Watched: Materialists 🍿
Watched this for date night while the kids were asleep, and it was pretty good! It follows the usual romance trope of “emotion versus logic”, but did it in a way that felt fresh and interesting.
I’ve recently started a concerted effort to study philosophy. I want to ask good questions. Questions that grant me a long life, rather than a short, wasted one.
““It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca” (Susan Rigetti, So You Want to Study Philosophy…)
It feels nostalgic to look at clouds. I remember laying in the grass as a boy and staring at them.
It doesn’t take long to look, so I wonder why I stopped?
The clouds were particularly beautiful yesterday, around sunset, just outside my bedroom window.
Its time to migrate to a new pocket journal again! I‘ve been using the one on the left since August 11. I love the process of looking through my old journal, reminiscing, and then manually transferring things over to the new journal.
Started reading: Tuesdays with Morrie : an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson by Mitch Albom 📚
I don’t know if it’s the changing of the leaves, but I’m craving a story that is wholesome and stirring. This is another book from my Goodreads shelf that I can’t remember when or why I added it, but the description sounded like just what I’m looking for.
Finished reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚
I should not have read this as an audiobook! It was beautifully written and I was excited to listen each time, but the material was too dense to fully absorb audibly.
I’m planning to write up a “book review” on this soon, as inspired by:
- my college pastor Eric Asp (who recently read and wrote about Don Quixote)
- this article that I happened to come across today: Why I started writing about every book I read
This quote from the article captures my aspirations for my book review.
In my book review process, I take the juiciest off-the-cuff impressions and, through expansion, rewriting, and additional research, turn them into clear, informed opinions that will stick in my mind.
The thing that’s most surprising to me is how little I am able to plan the book review.
I have a few notes from my journal, a few half-baked ideas, a general idea of the direction I’ll take. But then, when I start writing, stuff I didn’t anticipate floods out.
This is proof, again, that I don’t know what I truly got from an experience until I write about it.
“The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”” (James Clear, Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds)
I try to remind myself of this often. Software engineers are always squabbling over the “right” approach, and more often than not there is an emotional attachment. I also try to think of this in reverse, such that my view of reality is not perfect and it is okay to adapt it to new information.
Started reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚
I’ve been spending a lot of time on podcasts, but I want to transition to audiobooks. Podcasts keep me entertained, but I don’t feel like I’m getting much from them. So I’m hoping audiobooks can fill that void. My plan is to listen to fiction audiobooks, since I prefer nonfiction in physical-form for annotation.
To that end, I looked at (what I thought were) fiction books I saved as “Want to read” in Goodreads and started requesting the audiobooks from my local library using Libby.
The first available was “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli. I don’t remember how I discovered this book. I assumed it would be an interesting sci-fi novel, but it turns out it is very “sci”, and not very “fi”. The book is written by a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity. His aim is to dismantle the intuitive understanding of time being something that moves steadily from past to present. He compares this to other “intuitive understandings” that have been dismantled, such as the earth being flat or the sun revolving around the earth. After listening for a few seconds, I realized this was nonfiction, and I thought about returning it for another book. But then I listened to the whole intro and was hooked. The author sold me on the idea that there is more to time than I realize, and I’m looking forward to finding out what that is.
Oh, and as a nice bonus, it’s narrated by Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Your Flaws Are Your Draws
When I started my career, I put a lot of emphasis on learning how to say things the right way. I’d think, “How do I sound competent in this interview follow-up email?” Or, “How do I sound like a professional instead of sounding like normal me?”
Post-AI, this seems to be flipping. I expect more movement away from prim and proper corpo-speak. Everybody can talk that way now with AI, so what’s the point of the formality circus?
I got up early to mow this morning and was fascinated by the snail trails in the morning dew on my neighbor’s fence. I’ve been noticing a lot more snails this year.
