Ruminations

People say that tradition is dying in the 21st century. But tradition has always been dying no matter when and where you look in history, for culture is fluid and ever-changing, and bound by nothing but the heartfelt passion of the living people. In the bygone eras of the old, human experience was determined predominantly by natural geography. When the most accessible means of transit is walking and most people struggle in poverty, the broader world outside one’s immediate town or village did not exist past stories and legends. This limit forces a consensus on “what is happening”. Everyone knows when the blacksmith’s family is expecting children, or if there will be a festival happening in a week - for there is nothing else to care about. Any two people from the same region on Earth will always share much more of their world with each other, compared to a person from somewhere else. This shared world creates shared experience, which over time brews into shared culture. ...

Disambiguation: For the remainder of this post, “good” and “evil” refer to “beneficial/harmful to human individuals in society”. “Ads/marketing” refers to “consumer-targeted marketing exploiting human psychology” I was driving back home listening to vtuber clips when an ad kicked in: An actor narrates an obviously made-up anecdote about pesticide remains where her husband got hospitalized after eating an apple. The narration was not subtle about its emotional manipulation either: charged language was used throughout - at least 4 people independently threw out their fruits in disgust. The voiceover was so dramatic that I suspect it was synthesized by an AI. ...

The human brain is primitive and illogical. Our evolutionary history leaves us with social instincts that are easily manipulable. None of us make decisions, simple or complex, by precisely computing an objective function with all the information we know. We are not biologically equipped to be precise. Instead, we blend everything we know into a vague, muddy ball of impression, and proceed to wherever that points us. In more familiar modern terminology, we call this imprecise, impression and intuition based understanding “vibes”. ...

 Many say that physical death is not true death, that as long as we are remembered we continue to live on in memories. I thought about that saying a lot when I was younger. Time passes and memories degrade. What was once the memory of a whole person eventually disintegrates into fragmented recollections of events and impressions. Details are drowned out by noise as stories are recounted from mouth to mouth, until eventually flanderization transforms the memory-person into a caricaturized shell of their former self. I find this to be the moment people truly die, when the multitude of their life and being gets compressed down into a single trait or two. Still, I consider this a peaceful death. It’s a fortune to have one’s existence persist beyond the limitations of human lifespan, even just for a little while. ...

TLDR: Maintaining things suck magnificently, but it might suck less if you make conscious decisions. At some point I no longer remembered in my childhood, when I first learned about the concept of “renting”, it sounded like the dumbest thing in the universe. When you buy something you only pay a finite cost once, whereas if you rent it you’ll have to pay infinitely - an infinite total cost! There are many issues with that statement. Obviously my kindergarten self is not going to know about interest rates and present value discounts, not to mention market volatility and risk. However, when I brought this up to my parents, their response wasn’t these but - “purchased things cost money too”. ...

“The Personal is Political” is a stupid statement. The personal “is” political, yet it “need not always be” political. This much-echoed catchphrase is a prime example of how linguistic ambiguities dull our brains and allow for logically uninspired statements. To say that “The Personal is Political” can be one of two meanings: 1: That personal matters always have a significance or influence to other matters people colloquially treat as “political”. 2: That personal matters ought to always be treated in a way similar to how people treat colloquially “political” matters (i.e. be subject to scrutiny, be advocated for/against). ...