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  • #224 What a burden

    The other day, I talked about changing your focus to change how you feel about the events in your day.

    But something strange happened when I first had that realization.

    It didn’t feel like a relief.

    Do I even want that responsibility? To choose how events affect me?

    After all, that would take away my right to complain about how poorly life treats me.
    I couldn’t ascribe any successes or achievements to “sheer luck” anymore.
    And wouldn’t it be silly to say I don’t deserve happiness, luck, or anything good if I knew I could change my focus and be lucky this very moment?

    What a burden.


    I’m still deciding if I am strong enough to carry it.

    But one thing’s for sure: the days I have the presence of mind to direct my focus are the days I feel best.

    I wonder if it’d be like that for you, too.

    Maybe you could try it out? Even if it’s to indulge me.

    See how it feels.

    And let me know how it goes. I’m curious about you.

  • #154 When results have become irrelevant

    When technology and AI outpace us and we can’t be the best, smartest, fastest, strongest on the planet anymore – will we still care about our economic output?

    When results have become irrelevant, what are the things I will still want to do?

    Maybe we’ll rediscover value in our actions themselves and the pleasure and pain they make us feel – happy, sad, useful, worthless, brimming with purpose, overflowing with self-hatred…?

    Will I still write just because I enjoy writing, even if AI could write a better-researched, more insightful book than I ever could?

    Will I still learn a language just because learning a language makes me feel good, even if I could use an instant translation device to talk to anyone in the world?

    Will I still spend my days in an office cubicle if that’s a painful prospect?

    An era of soul-searching is coming.

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    #45 The tragedy of the spoken word

    Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

    Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

    Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

    But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

    How do we re-access memories, emotions, hidden away in a long-forgotten language?

    How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

    there’s an eternal song
    drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue
    a wordless melody that once made sense
    until our brain started blurring it with a lens
    narrowing it down
    neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns

    with all its might language wants us to abide
    but the wordless world it tries to hide
    will forever be inside

    Lukas Van Vyve

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