I used to feel the same when I thought dreams were utterly meaningless, then I had a series of undeniably meaningful dreams and I became not only interested but proactively curious (ie have you seen this character in other dreams? Was anything important happening in your life when this dream happened? How did this event in the dream make you feel, if anything?).
So now I have a question for you: what is your personal stance on dreams?
I bike in Mexico. I usually get a flat patched with the bike mechanic for $1 USD and they do it in less than 5 minutes. They check the tire throughly to find the source of the puncture. More often than not they pull out a piece of metal debris from the tire (like small pieces of wire or nails). If the roads are cleaned, it will be a person with a broom doing it, which is why metal debris stays on the shoulder of the road instead of being suctioned by a mechanical cleaner.
Would good tires still save me from these punctures?
We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist, we can naturally divide the year in four (or two) by being attentive to the season, and you can add a little flair by being poetic about it (say saving during the fall, frugality in the winter, sexuality in the spring, enjoying the fullness of life in the summer. Life is not academia, it is poetry!
The Tao Te Ching itself is the best introduction to philosophical Taoism (the religion is something else). Perhaps certain passages can be obscure, but they reveal their meaning in time.
Regular gym goer for 20+ years here. It eventually becomes difficult not going to the gym, on days I can’t exercise I feel restless, like a dog that hasn’t gone out for his walk.
Food, I eat between 4K and 5k calories per day and I’m close to 10% body fat. I love eating.
Re: boring. Lift heavy, it’s supposed to be challenging. It should require focus and concentration. Don’t use machines, those are boring.
I would never go if it were exclusively for aesthetic, strength, or health benefits. For me it lifts my mood like nothing else, anytime I feel like not going I know it is my I unexercised mind telling me stories, once I start moving weight it’s like changing a radio station in my head and the negative affect fades away.
I'll go forward and offer my own interpretation: highly creative people experience the process of creation as something that comes _through_ them, not _from_ them, that's why Bob Dylan calls them "stenographers". I think most people have experienced some glimpse of this when you lose yourself in flow, wether you are dancing, coding, or writing. Norm doesn't understand that calling the author of his favorite passage a stenographer is actually praise, because he means it comes from a higher source than the ego. One week later he understands the koan and tells Dylan, who laughs.
> When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact.
I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture.
You can also reverse the situation and suppose we are able to visit an alien planet where we find a rudimentary civilization which has customs that appear exotic to us. What would the experts recommend? The cynic would say we would go at war with them to take over their planet, but being realistic it is much more advantageous to study them without interfering. I think the evolution of conscious life in different conditions than our own planet must be of tremendous interest to other conscious life.
He exclaims out loud "I don't know!" (in Spanish) before humoring with his own speculations about his longevity.
But attributing it entirely to hitting the genetic lottery would also be a mistake: the genetic potential can be easily squandered by allowing your mind, heart and body to decay at an accelerated rate. It is obvious this is a happy and lucid human being who still finds plenty of reasons to stick around.
I hope that some day Apple revives the idea of the PowerBook Duo (https://lowendmac.com/2007/apples-first-subnotebooks-powerbo...) in which you could dock your phone to something akin a brainless iMac: a screen, mouse and keyboard. Your main computer is always your phone, which you can slide into different form factors (tables, laptops, desktop PCs).
When I work for myself, I nap at the slightest sensation of drowsiness. I’m not productive nor efficient while sleepy. Yet I’ve wasted so many hours in mindless stupor for my employers (especially after lunch) because napping on the clock is taboo.
It seems every article on Neanderthals has to be prefaced with a story of how we believed that they were brute club-wielding cave dwellers, but this discovery has changed the way we think about them... Can't journalists find a different way of spinning this story?
The earliest Homo Sapiens remains are from ~200kya while the earliest (crude) Homo Sapiens paintings are from ~75kya. Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira et al are ~20kya.
So now I have a question for you: what is your personal stance on dreams?