Monthly Musings
Food for thought - March
Would you like some food for thought? The menu is the same, so choose what you would like to enjoy first.
Small snacks – light, easy, not too filling
The main course – highly nutritious, but sometimes harder to digest
Dark, rich, and decadence-free desserts – pure pleasure
Small snacks
"Human morality is firmly anchored in the social emotions, with empathy at its core. Emotions are our compass." - Frans de Waal, "Our Inner Ape"
“Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.” - L.R. Knost
Our world values what's easy to categorize, not what's exceptional. If you're undervalued, it's not personal—the system isn't designed to see you accurately. Source
Thinking that something does not affect you simply because you are not aware of the effects is like claiming the world does not exist because you don’t see it. But it was you who closed your eyes to avoid seeing in the first place.
“People don’t care about the truth when the lies make them feel better.”
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
The main course
“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.” - Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
If the truth is too hard to accept, do you think suppressing it will be easy? You will have to put in effort to avoid seeing the truth, to lie to yourself, to lie to others. You will have to actively work on pretending you do not know what you already know deep down. Is this a curse you choose to put on yourself? You could just face the truth instead.
Happiness is Bullshit - an article by David Pinsof
The truth is, we’re animals—specifically, apes. Our brains are the product of evolution. It would be very strange if evolution made us want happiness as our number one goal. Happiness is inside our heads—it’s not out there in the world. It has no connection to survival or reproduction, which kind of has to exist if we evolved to want it. Eudamonia and self-actualization make even less sense as evolved goals.
What we want, as apes, is much more straightforward. We want sex. We want to be sexy. We want tasty yum yums for our face-holes. We want to establish dominance, or we want to display submission. We want to stay warm, avoid snakes, use tools, support our tribes, not be on fire, ascend social hierarchies, form alliances, show off our health and virtue, nurture cute babies (preferably ones that share our DNA), and make people feel indebted to us (so they’ll help us in the future when we’re sick or injured).
These are the sorts of things we want—the things that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Not happiness. The actual motives of human primates are pretty unflattering, and we would prefer not to talk about them. That’s why we pretend that happiness (or self-actualization or whatever) is the reason for everything we do. It’s the perfect PR story.
Read the full article here.
“If emotional scars were visible as physical ones, no one would be able to stomach or watch porn.” - Wendy Maltz
"Some people measure their virtue by what they believe rather than how they behave, so they feel righteous even while acting like beasts." - Gurwinder
When we call people out for betraying the values they claim to hold, the main thing we are doing is holding up a mirror. We force them to look at themselves. How people react tells you a lot about them. Some lash out and smash the mirror. Some look within and try to grow.
"The algorithms, by responding to actual behaviour, are picking up on user desires, which may not even be known to the user. They are digitalizing the unconscious." - Richard Seymour
Avoiding the truth is like carrying a burden that feels light right now but it gets heavier in time. Facing the truth is like carrying a burden that feels heavy right now but it gets lighter in time.
A healthy society will shame people who engage in behaviors that harm the individual and the collective. We may disagree on which behaviors warrant shame and criticism, but thinking shame should be eliminated completely is a way to reduce accountability and damage public trust.
“We might be living in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to live again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.” - Bell Hooks
If you always blame everything and everyone else for all that’s wrong in your life, then there is no hope for you, simply because you’ve convinced yourself that you are completely powerless. As long as you are alive, you are never completely powerless. If you are a victim of fate, refuse to become a victim of yourself at least. Ask yourself: what can I control? What must I focus on? There lies your power.
I’ve come across an article that should be a wake-up call to our society. It highlights a culture of sexual abuse that has reaches children who are still in school. Here are some shocking statistics from it:
“The charity Everyone’s Invited publishes its first Primary Schools List on Saturday, naming 1,664 schools in the UK where pupils between age 5 and 11 have submitted anonymous testimonies of rape culture, their experiences of sexist name-calling, harassment, groping, inappropriate touching and even penetration. The collective howl of pain across one in 12 primary schools is harrowing but this is the state of our children in 2025.”
“The National Police Chiefs’ Council warns there has been a 400% increase in child sexual abuse and exploitation from 2013 to 2024.”
“Children have also become increasingly unhappy about their looks at primary school, with 62% of girls saying they experienced shame about their bodies before the age of six and 69% of boys by the age of nine, according to Everyone’s Invited research.”
“Young men want to be seen and appreciated, not viewed as the problem the whole time. Girls had centuries of not being encouraged but now boys feel the same. We need to help them all.”
“One therapist now working with us says every young girl on her caseload has been sexually assaulted.”
Read the full article here. Children deserve better than this. But the adults have failed to keep them safe. We have all allowed the porn industry, one of the most vile industries ever, to poison the minds of the most innocent among us - children. We are allowing children to abuse each other, to traumatize each other and they may have to spend years healing from this. If the adults could stop watching porn for long enough to see the psychological damage inflicted on children, there might be hope for the future generations. The ones who are already here are bound to suffer, sadly.
Dark, rich, and decadence-free desserts
Emergence - Sleep Token
Through the eyes of a child - Aurora
Hello Heaven, Hello - Yungblud
Adore You (Cover) - Brittany Broski
I recently discovered the work of the painter John William Godward and I love his paintings so much! Here are some that I liked.
There is beauty in this world. Sometimes we forget. Remember to look for it wherever you can find it.