I wonder why living on a computer feels so much worse than the image held in the past of people who lived their lives cooped up inside reading books, who also spent their lives in unreal worlds disconnected from any ‘We’ around them and therefore themselves. I guess maybe every age has things that are seen as extreme wastes of life, from TV to daydreaming.
The living nature of language and the ancestral chains inherent to it are so interesting, constructing our sense of self and the world within the bounds of the games of our language and all the implicit biases that have snowballed over the centuries. I wonder how much slang and in-jokes are able to temporarily break from the weight of cultural history and work within shared personal history.
Truly what feels from a divine otherworld to me is the soft, the blindly trusting, the saintly naive kindness in the face of a merciless nature. To summon a bit of that vulnerability within myself can sometimes mean going against the natural instinct of hardness, distrust, and fear. Striving to live in this way can become virtuous in this secular way you’ve described when I can give myself over to it
Insightful as always. In regards to virtue, it reminds me of: https://publica.org.au/wp-content/uploads/fowers-et-al-2020-the-emerging-science-of-virtue.pdf Ironically, I think you are actually getting closer to what was originally meant by "heaven" by approaching virtues in this manner. They *are* based on maximizing constructive outcomes for all simultaneously, but not necessarily individual "pleasures".
I wonder why living on a computer feels so much worse than the image held in the past of people who lived their lives cooped up inside reading books, who also spent their lives in unreal worlds disconnected from any ‘We’ around them and therefore themselves. I guess maybe every age has things that are seen as extreme wastes of life, from TV to daydreaming.
The living nature of language and the ancestral chains inherent to it are so interesting, constructing our sense of self and the world within the bounds of the games of our language and all the implicit biases that have snowballed over the centuries. I wonder how much slang and in-jokes are able to temporarily break from the weight of cultural history and work within shared personal history.
Truly what feels from a divine otherworld to me is the soft, the blindly trusting, the saintly naive kindness in the face of a merciless nature. To summon a bit of that vulnerability within myself can sometimes mean going against the natural instinct of hardness, distrust, and fear. Striving to live in this way can become virtuous in this secular way you’ve described when I can give myself over to it
Insightful as always. In regards to virtue, it reminds me of: https://publica.org.au/wp-content/uploads/fowers-et-al-2020-the-emerging-science-of-virtue.pdf Ironically, I think you are actually getting closer to what was originally meant by "heaven" by approaching virtues in this manner. They *are* based on maximizing constructive outcomes for all simultaneously, but not necessarily individual "pleasures".