What would your strategy for life be if things were darker? Asked another way: what would you do if life on Earth was more challenging than it currently is? What if there was more censorship, more control, more corruption, more manipulation, more destruction? What would your strategy for life be?
Continue reading “A Thought Experiment”
Some might wonder why I go so deep into emotional processing. The biggest reason was always to counter endless tendencies of avoidance. I saw (early on) that I could not get any creative work done if I was clogged up emotionally.
My goal with emotional processing wasn’t to dissolve all negative feelings forever—that’s unrealistic. Rather, my goal was to increase my creative output. There are many benefits to emotional processing. For instance, it allowed me to be more comfortable with uncomfortable emotions. It helped me to resolve long-standing anxiety issues. Things like this. But these things were never my main goal. My main goal had to do with creative output.
Continue reading “How to Create More”
Years ago I wrote a post on anger. This post is a distillation of that article along with a few additional thoughts.
Continue reading “How To Process Anger”
I often listen to recovery stories because I find them inspirational.
I once heard a man say that not being arrested for driving drunk was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him. It gave him the idea that he could get away with anything.
After he was let off the hook with zero consequences, he went on the worst bender of his life.
Continue reading “The Worst Thing That Could Have Happened”
Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud had two very different views on dreams. Dreams to Freud were wish fulfilments. Jung’s view was more expansive. He didn’t lump dreams into one set category. To Jung dreams were alchemical catalysts, messages from the unconscious, and something that re-establishes psychic equilibrium. From the Jungian perspective you can think of dreams as parables.
Continue reading “Jung and Freud | What are dreams?”
It is often the case that parents that spend a lot of money on their child’s education put less responsibility on the child to make it all work. There’s an internal argument that goes like this: Because I’m spending a lot, I deserve better educational outcomes for my child.
But more expensive doesn’t mean better—especially in education. In fact, taking into regard what I said in a previous post, less intervention from teachers might be better if the student can learn to apply buttocks to seat and work.
I saw two tendencies from parents who paid exorbitant amounts for their children’s education:
Continue reading “Education and Money”
In mathematics students have to grapple with problems to understand it. It’s only when they go through the effort of investigating a problem on a deep level that they understand it.
Solving for x doesn’t mean much when all the steps are written down in advance. Just copying answers is useless. But mentally grappling with the problem—that’s where the gold lies.
Continue reading “Education | Letting students think for themselves”The idea that we are either smart or dumb is enormously destructive. Many people have written books on how cognitive skills can improve with effort and time. (One, Two, Three, Four.)
That said, this mainstream idea that our mental capacity is fixed is an idea that I’ve been trying to debunk for years.
Continue reading “Education and IQ | Why struggle is beneficial”
Gratitude correlates with presence. When we’re grateful, we’re present. And if you’re regularly grateful, you might also assume that you are more present than most.
Continue reading “Gratitude”
Joblessness is off the charts in Pretoria and Johannesburg. So much so that people have asked me for job opportunities. This is because I make videos. But my videos make zero money. It just helps with web traffic at this point.
But you don’t need to make videos to know that there’s a serious unemployment issue in these cities. Just drive around and look.
Continue reading “Jobs | An Article for South Africans”