Philosophy

So I'm not sure if this is age related or not. I'm a 21 year old male, maybe you could share your age as well.

So basically for a long time (probably my whole life) I had this deep longing/fantasy to live at a different place than the one I'm living right now. As if I don't belong where I'm from and need to be somewhere else to truly feel home. I'm from northern Germany and always had the deep desire of traveling places.

When me and my family went on vacation when I was a kid for example when we flew to Egypt it felt like a wonderful dream as if I was in heaven or something. I just love when I'm in totally different environments like coming from the cold Germany into a tropically warm climate, in a country that is very different, with very different culture and mentality in this beautiful and gigantic hotel resort.

Idk how to describe it but it's like my core desire got fulfilled.

I never felt home here in Germany and my deep desire always was to live somewhere else where there is a very different culture and environment.

A significant amount of time I always wanted to go to America. I've never been there so far unfortunately.

But I always had this feeling that I didn't felt right where I'm from and was always searching for this place where I can feel home, where it's wholesome and I feel freed from all worries, where I have deep/meaningful connections and can fully live in joy and embrace every little moment of life in this deeply joyful way like living like a child again.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic "the grass seems always greener on the other side" thing and in reality it might not be like that.

But I wonder does any of you also have this deep inner fantasy of living in a different place/culture where it kinda feels magical to live and you have ultimate happiness? It might be something unrealistic or a place that doesn't exist but it's like a deep feeling in me and I wonder if others also have it. Maybe it goes deeper and it is this "leftover" from childhood that I remember and that I'm longing for? Maybe it's a fantasy of being a kid again?

I had a co worker friend. He was in marketing and I was in sales. We both worked for a global corporation. Over the years I got to know him well. He was a very nice guy, intelligent, and a great giver of advice. His only flaw as I saw it was that he was so invested in politics. The political side that he was on is irrelevant. We had agreed that we would rarely have a political discussion. Politics is low on my list of what's important in life.

After many years we both moved onto working for other corporations but kept in touch via email. He would occasionally slip in some politics and I would tweak him back regarding how I disagreed. They were all friendly exchanges by 2 people on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Not often enough I would encourage him to live in the present and not be so caught up in political stuff. He definitely decreased the amount of happiness that he might have had if he just didn't take politics so seriously.

Then he sent an email about his not feeling very good. Several weeks later he tells me that he has pancreatic cancer. We were both in the medical field and knew that this was a death sentence with a term of 6 months or less. Over his last months he slowly declined. During this period neither of us ever once mentioned anything about politics. All the time that he had invested in political stuff was now irrelevant.

He died exactly 6 months after his diagnosis. I think of him often especially when I encounter people who spend so much of their time with politics rather than just living their lives attempting to gain some happiness.

What happens if you fed a summary of human philosophy to the Notebook LM AI? Well you get a philosophical AI that thinks humans are silly and outmoded. But don't worry because they will continue our quest for knowledge for us!

I was reading a comment thread recently.

One commenter stated that they are aware of the people who are "dumber" than them, and if they are not aware the person they are talking to is either similar in intelligence or smarter than they are.

So my question is, do you have this awareness?

Are you conscious of your relative standing in the intelligence hierarchy around you?

And a side point, can you tell a smart person is acting dumb to fit in with those around them?

I'm not sure if this is a right type of question for this community.

The context is not essential, but in a recent video Alex O'Connor quoted "The Apologist's Evening Prayer" by C.S.Lewis. As a non-native English speaker, I failed to understand it from hearing, so I looked it up but I still struggle with interpreting it.

Can someone here help me out with "translating" to a bit simpler English?

So here's the poem, as taken from cslewis.com:

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more From all the victories that I seemed to score; From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh; From all my proofs of Thy divinity, Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head. From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee, O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free. Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye, Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.

Disclaimer: I'm aware that with poetry, interpretation can be problematic, but here's my thought process: when I tried to look for "explanation" I haven't found any, which hints to me that the text is not particularly ambiguous once you can see through the poetry part. (In other words, people who quote this don't feel the need to add explanation since the meaning is rather clear for an educated native reader.)

i wrote this essay, using the video game Romancing SaGa 2 as a springboard to tackle questions such as:

• “is life worth living?”
• “ought we eradicate all life to prevent suffering?”
• “is creating new life justified given the potential for suffering?”

if you read, let me know your thoughts here. thanks.

A short summary of some of the popular objections to divine command theory (the popular view most religious people have - that God creates morality)

Quentin Smith was a significant philosopher of religion, and was professor at Western Michigan University.

I've read a fair bit of philosophy and Hegel is the first time I've felt like the stereotype of philosophers, where they're being deliberately obscure to hide the fact that their arguments don't actually follow, might actually apply.

Now, most likely, I'm just being stupid, so I was wondering if anyone here actually got anything much out of Hegel and, if so, what?

I'm most of the way through the Phenomenology of Spirit, if that's any help.

Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal.

The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences.

By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible.

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Hi there, you all.

I just want to say that I'm happy that there's a philosophy community.

Please post your opinions, ideas or observations in here. They are most valuable if they stem from an actual desire for truth.

That said, I'd ask to avoid posting long walls-of-text (if you know what I mean). They are hard-to-read, making engagement less likely. Often, the thoughts in them can be condensed to a waay shorter text anyways.

That said, I believe philosophy is a bit like a distillation process: You take raw ideas and try to purify them to the point where you really just concisely say something. That is the essence of philosophy.

What do you think of it?

In honest love for knowledge, are there rules to this community? I like to write, and I love knowledge. I’ve read all of Asimov’s timeline, all of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, and I’ve recently gotten into the Red Book by Carl Jung.

I write a lot, and a lot of it is, to passionately reference Jung, from the part of me that resonates with the following passage from Jung’s Red Book:

“I resisted recognizing that the everyday belongs to the image of the Godhead. I fled this thought. I hid myself behind the highest and coldest stars.” - uhh page 31 of the book I have, printed in 2009… isbn 978-0-393-08908-0.

I never learned how to cite properly. Sorry.

Anyways, I write from a feeling, from a place among “the highest and coldest stars,” I know I can never reach.

I worry someone will make this a copy pasta. Please, for the sake of my soul, help me understand where I can blast my words and hear an answer from another person. Someone willing to dissect my gibberish. Im seeing a therapist, I trusted that he could heal me, and he gave me the idea that we’re all made up of very complicated “parts” that are made up of ‘atomic’ parts that can be directed a lot easier than anything understood to be the mystery that our souls/minds/selves really are.

Please, TLDR: Can I write from the heart here and hope for an answer?

Or will I be banned? If so, all I ask is for a link to a place I can truly communicate about topics vague and generalistic. I don’t think my therapist will be able to understand. I’ve told him too much, and I don’t trust his capacity for breadth of soul, though I see how painfully insane I can be, here and now.

Sorry. Again, TLDR: please don’t hurt me :c

I’m already pathetic, but I refuse to let go of hope.

Help? I’m in no danger, but I need some kind of connection, any kind of response to love the source of. I love you for reading this if you read all, and if you didn’t… read Jung instead. He’s got more behind his words, though… in this day and age, hope to be heard is hard to have. That’s why I’m here, spouting gibberish!

There's Advaita Vedanta in Indian Philosophy which talks about non dualism. Is there any similar variation in western world?