Life's highway
Saturday, 28 March 2009
"(A life of happiness and a life of meaning are) two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, with no thought of what's gone before, and no thought of what lies ahead. But, for a life of meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past, and obssess about the future."
-Mr Linderman, Heroes season 1
12:45
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Speculation
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Simple truth: The happiness and pleasure we derive from things increase in proportion to the intensity of suffering we are undergoing.
This may be the science behind the psychology of a masochist. He deliberately suffers more to inflate his sense of pleasure.
20:08
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Past and present
Sunday, 22 March 2009
I had just read some of my old MSN conversations, and I’m quite shocked.
What has happened to me?
Two years, and I have become a completely different person. I’m a stranger to my past. The past me lived in the present; the present me live in the past.
IT Club outing last week revived my old self for a few short hours. Thereafter, I’m back. Back where? Back to the past, or to the present?
I lost that belief somewhere. That spark of confidence. Snuffed out.
Things have changed. But I cannot bring myself to move on.
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I cannot quite believe I still feel this way.
It has been more than two long years, two long and lonely years by my lonesome in this wilderness. It is a feeling that can grow overwhelming too easily, like how it is happening now. Loneliness is like a creeping darkness that slowly and steadily takes over the soul, subjugating it to suffocation.
I just want you to know that I still think of you. But I don’t know how to bring it across. Fear holds me back.
02:29
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42
Thursday, 12 March 2009
I plan my future obsessively. At the moment, I have already detailed what I will be doing in five years' time, and planned sketchily to nine years' time. The details may change with time, but here is the overall plan:
-Extend ORD date until August, utilising all my leave at the end so that I can attend university camps and orientation.
-Attain First Class Honors in Physics, maybe do a research project if possible.
-Train and cycle competitively, with the goal of finishing a stage race by 2013.
-Work part time in NUS as research assistant or the like.
-Meanwhile, read lots of books.
-After NUS, I plan to go overseas and attain my PHD in top universities, ideally MIT or UC Berkeley.
Sometimes, I have doubts about such planning, it is like you are systematically bashing out a trail through the forest of the future. Life becomes so focused and purposeful that it is scary, there is nothing left that is unexpected, and consequently, nothing that is truly exciting. You can see nothing but the trail, a winding trail that inevitably stops at death. So what if you achieve so much but fail to live?
The question that I had left unanswered 18 months before has once again returned to haunt me. What is the purpose of life? Happiness? Serving God, or Humanity? Duty, to others or yourself? Or is there no purpose to begin with, no meaning in continued existence? How the hell do we know? All these metaphysics crop up, and many, bewildered by the complexities they confront, simply sidestep the issue. Many others believe in an ideal, be it in relationships, or God. We all live on, with answers we think are right.
What happens, then, when we find out that we were wrong? I shudder to think of the result.
I doubt anyone of us have the confidence to claim to have right answers about life, unless you are religious. For the non-religious, it take courage to live, to stumble so often in the dark. That is why I plan so much, I think, for it makes finding your way in the dark so much easier when you have a path to follow. But there are many times when the trail ends in a ditch, and you got to reorientate yourself to bash out another trail: this requires great courage too. You got to know where you want to go, but as I mentioned earlier, what makes you so sure the destination is correct? Unless you get that right, you are stuck. Lost. Nothing but faith to guide you along.
The feeling of being lost in the jungle is fearsome. That sensation of hopelessness. Despair. Those who have never experienced it can never understand how it eats away at your mind, how it gnaws at the hearts and burns in the lungs.
Faith and despair are perhaps direct emotional opposites. None of us can survive without a little bit of faith to counteract the despair of being lost, and submission to the latter is as good as digging your own grave prematurely. To live, we need not a reason, but to live well, we damn well do. We need to believe in this reason wholesomely and construct our lives around this core belief, and our subsequent history will be the reflection of this faith.
If so, you can say that my faith lies in my capacity to achieve.
11:00
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Beliefs and foundations
Saturday, 7 March 2009
There are ideas that really shape the way you think. These are defining ideas that will form the foundation of the beliefs and subsequent behavior and lifestyle. Our present character can be seen as the culmination of ideas upon ideas upon ideas, the very basic of which have become unquestioned facts rather than possibilities.
I can perhaps name several that really caught my imagination and affected my life (in chronological order):
-We can do anything that we want enough. (Scouts)
-Emotions clouds our actions. (Wheel of Time)
-We ought to be the best we can possibly be.
-There is no God.
-There are things we cannot do even if we want to. (Council)
-Good ideas occur rarely, but if they do, they ought to be written down. (Einstein)
-Reasoning should be the determinant of our actions.
-Life has no inherent meaning.
-I will never die for my beliefs for I may be wrong. (Bertrand Russell)
-Life should be lived for the goal of happiness.
-God can never be proven for or against.
-Life should be lived wholesomely, not exclusively rationally, nor emotionally. (Point Counter Point)
-Our beliefs are determined by our feelings, and reason acts only to reinforce them.
-Intuition is usually more trustworthy than reason.
-Life should be lived striving towards personal excellence. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Maybe given a complete list of such influential ideas of a person's life, one may painstakingly construct a portrait of his lifestyle, a reflection of reality that may correspond closely. It can be done. However, many of them are lost in the fogs of memory. When thinking up this list, I can't recall any major ideas that influenced me before Sec 3. Even within the list of recent memory, there are strikingly obvious contradictions of beliefs.
If what I had written earlier was true, that base ideas become unquestioned facts governing your life, then how would new beliefs that contradict these foundations fit in? It is practically inevitable for such collisions of ideas to occur within oneself, but I think we only get affected by them if we become consciously aware of the dilemma. When that happens, how do we determine whether the new or old idea wins and displace the other? Which is more likely? Perhaps the best answer is that whichever fits more readily into the pattern of beliefs would triumph. But should the foundation collapse...
“Madness is defined by the rejection of the mythos.” - M. Pirsig. I agree.
16:24
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