Philosophy

In my old blog, “The dream you took for granted”, I gave an example of myself. I said that I am living the dream life of my 19-20 year old self, and yet, I don’t feel that great. Many people have a similar situation as mine. As a solution, I had mentioned that we should practice gratitude (check out the blog for more details). We should be thankful for everything that has went our way. Few of my friends questioned this, and they had a very valid point. If we are always satisfied of where we are, how will be put in the effort for growth? We will forever stay stuck where we are. The negative emotions that we get in our current position lead us to work towards a better future. In this blog, I will hopefully be able to provide an answer to this question. ...

Imagine this, you are living in a time where slavery is very common, let’s say sometime between 15th to 17th century. You see that a lot of people believe that slaves are a different “species” of sorts and they deserve the treatment they are getting. You see that a lot of people treat slaves inhumanely. What do you think your reaction will be? Will you believe that there is nothing wrong with slavery? Will you believe that slaves are so dumb that they themselves can’t find any other job and so they deserve to be slaves and their masters are actually helping them by doing that? ...

Judgement is a skill that is very necessary to have in certain situations in life. Our judgements affect a lot of things in our life. There are three levels on which we judge people. As you might have already guessed from the title, they are - action, intent and context. In today’s blog, let’s explore how we use these incorrectly and how we should actually use them to correctly judge people (and ourselves). ...

I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong. -Bertrand Russell There are almost no certainties in life. Almost every conclusion we reach, every decision we make, every thought that occurs to us and every word we speak is a leap of faith to some extent. I can’t even say that the table that is in front of me right now exists or not. I may say that if I assume that there is a physical table present in front of me, then through my perception (i.e. my eyes, retina, and brain), or through the sense data that I receive, I see the brown colour of the table. The brown color of the table is a combination of the actual physical object (if there is any) and my senses and not the sole property of the actual physical object. So me saying that “the table exists” or “the table is brown in colour” are also leaps of faith. ...

The phrase “my life, my rules” has been very popular. People just randomly throw this phrase around these days. Let’s dissect this today. When somebody says “my life, my rules”, they usually mean, “I own myself, I can do whatever I want with myself”. This reaction is usually triggered when they are stopped from doing something, their freedom is hampered. For example, if an orthodox father tells his daughter to come back home early and not wear short clothes, this is the reaction the daughter will have. We can all see where this reaction comes from. The daughter feels that her father is restricting her and that she has the freedom to wear whatever she wants and go out with anyone she wants, she owns herself. ...

If you found the title strange, you are not alone. You might never have heard a person making such a claim. Nobody can be an atheist by birth. When a person grows up and starts understanding their environment, and starts observing the various religious practices, they begin to feel that there is something wrong here. They dig deeper and find out that so many things that religions claim are straight up rubbish. And then they decide to be an atheist. They are not born in an atheist household to be an atheist by birth (or on paper). ...

There are many vegetarian people I know, who don’t hesitate to kill mosquitoes or cockroaches. Isn’t that strange? Vegetarianism is all about not killing other living beings. And they have no problem killing mosquitoes or cockroaches? I am not here to discuss whether it is right or wrong to kill insects, that is a separate debate and I don’t want to get into it in this article. I am more interested in this behaviour where, in a person’s subjective morality, doing something is bad; but they themselves do it in some other way, or in some other context, and have no regret about it? In fact some people even encourage other people to do it. I have seen people totally panicking on the sight of a cockroach, jumping around and telling everyone to just get rid of it. I was intrigued by this behaviour and decided to think a little on it. Here’s my opinion. ...

Today’s topic is controversial and it is something I have been thinking about lately. Can you achieve freedom by restricting yourself? Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Let me explain. Long back, our ancestors, the hunter gatherers, had a lot of freedom. They used to wander around in forests to collect food. They did not stay at one place for long. Then time passed by, we learned agriculture and we had to restrict ourselves to one location. We lost freedom of continuously moving from one location to another because our lifestyle demanded that we stay in one location. We restricted ourselves to a single location and we freed ourselves from the worry of “will I have to stay hungry tonight?”. You might be starting to get the point here. ...

Let’s talk about dreams today. Not the dreams that you see while sleeping. The dreams that keep you awake. The ones that motivate you to get out of bed and work. The ones that give you some purpose in life. We all have dreamt of something or the other. The dreams have been of different magnitudes based on the conditions around us and our age. For example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to dream that I will become the Prime Minister of India one day and all the criminals and “bad people” will run out of India. Now obviously that is ridiculous. All of us have had some ridiculous dreams when we were young. But we have had some serious dreams as well. I had a dream college. I wanted to go to IIT. I tried to achieve it and failed. That hurts. But what about the dreams I already achieved? What about the dreams YOU already achieved? ...

This is the 5th part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and then come back here. Now without further ado, let’s get into it straightaway. The above diagram is a representation of everything that we have learnt in the first 4 blogs. The fp boxes represent the factors in life that affect the state of mind positively and the fn boxes represent the negatively affecting factors. All of these factors are different for different people. The y-axis in the diagram represents a spectrum of emotions we experience. Each factor is placed based on how it affects the state of mind in the absence of other factors. Think of all the arrows that go from the mind to the factors like the factors are pulling the mind towards the emotion they are in. The labellings wp1…wpn and wn1…wnn are the weights or kind of the force by which these factors pull the mind to their emotion. These weights are variable. All these factors are everything we have ever experienced in life. Every little and every large thing. These factors contain all our fears, all our abilities, all our success, all our failures, all our biases and everything you can possibly think of. It includes small annoying things like your barber spoiling your hairstyle, small happiness like the food being tasty, extreme happiness like becoming a parent for the first time. The diagram here is a very simplified version of what I am trying to explain and not all emotions are covered here but you get the point. Our state of mind at any point in time is determined by a weighted average of all these factors. ...