Is it really impossible to have your cake and eat it too? Only if you want to eat and keep all of it: there’s no contradiction in cutting a slice and keeping most for later. What can look like pedantry is actually a powerful rigour that can remove some contradictions by simply showing that they are no such thing.
ReadWhat surprises me is not that people die or get sick, but that other people continue to be so surprised when it happens. Am I unusual in this because I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy? I suspect the causal arrow is the other way round: I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy because I am unusual in this. After all, it is not as though the basic insight depends on a close reading of the Stoics, Socrates or Schopenhauer.
ReadBe mindful of the perennial mistake of zealots everywhere, of elevating a good to the good, inevitably making it worse, not better.
ReadIt’s very difficult to maintain a thriving curiosity without it being somewhat random. In his essay on curiosity, philosopher David Hume noted that there is a pleasure to be had simply in the “invention and discovery” of truth, whatever it might be. The curious will find themselves drawn to anything that stimulates this delight.
ReadImagine being young and having to do up to seven years of unpaid work experience before you could get gainful employment. This is not a doom-laden prediction for the future but a factual description of a lot of apprentices from the middle ages to the industrial revolution
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