Would I do better with an editor?

Maybe you’re thinking: well, now Jochen must have lost it… I mean, at first, this question does seem a little like I am taking myself way too seriously here, right? It’s “just a blog”, it’s not a professional project, and so what the heck would I need an editor for anyway.

Well, yesterday I had two experiences that at least made me think there are benefits to having an editor. One was a long conversation I had with Marck, my boyfriend of more than three years now, in which he pointed out how, each time I had blogged in the middle of the night, literally burning my midnight oil, I might have been putting less scrutiny into my thoughts and, inadvertently of course, could have written something I wouldn’t have under other circumstances. And while I assured him that I have made it a rule to reread each and every blog post at least twice, in full, before hitting the little “Publish” button that WordPress offers, I cannot make the claim that I would never write something, particularly if it is written in “the heat of the moment”, that I might put differently at another time or in another mindset. The fact that typos and some other flaws remain is proof enough for me that I’m not perfect!

The second experience was that shortly after publishing my previous post about how accepting one’s mortality might be beneficial for the quality of our lives, a somewhat nagging feeling overcame me, and I wanted to “double-check” with Hedy Kober, the lead author of the soon-to-be-published study I am mentioning, whether I had overstepped any limits. And while I felt fairly confident, at the time of writing the blog post, that I hadn’t, I also couldn’t shake off the feeling that maybe I still had…

So that, in short, is why I think an editor might be beneficial: to provide a reality check on my assessment of values, and to work as a sounding board for my, uhm, admittedly present vanity, assuming that is the right term to describe my predicament. And I sincerely hope that I am only suffering from a relatively mild and harmless amount of it…

And again you might think: “What on earth is he talking about??”

Yeah, well, I think it is a confession which I must make sooner or later anyway… You see, as much as I can say that I enjoy a philosophical debate (which I do!), there is also a small but significant part of me that felt and feels having those debates in private with friends wasn’t and isn’t quite enough. This part “inspired” me to register this domain name and, in a way, has “driven” me to posting more or less regularly since this blog’s inception less than two weeks ago. Is it something I have a problem with? Not yet, or at least I hope so. And neither I hope is it a problem for my readers. But…

A couple of days ago I read a Facebook post in which a friend and former colleague of mine mentioned an article in Slate Magazine covering “Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com”. So far I haven’t yet “self-plagiarized” my blog posts, at least to the best of my knowledge. I have just been hacking away at the keyboard every time I post, not using some sort of copy-and-pasting, with the exception of the Facebook comment I paraphrased for my post the other day–something I expressly noted there. But I think that every “misdeed” is, to some extent, a misjudgment in values and in some kind of moral code that people who want their published works to be taken seriously better adhere to.

The deeper issue this very article’s author, Charles Seife, raises is that people reading any kind of material that is published have an expectation about what they’re consuming. In the case of Jonah Lehrer, Seife argues that people had the reasonable expectation that every time a new article was written by Lehrer, each of these articles had to be “brand new”, at least to a great extent, and not simply “recycled” from prior work. As to whether or not that is a reasonable expectation and assumption, I must admit that I have a somewhat more nuanced opinion about.

Equally as in music, I believe that creative work always is a recombination of already existing material. To what extent this should be achievable by merely paraphrasing, if not copying parts of existing work–written by the same author previously, mind!–I cannot say, but at least in the realm of music remixes are among the most popular works published. And I tend to agree with wikipedia’s quote of Mr. Lehrer’s publisher, hoping the quote is correct, as I currently don’t feel like putting in an hour of “fact checking”, that you shouldn’t have to ask for permission to reuse your own works, and that Mr. Lehrer simply didn’t correctly state whenever he did so. Next to the re-use of his own material, there are claims of fabrication and misrepresentation of quotes and facts, which is something entirely different, and I currently don’t want to comment on, as I know by far too little about the whole background or Mr. Lehrer’s writing in general…

The initial question I had, however, remains interesting to me. Why? Well, as much as this blog is not a professional project–quoting from my very first post: “Given that I lack (complete and/or certified) academic, scientific training, I would never consider myself aprofessional philosopher“–I want my readers to enjoy consuming this blog and, while I prefer not to think of life as trying to meet expectations, I still want to allow readers to have at least some reasonable expectations about it. In that sense, I might at best approach this issue by asking: are their any “standards” I want my blog to meet?

Essentially I want to present my thoughts and opinions, as truthfully as possible, in a way that is, if anyhow achievable, entertaining but at the same time not at the expense of others. In short, I generally feel very opposed to the idea of inflicting pain or serious harm, which leads me back to my original conclusion: having an editor might very well work as a kind of sounding board. I try, very hard, to look at what I’m writing from different perspectives–does what I have written have the potential to cause pain?

Under certain circumstances, it seems inevitable to cause pain if I want to express my thoughts truthfully. Someone reading my blog might, for instance, already be “hurt” by encountering a thought that contradicts a vital aspect of this person’s worldview or way of life, such as in my post about abortion after rape. I would still feel saddened but, again, not sorry. Still I want to extend every effort possible to avoid publishing thoughts that, if I were to put myself into the position of someone not sharing my views, were construable as a personal insult or as hurting someone on purpose.

Equally, I want to and when it comes to my work as a research assistant at Columbia am even legally required to ensure that I do not publish anything that can be considered as a breach of confidentiality. When friends are concerned, I do not wish for them to feel less inclined to share their views with me in private because they fear being named in my next blog post. And equally I want the people I work for and with to have the faith that I will not publish anything that would affect their work or reputation negatively in any way.

How will I go about this practically? Well, I am not sure whether I can find someone willing to be an actual “editor”, someone who wants to perform the probably tedious and not necessarily altogether enjoyable task of having to “fact-check”, or rather “value-check” my posts. In case you are among the people I trust and feel inclined to apply for the “job”, let me know! In the meantime, I will send new posts to a small number of friends, probably two or three at most, and wait… If I hear back from them with comments, I at least know where to put some more effort into. And if I do not hear back from them, I will have to concede to rereading the post, after cooling down a little from that “heat of the moment”. Hopefully that can improve the quality and enjoyability of my posts. As always, comments are welcome!

Accept or React?

Working in a psychology lab focused on social cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University has allowed me to keep an eye out for answers to some very profound questions I have been asking myself for a long time, and even I don’t remember how long. One of these questions is, “how do you react to fear?” Incidentally, in one of the studies run at our lab, subjects were instructed to either react naturally to scary and pain inducing images or, alternatively, to try and put themselves into an accepting mindset, one in which the fear they were to experience simply would be allowed to exist. But more on that later…

Naturally, there are fears that better be reacted to, such as when an immediate threat enters our consciousness, and probably shortly before that it enters our subconscious, and our bodies are, almost automatically, set in motion to either avoid the threat, like dodging an oncoming car when we step onto a street we erroneously thought was empty, or to try and neutralize the threat, like taking aim and trying to thwart an insect we assume has the capacity to inflict pain or spread disease.

This kind of instinctive program, the fight-or-flight response, is still very strong and powerful in our species, and, at least in the here and now, for good reason. But humans have also evolved quite a bit further, and something else is by now “added to the program”, something that I believe is at the center of the human condition: we know that no matter how much we struggle for life, and no matter how well we adapt this fight-or-flight response, in the end we cannot win. We are, one could say, doomed to die. Obviously, I am not the only one talking about this: for instance, in a 2003  documentary, “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality”, something I can recommend as worth watching, for instance at Netflix, film makers explore this question together with psychologist and anthropologists.

The paradoxical condition we find ourselves in can, I think, be characterized by those two elements and a twist: our instincts and intuitive responses, almost immutably, compel us to react to threatening cues in the environment such as to preserve our lives. But at the same time we have foreknowledge, and this is one of the very few things I would say most people agree we know with the highest degree of certainty, that one day must come when we will die. If the two layers in our minds–the subconscious effort to preserve life and the conscious knowledge that we must, eventually, fail–were separate entities, operating side by side, maybe we didn’t have to suffer. And here is where the twist comes in: conscious thought has the ability to generate subconscious states. And this is also true for future events, even if the details of these events aren’t yet available. Thinking about or being reminded of our mortality generates, even unbeknownst to us, a state in which we are more likely to pick up the fight. Which is also why we can be excited in light of anticipating a positive event.

So, if this reaction of fear is in the subconscious whenever we think about death, is there any hope of ever finding peace? Well, here is where I would want to add to the movie by presenting some, admittedly preliminary and not yet published evidence from the study in our lab: being accepting of one’s fear, that is to say allowing oneself to experience fear but doing so not with the intention of reacting, that is to say taking a path outside of fight-or-flight, seems to have the effect of lowering the actual impact of that fear. In other words, by consciously deciding not to react to a threatening cue in the environment, but rather acceptingly experiencing its impact, we are, at least partially, able to mitigate its emotional consequences and, possibly, lower its “call for action”, something that still needs to be studies in depth…

I recently posted on this blog about why I love living in the U.S.A. And there isn’t really anything I feel I have to take back about this post. But… The instinct of preserving life has become something that, as an outsider, I would almost call ever-present, all-trumping, an obsession. The debate on abortion, something I also posted on already, is one example. Good people are fighting one another over when life begins, probably driven by, on the pro-life side, the fear of their own mortality. Another and potentially much more dangerous example is the American notion of protecting life world-wide. The reason why conservatives want to stock-pile weapons and bombs is not to destroy life but to protect it–how could you, without a good ace up your sleeve should life become threatened, right? But, as the documentary movie so aptly puts: the desire to protect one’s life has the subconscious effect of increasing the impulse to fight, and then of course fight those who seem to have a different world view, as that is what threatens our way of life. In short, this is a vicious circle, one that evolution unfortunately didn’t see coming… And I must admit it would be very unfortunate if the human condition is one where the instinct to preserve life is, in the end, what destroys it.

My own vision? If we could just all accept some realities, such as that people have different religions and world views, and that we all will die, then, maybe, we can all share this reality and have wonderful experiences together, and at least reduce the suffering caused by this truly and ultimately useless fight.

There is yet little scientific basis for my vision, but I am hopeful that someone out there might feel this is worth exploring: can accepting the fear that comes with the foreknowledge of death reduce the impulse to fight? And if the impulse is reduced, what are the consequences practically.

Outside of science, in thoughts people post online as well as in revered literature, there is of course ample “evidence” that others have thought of this before, and that I am not the only one with this vision. I want to share two examples:

One of my very dear friends, Jeffyi Lu, put it this way in a recent Facebook post of his:

Midnight Reflection: If life was the ultimate game, I would rather prefer to loose. Because winning dehumanizes my true ethical being. In other words, being the king of the world also means losing everything else. And that “everything else” is what makes me a compassionate human being.

And I take the liberty to copy and paraphrase from the comment I made to that post… Aren’t we all losers? Then again, can’t we also be champions? At least potentially? This much we know: we are guaranteed to die! Unfortunately, for most people it seems that life is about fighting death, fighting mortality, which is to say they simply react to their emotion of fear, although this fear is entirely caused by imagining the future, a future in which they no longer exist.

This struggle causes so much pain and suffering, and for as long as we literally suffer from the illusion we could ever win this fight, I do believe we cannot be truly human. So, to be a champion, one must accept that, in the very end, the fight must be lost–but, equally, fight we must, as life preserves itself through instinct!

To borrow another image from someone whose books have been read by millions, I want to quote J.K. Rowling, who has her title character Harry Potter think and experience the following (J.K. Rowling. “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, p. 512):

But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.

So, yes, the true champion walks into the arena of life, knowing the fight will be lost, but with his head held high, accepting the inevitable but not despairing. And, to extend on that image a bit, that championship is exactly what Harry achieves, when he walks through the Forbidden Forest to meet his own death: you know what’s coming, death, but you still face it with dignity and humanity!

If we just, in our own lives, were accepting a bit more of the fact that, one day, we will no longer exist, and take it with a bit more “Buddhism” in our hearts and minds, not fighting it, but enjoying life while it lasts, maybe we would discover that the differences between cultures and ways of life are not reason enough to die for…

Sad, not sorry

I don’t think I’ve ever given this an awful lot of thought until today, but it’s a strange thing that when you talk to people about something sad that has happened in your life one of the most common reactions seems to be that they say, “I’m so sorry.” And while I am still not entirely sure what that is supposed to mean, other than hopefully showing their sympathy with my sadness, somehow I usually feel that people want to say something like, “that’s too bad, I wish this thing didn’t happen in your life.”

So, today is one of those days where I am sad. My dad called me just a short while ago, telling me that my grandmother, who celebrated her 95th birthday in February this year, died earlier today. Once the words were out, I could hear and sense my dad’s sadness, just as I could feel tears welling up in my own eyes, and we shared a long silent moment on the phone together. There clearly is a feeling of loss, and knowing that I will never be able to spend time with her, listen to her words of wisdom and her humor makes me sad. But am I sorry? Am I suffering from the loss? Well, what I can say with certainty is that I don’t feel any regret, and neither I think does my dad, nor did my grandmother until the end.

My dad told me that he and his wife were sitting with my grandmother until she was gone, and that even shortly before she went, she expressed how satisfied and contented she was with everything, with her life, with the way things have turned out, with the fact that she has raised a wonderful son, who in turn founded his own family and gave her three grandsons she always felt she could be proud of.

The predominant feeling I have, next to the sadness over the loss, is that of gratitude. My grandmother has always been a source of inspiration when it comes to a wonderful attitude towards life: you always do your best, but whatever comes out of it is in God’s hand. While I do not think of the world as being “controlled” or “constantly ordered” by God, I truly believe that one of the main reasons why my grandmother was able to weather the tremendous storms that rattled her life was that she was willing and able to “give in to reality” and not despair, but rather grow with the challenges as they presented themselves.

I want to take this moment to celebrate my grandmother for the woman she was and remember her for the best of what she instilled in me!

Even before my dad was born, she received word that her husband, my grandfather, had been killed in a railroad accident in Russia. It was the summer of 1942, in the middle of World War II, and I cannot even imagine the agony and pain this must have caused her. One of the things my grandmother would, particularly later in life, repeat often whenever we spoke was that her family had warned her, “don’t you dare having a child so soon.” Well, obviously she did have a child, my dad, and has always been thankful for not heeding the advice she was given. And I do hope that, next to some traits I inherited from my mom’s side, my grandmother’s defiance and determination to stand against all odds and do what she felt she had to do will always be with me.

A few years later she was faced with a most terrifying health crisis. She developed an infection, which eventually led to an almost complete loss of hearing on one side. And after attempting pretty much everything that classic medicine could offer at the time, the doctors told her she had mere months to live. But she wouldn’t give in, and she surprised not only the doctors… Her son needed her, and she fought a long uphill battle. She began reading up on less traditional medicine, she became learned in herbs and their properties, and despite this severe incident she managed to outlive all of her siblings.

Another of her most endearing qualities was her humor. She would always joke and laugh with my brothers and me about the things she knew were declining during her final years. For instance she would suggest to us that we should take her to a dance, fully aware of course that her mobility and health would never permit it. But she wasn’t bitter about the loss of mobility, the loss of hearing, or the loss of memory. She just took whatever came and made the best of it anyway, simply by being who she was, by doing what she felt was right, and then allowing God to fill in the blanks. She often said that all she wished for was for God to take her home, so she could see her husband again, who would be waiting for her. But she didn’t wait anxiously but rather calmly.

In short, despite the many and heavy personal blows that fate dealt her, she kept going and always did so high-spiritedly. While I have not made up my mind about whether or not I believe in an after-life, I must say that I do hope that she is now reunited with my grandfather. She has been longing to see him for quite many years, and finally the waiting, at least, is over.

For as long as I live, I now want to do my best to follow in her footsteps and keep her legacy alive in me: Do what you feel is right, and then be content with what comes of it. And in those moments where I might feel frustration over something I didn’t manage to achieve, or angry about someone who I believe has wronged me, then I want to remember her… Don’t be angry, just be yourself and then everything will turn out alright.

Thank you, grandma, for everything!

Is romantic love worth the risk?

Today it happened for the second time within a week that a good friend of mine told me about how the person he felt very smitten, for not say in love with simply turned their back on him and how his feelings seem to have led him into a situation where, after opening up, he is faced with having to close a chapter in his life which just seemed to have started. How could this have happened? And given the potential for incurring such a high emotional cost, is falling in love really “worth the risk”?

Well, something similar happened to me before, and not just once. I guess most people can probably relate to this situation: there is someone who makes you feel special, who seems to be perfect, who you would do anything for, but as much as it might seem so at first, in the end the feelings are not reciprocated… I do not wish to speak to the exact details of my friends’ recent experiences. Instead I am again thinking about, and to some degree trying to decide, how much those emotions can be trusted.

Emotions in general seem helpful in “making up our minds”. Several researchers have looked at the quality of decisions that are either based on “our gut feeling” or on careful deliberative processed. And overall, it seems that our instinct and intuition are fairly useful and indeed goal oriented when it comes to making decisions. But particularly when it comes to this both extremely wonderful but also potentially hurtful thing we call love, they equally often seem to fail us…

A few weeks back I had a long conversation with another very good friend, and we were debating about what exactly makes up the feeling of “romantic love”. And although we didn’t really get anywhere definitive, I remember two of the key elements that emerged from our train of thought:

For one, falling in love seems to require a person to allow him or herself to become vulnerable. As long as you “play it safe” you might feel attracted to someone, you might very well desire to spend lots of time with that person and flirt, but there seems to be no “sparkle”. When it comes to making a definite move, you need something else. The willingness to make a fool of oneself, or more generally speaking to give oneself up, even as far as being willing to die should the significant other person’s life be at stake, has also caught the attention of Helen Fisher, who studies love scientifically.

For another, falling or being in love also seems to focus our attention solely on positive aspects we experience in a relationship. So, whatever negative, or at least possibly conflicting or usually discouraging information we might normally pick up on when it comes our way, we seemingly are just not receptive for that. Whether the person we have a crush on shows no real interest, or they even show signs of disrespect and hostility, as long as we are “in love” those aspects are invisible.

Both these elements clearly go against what a deliberative process would dictate: only exposing oneself as much as is necessary and certainly keeping an eye out for trouble. So,  if romantic love makes us vulnerable, and at the same time seems to prevent us from even noticing that we are indeed being hurt, wouldn’t it be better to just forget about the whole thing?

Well, naturally this is something I can only answer for me, personally. Here is my reasoning, both emotionally and cognitively, why I would not want to live in a world without this particular kind of love:

Despite the risk, mostly that of falling in love with the wrong person of course, romantic love allows us to explore parts of our innermost self which are normally kept too well guarded to become visible. During the times I was “madly in love” I realized many of the qualities that I have come to cherish about myself. At one time, I for instance created a piece of music for a guy I had a crush on, although we had never talked to one another. For those of you who know the story: silence is golden, OK? But, honestly… That was stupid, huh? Well, maybe so, but I also realized how good I can be at composing music. The effort I put into this piece didn’t have any precedent. In other words, being in love made me see my, and maybe can make us all see our full potential. Why? I would argue that, besides the thrill of romantic love, there are only a few other situations I can think of that could motivate me to “shine” and bring out the best in me just as much. And some of these are probably even riskier…

Naturally, the feeling of one’s heart being broken, which undoubtedly occurs in anyone’s life if falling in love is part of it, is nothing to be “desired”, but given the choice between having the opportunity of extending my limits at the possible cost of feeling that pain and a life without love as well as pain, yes, I choose a life that allows me to explore those limits. Does that make me a hopelessly romantic guy? If so, I can live with that!

Now, are there any precautions one could possibly take to lessen the risk? Maybe, but my intuition tells me that any attempt at doing so, at least when it occurs prior to falling in love, simply means that my love would never be as genuine, as pure as it has to be for me to truly explore my limits. But I do believe I can ensure that, should disaster strike, I will at least be “OK” in time to come:

Having friends who know me, as good as can be, who know what I feel for that special person, who have shown their support in the past seems like a good start. And as much as it saddened me to hear what those two friends of mine are currently going through, I am at least glad that they felt close enough to talk about it. I sincerely hope that I can “return the favor” and be there as a supportive friend. In my life I have quite a few good friends who have listened to and supported me in my romantic endeavors. If you are one of them and I never said it as clearly as in this blog post, please accept my deepest thanks for being there for me, it would have been much harder without you!

Why I love to live in the U.S.A.

Good morning 🙂 In the last three entries of my blog, I have more or less tried to tackle a singular issue, with a few sidelines here and there maybe. But, at the moment, my brain doesn’t seem to be willing or able to focus on just one topic, and so I figured I might just mention a few of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past few days about why I wanted to leave Germany for the longest time and am now tremendously glad I have found a new home. For those of you who don’t know: I started submitting my name to the Green Card lottery when I was 22, and it took almost ten years to be “drawn” and have this dream come true…

Looking back on and thinking about this past week, I was reminded again on how fortunate my life turned out: during a longer conversation with a friend, I once again conjured up the emotional situation I had created for myself while I was still living in Germany. And probably it has become even clearer to me now, compared to how I assessed my life back then. I had a job, not entirely unlike the one I’m having right now, and I was surrounded by friends. But I also had a secret. Something I felt I couldn’t really talk about at work or with friends…

Back then, my homosexuality meant for me that I needed to censor myself, my thoughts, my feelings. In many situations, although there are only a few that I recall most clearly, I had the wish and desire to tell people about “it”, but at the same time I also felt that by doing so I might jeopardize my very existence. What if I were to lose my job over this? Or some of my best friends? Luckily, I had at least my immediate family, with whom I felt I could share this part of me–I had come out to my parents and brothers at the age of 23, so around the same time I began to get a Green Card through the lottery.

Why was this so bothersome? I mean, Germany is, when it comes to how people think and feel about sexuality, as measured in the general population, a fairly liberal country: same-sex marriage probably is even more approved of, at least by law, than here in the United States. But…

The one big difference I have always perceived in the two cultural spheres is that the United States of America is, in general, much more diverse and that this diversity is not only present but truly welcomed. I would even go as far that it is essential for the American Dream: people having the opportunity to express themselves without immediate fear for being written off as “outliers”, who, if they had the decency, would better remain silent.

From my early childhood days on, I felt that I was different. My mom has eight siblings, and it became somewhat of a standing joke at family gatherings that my brothers and myself weren’t as well-mannered as should be, which is pretty much the kindest way I can think of to describe their sentiments. Suffice it to say that my dad, in particular, had this funny idea of being anti-authoritarian, of allowing his kids to make up their own minds and decide what’s best for them.

During my school years, beginning with some serious arguments with my music teacher in elementary school, leading up to me not going to school for a period of almost 4 months in 6th grade because I just didn’t feel like going, I often felt some inner urge, a calling, to antagonize the system. The fact that during my time in the classroom someone who wasn’t even family had the mandate to make me do things, even if I wanted to do something else instead, was a provocation and contradiction to how things were done at home. And before I forget it: I sincerely thank my parents for allowing me to “make up my own mind”. In the end, I was so bored that I decided that accepting school for what it is and spending the time being exposed to new knowledge and interesting things is preferable, even if someone pretends to be in control of the whole thing. I think my interest in Buddhism has become clear already, so I might add that I believe that the idea of ever being “in control” of something is an illusion…

The one crucial difference I believe exists between German and U.S. American culture for me can best be summarized by the fact that in Germany it is much more important to “fall in line” with the mainstream. Naturally, in the commercial sphere, people in both cultures are subjected to considerable pressure to align their taste with mainstream fashion. But when it comes to ideas and thoughts, the American culture has, from its early days on, been able to bridge a gap as far as viewpoints from the far right and the far left, by allowing people to express their views and not give them a sense of “not belonging” to the nation.

This last thought brings me to one of my few worries: the rise of electronically distributed media, such as television in the second half of the 20th century as well as the advent and success of the internet in the past two decades has come at a fairly high price, in my opinion: given that it is the advertisements and not the information being disseminated being the “real product” that is sold to the public, those channels with the most aggressive positions and opinions are the most successful ones, because who wants to hear news if they’re not sensational. And while I do not believe that those involved in politics or the media had any higher or better opinions of their opponents on the other side of the spectrum 50 years ago, this divide and its over-representation by the media seems to have created a far more radicalized population in the process. Even I have, occasionally, caught myself thinking things such as, “those people on the other side are plain stupid or crazy.” But I think it is important not to let that thought grow and take over.

Only as long as we are willing and able to accept, or at least tolerate the diversity that exists in the minds and hearts of the people in our nation, can we truly be free. As soon as we mark a position as “crazy”, or in other words indefensible by someone sane, we have given up on arguing about it, we have sentenced our opponents to insanity, and we simply want to set our beliefs and ideas as the standard for everyone. My hope is that America will remain the country and nation of the free spirit, where ideas can be expressed without fear of being marginalized simply for expressing them. If someone disagrees, we should always welcome the debate… Well, at least that is my vision of it all 🙂

A new blog is born…

Obviously, every blog must have its first post, so here goes… Over the past few months, I’ve been giving quite some thought to themes such as where my personal satisfaction and dissatisfaction with my life comes from (hint: it’s pretty much from within), as well as where our current global economic situation is headed.

Given that I lack (complete and/or certified) academic, scientific training, I would never consider myself a “professional philosopher”, but rather someone who spends a considerable amount of time being “in awe” about the quirky little ways in which life seems to work when it comes to outcomes (either foreseen or unforeseen).

And maybe there are others out there who enjoy doing the same thing, in which case I would be thrilled to “meet” you! This is my way of “getting in touch” by putting some of my thoughts out, and whoever wishes to reply, please do so 🙂

Hope to hear from you…