a PART of me doing by best. And not something that stops me from doing my best.

I also had to remind myself that gaining life and world experience is just an important as a paycheck when I can swing it. Making the time after I’d saved up to take me and 2 friends to New York just because we could and to make the most of it and it’s something we talk about all the time. Being able to go on a beach vacation with my large friend group again just because we can, it improves life so much and by being happier and being rested my work quality is so much higher it’s insane.

We <3 NYC

I’ve began to enjoy going out again over the last year or two, because I’m no longer plagued by this guilt that I should be doing something else. I am fully in the present moment taking everything step by step. I can look forward and know what I want to do but not be so
stressed by every step on the way there that I lose sight of my feet and trip.
 

The picture of just the guys for the beach trip. #mogged

I’ve had to accept that my time in this world is limited and that’s something I understand. I need to make the most of the time I do have, I think it’s something that I learned a lot from talking with my parents because as proud as they are of me I don’t believe they are truly happy. It hurts to know I’m somewhat of a cause of that because I do have higher ambition that they instilled into me to go beyond the station they became trapped in in life. They push me to go further however because of that their time is dedicated to work and rest. They work the entire day and return home exhausted and aren’t able to find much that they want to do with their time. 

Me and Cutter for Halloween

It took me time to get past the guilt or the idea that it is my fault that they do that. Not that they’ve ever even implied something like that but because of my own doubts being pushed forward that I began to feel that way. Now I make it a point to intentionally experience every moment of my life, even writing this out within the last hour of it being available because my friends decided they wanted to take me out last night for my birthday so I wasn’t able to get this completed any earlier. 

    My friends have been such a saving grace throughout, even when I was so tired they always encouraged my to go out with them. There's no one on the earth I love more than my friends, they are genuinely amazing and always have been.

The Happy Fits (My favorite band)
Concert Recently

Active Patience Against Biological Impatience by Tyler Murray

Staying on the Bus

    In chapter 11 of Four Thousand Weeks, titled 'Staying on the Bus,' Burkeman reframes patience as an active effort rather than passive submission to circumstance. 'Staying on the Bus' refers to a metaphor borrowed from the Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen who used the Helsinki bus station to explain how originality only emerges through preseverence. At first, every bus starts from the same station, follows the same routes, and makes the same stops. In this phase, it doesn't seem like you're going anywhere new. It isn't until later that their paths diverge into their own distinct routes.

    Burkeman uses this illustration to show how easy it is to abandon a project before it has time to develop its own unique signature. Whenever pursuing a new goal, the strongest impulse tends to be to abandon the route as soon as the excitement fades and the work becomes ordinary. Patience, in Burkeman's view, is the willingness to stay with something past the initial monotony. This is what gives rise to originality. Otherwise, you go back to the same station and try a new bus just to find that it begins the same way.

The Pain of Attention

    But patience isn't just staying on that metaphorical bus accepting your seat. It requires what Burkeman calls "muscular attention" - a deliberate, effortful engagement. To show what this looks like in practice, he turns to art historian Jennifer Roberts and her "three-hour looking assigment." In her classes, students are asked to choose a single painting and simply sit with it for a full three hours without any distractions whatsoever (aside from using the bathroom). The point isn't to become an expert on the artwork but to slow down her students' attention to the tempo of the art.

A Cotton Office in New Orleans - Edgar Degas

    Burkeman attempts the assignment himself using a painting called "A Cotton Office in New Orleans" by Edgar Degas (above). He explains how the difficulty sets in almost immediately. Within minutes, the mind starts pushing back. He notices the impulse to speed things up, to scan the painting instead of truly looking at it, or to jump ahead to some imagined conclusion just to feel a sense of progress. The longer he sits, the more he becomes aware of the more subtle layers of resistance: the thought loops, the restless desire for stimulation, and a feeling that the moment is being "wasted" if it isn't productive or exciting.

    As Burkeman keeps sitting with the painting, a shift in his perception starts to occur. The initial irritation fades and his attention begins to settle into a different rhythm. Once the urge to escape starts to dissolve, he notices aspects of the artwork that were invisble at first glance, such as the subtle direction of one figure's gaze, the uneven thickness of a brushstroke, and the way the light falls across a pile of cotton. Details that were once dismissed began to standout with a new clarity. He no longer felt trapped in the assignment, but rather drawn to the painter's world. The longer he remained, the more rewarding the experience became. Burkeman realizes that this depth of perception only emerges after the discomfort of boredom has been endured long enough for focus to recalibrate.

What Boredom Really Is

    But this turning point raises a larger question: why is it so hard to reach this stage in the first place? During my presentation, I asked the class if they think that, when faced with boredom, the urge to immediately do something else is a natural impulse or a product of the fast-paced environment that we live in. The answers were mixed due to the inherent difficulty of finding objective causation from a subjective standpoint but I remember seeing a VSauce video years ago that discusses this very topic.

    According to Michael Stevens, humans have been describing boredom-like states for centuries, long before smartphones, social media, or even industrialization. Ancient writers used terms like "acedia" to describe a restless dissatisfaction that seems nearly identical to what we experience today. This suggests that boredom is rooted in our biology rather than in any particular era. Stevens explains how boredom appears to be an evolved signal intended to nudge us away from situations where our attention is no longer rewarded. When the brain predicts that nothing important is going to happen, dopamine levels dip, and attention begins to drift. This drop is what creates the uncomfortable sensation we label as "boredom."

    He also points out how boredom is tied to our evolutionary need for novelty. Early humans benefitted from seeking out new environments, opportunities, and resources, so our brains evolved to reward new stimuli and punish monotony. Our attention system was never designed to remain fixed on one static object for extended periods, which helps explain why Robert's three-hour looking assigment feels nearly impossible at first. The mind interprets the lack of change as a sign that there is nothing to gain, and it pushes us to move on.

A Society That Can't Sit Still

    But, even if boredom is rooted in biology, it's difficult to ignore how modern life intensifies it. If boredom evolved as a signal to seek novelty, then a world filled with instant entertainment pushes that signal into overdrive. Our devices satisfy the craving for something new so quickly that slower experiences feel almost unbearable by comparison. A society unable to tolerate boredom becomes a society unable to tolerate the early, unglamorous stages of learning, creativity, or personal growth. If attention is a muscle, our culture has conditioned it for speed rather than endurance. The challenge, then, is not to eliminate the boredom but to learn how to embrace it. Whether this can happen collectively or only through individual effort isn't clear. But without some willingness to tolerate stillness, our capacity for depth, patience, and sustained meaning collapses, and we risk eroding the foundations for shared life.

"Boredom is the steak knife that trims the fat from our lives."

~Michael Stevens