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....
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....
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....
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?...
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....
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....
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....
This is the 4th 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 and part 3 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the the biggest pleasures you experience in life. Let’s take an example of arguably the biggest happiness a person experiences in their whole lifetime, the birth of their child....
This is the 3rd 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 and part 2 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the really small pleasures that you experience in life. For some time, let’s forget the placebo effect and focus on the state of mind....
This is the 2nd 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 and then come back here. At the end of part 1, we discussed about one kind of happiness, the happiness of bouncing back from all odds and we compared it to the placebo effect. We took the analogy of a depression patient in case of placebo effect and a cricketer in case of the happiness of bouncing back....