September 2020

Aliveness. Living in the moment. When I started this channel, looking for names for it, one of the names I was looking at was “aliveness”. Something involving this this word “aliveness”. Because it seems like that captures a lot of the idea of a meaningful life. I want a life where I actually feel alive, […]

Philosophy. Existence. The universe. This series is about those big questions, imagining what is the nature of the universe and reality. And wow, if it was already getting abstract with the whole “meaning” conversation, well, now it can get even more abstract, just looking at what is existence all about? What is the universe all

It seems like one of the problems with accepting the simple life is that it’s just too simple. It seems too easy. It seems like that can’t be right. Can life really be simple? There’s so many distractions and complications that so easily fill so much of our time that it seems hard to accept

So looking at this ancient philosophy of Epicurus, epicureanism: it’s often that word, when it’s remembered at all, is often used to mean a love of luxury and gourmet food. But missing the point that Epicurus saw pleasure as being the greatest thing, so when you hear that, it sounds like it’s all about indulging

I’ve been going back to the well, ancient philosophy. And I’ve learned so much from stoicism, but a completely different philosophical school, epicureanism, I’m now finding is really quite refreshing to look at. And the simple idea of Epicurus is that we can separate our natural desires from our vain desires. So if we look

Meaningfulness. Meaninglessness. The meaning of meaning. Wow, if I say this word enough times, it just stops meaning anything. And yet this is part of the name of this channel. It’s about somehow making life meaningful and living a meaningful life. But what does that even mean? So this series is about that topic directly.

Community, connection, and conformity. This series is about the whole issue of working together with other people. We clearly can’t do everything alone. We can’t live a happy life alone. And yet sometimes other people can be such a problem that we’d rather just be alone. It’s this endless challenge that is such a central

Love and selflessness. This series is about how we look at the universe, really, and how we choose to focus our attentions and our energy. How much do we focus on ourselves, versus how much do we focus on what’s outside ourselves, and maybe the bigger picture? So this I find is always a matter

In the last few videos, I’ve been talking about this world of systems and institutions, and being industrialized and part of a system, a machine. And it can easily sound like it’s some kind of alien entity, and it’s really easy to look at it this way, but I don’t think it’s this way at

Industrialized humanity. It’s like a way of managing large numbers of people, organizing social systems. It’s not really about individual feelings and individual will and determination. It’s about managing herds of people, essentially. Now, it sounds so negative when I say it that way. But for many practical, everyday purposes, this is very useful. This