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Profound Realizations -- Yours or Others
King Boo Hoo
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I was reading the "Favorite Novel Passages" thread and realized I kept skimming the quotes looking for the truly profound ones. The eye-openers. Quote from books that I had forgotten, but upon re-reading them remembered how my mind had lit up in a 'Eureka' kind of way when I read them.
Which also made me think of how many of those realizations I had come to on my own, and just never wrote them down, or never shared them. And how so many famous quotes are profound realizations that people finally think up near the end of their life.
So here's a thread for that, if it doesn't get ruined by silly humor and trolling. Profound realizations you've come to yourself, or read in a book, or heard from a friend, or whatever else.
I'll provide one of my own and one from a movie to get things rolling.
Anyway, here's a classy one from Secondhand Lions to wash the taste of poorly-written-ramble out of your mouth:
So... let's see if anyone has any interest in this kind of thread. Surely you must've been laying awake one night, or sitting on your couch stoned, or zoning out at work, and reached some kind of profound realization. About love, or relationships, or psychology, or differences in perception on life as we age, or meaning of life, or anything else. Post it so we too can consider your clever thoughts.
Which also made me think of how many of those realizations I had come to on my own, and just never wrote them down, or never shared them. And how so many famous quotes are profound realizations that people finally think up near the end of their life.
So here's a thread for that, if it doesn't get ruined by silly humor and trolling. Profound realizations you've come to yourself, or read in a book, or heard from a friend, or whatever else.
I'll provide one of my own and one from a movie to get things rolling.
Feelings aren't trustworthy. We all know we can't just trust what the body says automatically. For example, you start shivering and so your body is telling you it's cold. Is it really cold though, or is this because you stayed up all night and now everything feels colder because your body is running out of energy? Body says one thing, you don't believe it until you explore the situation and other possibilities.
On the other hand, people have too much a habit of believing feelings automatically. If you're feeling short-tempered and impatient with someone, you often act it out. Most people don't think to themselves, "I haven't eaten in a while, therefore I'm cranky, and therefore this isn't really how I feel about this person" (maybe afterwards as an excuse but rarely do they realize it before they act on it). Or when you feel passionately about something, you defend it 100%, and therefore too far. See politics, and how each side's fanatics view their candidate as a God and the opponent as Satan himself. Both sides fully believe it, yet if one takes a step back and thinks, "I know I'm really into this guy, but everyone else seems to be able to find some things wrong, perhaps my bias is influencing my thinking". But usually the only people thinking like that are the ones who aren't that fanatical about whatever issue it is.
The point simply being that we always need to be able to take a step back and percieve things rationally and cooly. Just as we interpret our body in the context of environment and situation before we act, we need to interpret our feelings in the context of how the situation affects us.
Like most personal realizations, it's fairly simplistic and obvious to most people. And like most people, I'm no writer so I can't write with the style that makes people look at the obvious and be amazed. Oh well, at least there's already an example of a badly written obvious personal realization, now you guys shouldn't be concerned with posting your own.On the other hand, people have too much a habit of believing feelings automatically. If you're feeling short-tempered and impatient with someone, you often act it out. Most people don't think to themselves, "I haven't eaten in a while, therefore I'm cranky, and therefore this isn't really how I feel about this person" (maybe afterwards as an excuse but rarely do they realize it before they act on it). Or when you feel passionately about something, you defend it 100%, and therefore too far. See politics, and how each side's fanatics view their candidate as a God and the opponent as Satan himself. Both sides fully believe it, yet if one takes a step back and thinks, "I know I'm really into this guy, but everyone else seems to be able to find some things wrong, perhaps my bias is influencing my thinking". But usually the only people thinking like that are the ones who aren't that fanatical about whatever issue it is.
The point simply being that we always need to be able to take a step back and percieve things rationally and cooly. Just as we interpret our body in the context of environment and situation before we act, we need to interpret our feelings in the context of how the situation affects us.
Anyway, here's a classy one from Secondhand Lions to wash the taste of poorly-written-ramble out of your mouth:
Secondhand Lions wrote:Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
So... let's see if anyone has any interest in this kind of thread. Surely you must've been laying awake one night, or sitting on your couch stoned, or zoning out at work, and reached some kind of profound realization. About love, or relationships, or psychology, or differences in perception on life as we age, or meaning of life, or anything else. Post it so we too can consider your clever thoughts.
King Boo Hoo on
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I read the book I Am A Strange Loop a while ago and it opened my eyes a lot about the nature of consciousness.
I was doing educational research on biology at work a while ago, going over the different ways scientists think life on earth originated, and when I actually internalized the ideas it was definitely an a-ha, holy shit, that's where we came from moment.
First crazy realization moment that came to mind for me was this: When taking a physics class, thinking about Stars.. There are more stars in the Universe than all the people that have ever been born and died on this Earth combined.
Whoa.
Bad people are unlucky.
That's pretty much the core of my current worldview.
(This is not a profound realisation.)
While also in high school, I realized that creating circumstances which necessitated something was not enough to cause its happening. Manipulating the world is distinct and different from enacting change, and I learned to focus on the latter instead of the former because even the most morally-benign manipulations fail when you consider that they are never definite.
---> Poor people are bad?
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Just a silly one for me . . .
Several summers ago my friends and I had been out playing football or throwing a frisbee around or something, and afterwards were sitting on the frontporch eating popsicles. Anyway, my friend's popsicle had melted through and last bite, before he got to it, fell off and onto the ground.
I respond: "that really sucks, the last bite is always the best because you never think to savour the second last bite".
Everyone was all: "woah".
Think about it, man!
I could make a Venn diagram, I guess...
Nah. Basically, the only reason bad people and good people exist is because of accidents of history they could have had nothing to do with. Poor areas are regions that don't lend themselves to good luck for the inhabitants.
You increase the number of factors that increase a population's luck, and you'll get a lot more good people in the world.
I'm actually facing the opposite dilemma. Having grown up using the Internet from an early age and such, I was always well aware that everyone thinks they're unique and that they're not. However, now I'm standing on the brink of deciding what I'm going to do with my life and I have to consider the possibility that I am unique, just basing it on what I've done with my life, how I speak and act differently, how people seem to naturally assume I'll succeed in life without questioning it. It's a pompous and arrogant thought, and statistically speaking I'm most likely wrong, but what if I am a unique little snowflake? I mean, all the great minds of the world that we know of had to be both be great minds and be confident in that, enough to try great things. How many great minds are there out there that were stifled into believing they couldn't be unique enough to do great things and therefore didn't? But anyway, I'm probably not unique, just something that I have difficulty assessing and discussing with anyone because the topic always comes off so arrogant and cocky.
sure, your common criminal is generally poor and that's why he's breakin' the law
but "bad people" can include some very lucky individuals
I would imagine everyone realizes this at some point, but I don't think many folks really ponder it. I mean, everyone knows they will die, but most I think only know it in some sort of abstract out of sight out of mind sort of defensive way.
This is especially a big-hitter if you're an athiest, it's easy to face death if you think you go to candyland.
Also, this realization shook me when I figured it out. A homeless guy was asking me for change one day when I was leaving a local Thai takeaway place, and I said I didn't have any. Then as I started putting on my motorcycle gear he started asking me what kind of bike it was and such. Normal small-talk for normal people, but this was a homeless guy, what's going on? So it turned out he used to have a bike similar to mine, back when he was a married successful businessman. But then he got into some accident (not motorcycle related) and he took so long to get better that his wife left him and the medical bills were so high that he lost everything. And now here he is, begging for change. A guy who got to a much higher position of success than I have and possibly ever will, and he's begging me. It just screwed with my entire picture of reality. Somewhere deep inside I must've just assumed beggars are either born poor beggars, or else they did stupid crime and/or drug related things to end up there, and are now too lazy to get themselves out of it. But to see a man who used to ride a nice bike with his wife to a job that requires an MBA? Boggled my mind.
is it really unlucky if they are not suffering because of it? there are plenty of people who aren't sociopathic who do bad things and end up with wealth, power, love, friendship, fulfilling life, etc.
Good people are the result of good luck.
Bad people are the result of bad luck.
i wouldn't even go that far
i would just say that good and bad are ultimately the results of chance
unless "bad luck" in your formulation applies to the bad luck of the community in general that has to deal with the bad person, and not that individual's luck
Bad people are still capable of receiving good luck. I'd say the best tack is 'everything you do is half chance.'
This.
Well you could rectify that with just looking at it as rather than being a unique snowflake, you are instead, in this large world, part of a rare subset of (soon-to-be)successful people. Sure there are others out there just like you, but that doesn't mean everyone you around you is.
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that is suitably profound. carry on.
on topic: when i realized that doing a degree or two in English literature does in fact make it harder to write, and often stops you from writing at all, it was profound when i realized why: not because analysis ruins literature, or some other insipid anti-intellectual fetishizing of ignorance, but simply the fact that exposure to great literature and, more than that, understanding of great literature, makes you realize that what you were writing was trash, and that you have to step up your game as a writer to produce something of any value. that is intimidating and really makes you realize that writing a real piece of good literature is difficult, and takes time and effort, and that you might not be able to do it.
This is my problem with realizations in general and why this thread has to be about silly personal realizations and not broad global realizations to bless the world with it's knowledge. Simply because the more I learn about philosophy, psychology, literature, etc., the more I realize that everything clever I think of has already been thought of, then argued, then improved, and all that happened hundreds of years before I was born.
That's probably what draws me towards learning about the Internet. I get some feeling that perhaps not every smart person in the history of mankind has already figured this out, and there's room for my brain somewhere.
(I know I comment too much in my own thread but what you guys say makes me want to add on so much)
I got this same feeling when learning about the eye and how your brain interprets images. Learning about how a single cell is only responsible for figuring out whether light is hitting it or not, but when you get a cluster of those cells you can now tell whether the light that's hitting this area is the edge of that light (only some of the cells in the cluster signal light) or just the middle part of it (all cells signalling light in that cluster). And more to the point, so as not to waste energy, the brain will only pay attention to the parts of the eye saying 'theres an edge here' and the parts with no light or full light don't get attention. And then you get one stage more complicated with shapes, and then your eye figuring out what the object is from memory, and then your eye filling in parts of the object that aren't visible in your mind. And fairly quickly you realize that without much additional hardware, a number of fairly efficient lines of code have turned a bunch of cells that can only say 'THERES LIGHT' and 'no light here, boss' and a pretty crappy hard-drive into a fully functioning visual perception system the likes of which man hasn't been able to reproduce yet.
here's something profound that you may not have realized yet, if i may be so patronizing:
whether or not a profound realization has been had before does nothing to reduce the value, profundity, or importance of that realization when it occurs. that's part of why they're profound. they're not just factual knowledge, they're important insights. in fact, the more people that have them, the more important and powerful they become.
The Internet also allows individuals unprecedented power to create, market, and distribute their own ideas. It has already basically killed the music industry and I'm sure the movie and TV industries are on their way out too.
Millions of people self-publish blogs and other forms of literature. But so far, nobody's really adapted the electronic literary format to publish a truly electronic book—a piece of literature that actually takes advantage of the form in new ways. So-called "online books" are really just print books copied and pasted into long, illegible scrolls of HTML with too much white space between the paragraphs or, worse, pdfs. Authors haven't explored the possibilities of the electronic medium yet, and I want to be one of the first to try.
Everything that you see is upside-down and backwards. Now tell me that doesn't fuck a dude up.
No one knows how much time they have. Could be a century, could be hours, nobody knows. The people around me that I love with all my heart may not be around me tomorrow.
You have to love deeply, and passionately. You have to love the people around you and the things you do with a white-hot intensity, so that when they're gone you'll still remember them. Life is too short for half-measures and regrets, so live life without them.
i hope the internet kills all of the entertainment industry, frankly, so that art is no longer commodified (at least not to such a degree)
you won't be able to get fantastically rich by getting your music out there, but it becomes easier by magnitudes to get it out there in the first place. this changes the motivation behind producing music, and art in general, hopefully.
2) People run on lies, falsehoods, and comforting bullshit, even the smart ones.
3) The desire to define and categorize the universe is one of the greatest impediments of understanding it, despite how helpful it is -- see "species"
4) Power does not corrupt, power allows an individual to show their true selves.
5) Anger and hatred can be -extremely- useful if channeled properly.
I'm from the school of thought that luck is virtually nonexistent. There is a definable set of factors, however difficult to measure and understand they may be, that influences what we become.
The only real "luck" is stuff like not being born as E. Coli or some other shit like that. Because we're all very lucky to be human beings.
This.
Pretty much made me miserable
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
The trick is to save literature for later, and work your way up to it.
A good way to start is fable-making, and accepting cliche.
Also realizing that a lot of the great stuff is also trash but they get away with it anyways.