Archive for the ‘ Existentialism ’ Category

Living the Life Others Never Will

Don’t bother thinking too much about whether or not you’re living the life that you should be living, whether you’re doing “the best you can” or whether you’re “living the best life possible” — there is no such thing. But if only it were that easy to stop thinking: what if there is? [ READ MORE ]

Life is Meaningless

Sometimes you’re just minding your own business when out of the blue reality hits you: life is meaningless. But despite your new-found revelation, you carry on with a big grin on your face, pretending everything’s all right; eventually, you’ll realise life isn’t meaningless or meaningful, and that meaning’s just a construct our brains conjure to make [ READ MORE ]

Living the Good Life

I had always had this notion that the concept of the “best life possible” — of living the “good life” — was real. I never quite qualified it with reasoning or investigation, and just took it as it was. Then one day, hit by inspiration, I decided to do some research on what the living [ READ MORE ]

Happiness and the Value of Life

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the bestselling book Flow, writes in his follow-up book Finding Flow that being happy alone does not mean we have a good quality of life; rather, he says that it is what we do — not how happy we are — that determines the quality. I do not agree — [ READ MORE ]

The Eternal Lightness of Being

I recently finished Milan Kundera’s book The Eternal Lightness of Being. This has been the first novel I’ve read in years, and I must say it doesn’t disappointment. Although I’m not a fan of authors breaking the fourth wall, it was relatively infrequent and not excessive. The stories (the book revolves around a few protagonists) [ READ MORE ]

Is she real?

The day started as most of my days start. It was normal in every sense: woke up at the usual time; did the usual morning routines; and I was on the train, on my way to work. While on the train, I glanced around, and caught sight of a man and a woman holding hands. It [ READ MORE ]

Without Direction

I feel like a powerful ship without a rudder; like I have the potential to achieve a tremendous amount, but because I’m not too sure what I want to achieve, I stay still and let the currents take me where it will. I’m going nowhere, slowly. Maybe I should pick an arbitrary shore and head toward that. [ READ MORE ]

The Guru

The self-help guru walked up to me and asked, “what would you do if you could do anything, anything at all, and knew you couldn’t fail?” I looked at him, thought for a bit, and shrugged. “How can you not know?” he asked. “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” My face was blank. I [ READ MORE ]

The Baby

I wrote the following poem in camp, inspired after I unthinkingly remarked that a friend’s “twenty minutes of fun created a lifetime of pain” when he talked about his illegitimate daughter: He asked her for a kiss On a night so very fine. He asked her to be his Over red roses and wine. They had some fun that night, Twenty [ READ MORE ]

On the Lack of Ambition

An old man demands that we live our lives with purpose[ READ MORE ]