Categories
Philosophy

Lifestyle Changes

Sometime in November last year, a few months after I had turned 40, I looked at myself and felt dissatisfied about my health & fitness. I had been dissatisfied for a long time, but it felt like I had reached my threshold by Nov 2021. Nutrition – Lifestyle I signed up for a 3 month […]

Categories
Existentialism Philosophy

It’s not a problem, it’s just what’s so.

Recently I bought “Speaking Being” and started reading it. The book is more like a screenplay of a specific 4 day and 1 evening Forum that was held from 27th December 1988. That particular Forum had 502 participants PLUS 40 Forum Leaders attending as participants PLUS another 100 people participating as observers. The 4 days […]

Categories
Philosophy Unschooling

My son knows how to create his relationships

Yesterday evening, I was working on something. Advay, my 8 year old came by and without giving a damn about the fact that I was occupied with something, he started telling me something and demanded that I pay attention to him. I was super-pissed. In a angry tone I said – “Please give me some […]

Categories
Moments Philosophy

What is the meaning of meaning?

Advay (my 8 year old) asks me: “Appa, what is the meaning of meaning?” Having read a lot of philosophy, this question appealed to the philosopher in me. I paused for a while, pondered over the question and tried to grasp the depth of such a question. After spending a while in deep thought I […]

Categories
Existentialism Philosophy

No freedom, only responsibility

The words freedom and responsibility mean different things to different people. When someone says “Sam is free to do xyz“, it could either mean “Sam can choose to do xyz, if he ‘wants’” OR “Sam is not ‘banned’ from doing xyz, so he can potentially do it” OR “Sam can try out xyz ‘for size’ […]

Categories
Existentialism Philosophy

Anxiety about unlimited freedom

Tight rope walking is scary because there are no rails to hold on to while walking on the tight rope. So, it causes an obvious anxiety about walking on the rope. Anxiety stems from the fact that, without support, one might fall off to the left OR to the right OR forward OR backward OR […]

Categories
Moments Philosophy

Insight

Exploring something new feels like taking two steps forward only to take one step back and not necessarily in the same direction.

Categories
Existentialism

On Authenticity

Each and every one of us has at some point in our lives paused to ponder over questions like “Who am I?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What is the nature of reality?”, “What does it mean to exist, to be?” and so on. As we pondered over these questions we came up with answers […]

Categories
Existentialism Philosophy

8 habits of highly authentic people

Pardon my cheap shot at free publicity. I couldn’t resist naming this blog post after Stephen Covey’s magnum opus “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“. It was one of the first “real self help” books I read in my life. Up until then I was mostly reading books on personality development, which taught me […]

Categories
Existentialism Philosophy

being-for-others – a breeding ground for inauthentic relationships

Sartre and others carve a phenomenon called being-for-others, that leaves a human being with an experience of being an object along with other objects in a world of objects, with fixed properties, labels, behaviour etc. Given that people are seldom, if ever, truly alone these days, each person constantly confronts the existence of other people, not simply as […]