Across the Brownian Bridge
I don't know what the future looks like. Perhaps that's better than either despair or hope. In my early twenties, I had a tendency to assume the worst of people. I concluded that people were simply selfish little creatures who were entirely out for themselves. I wanted to believe this, so very much, because it gave me license to be selfish myself. If you can write it off as human nature, then you can assume...
Seek Power
I'm a white middle-class American male. I'm far from a one-percenter, but needless to say, based on my demographics, I've spent most of my life in privilege. As men, society teaches us to seek power. We should go after the good job that gives us command over other people. We should go after a larger and larger salary as time marches on. We should find a woman and bring her under our wing in order...
Crossing the Chasm
There's an old bumper sticker you see that calls out the importance of considering individual responsibility in the right-to-bear-arms debate: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
Religion and politics are two major topics of conversation that have a reputation for being divisive. In my experience, they are not. People are.
Hearts and Minds
In adopting a worldview, here is the correctly ordered chronology of events:We separate feelings that make us feel good from those that make us feel bad. We desire to chase those feelings that make us feel good and avoid the bad ones.We choose beliefs that integrate with our existing beliefs, which are designed to keep the good feelings going, or avoid causing us bad feelings.We find the evidence to back up the beliefs we want...
The Male Feminist
There are objections that a man who calls himself a feminist will encounter from other men. I haven't personally encountered any of these yet, but I have a familiarity with the general arguments. The long and short of it is that men will tend to emasculate a man who is a self-described advocate for women's equality. Would I feel less self-worth if another man tried to emasculate me for calling myself a feminist? Hardly. It...
No Children
I was in a long-term, committed relationship for about 12 years until the middle of last year. This was with the girl I was "supposed" to marry, as those things sometimes feel, until life came between us, as life sometimes does. Ages ago, when we first met, I explained to her that children were, for me, a non-starter. I was willing to commit to her, but I asked her to promise me that if, in...
The Unreliable Narrator
This is a term used in art to describe a protagonist whose account of their own story is inconsistent with itself to such an extreme that it cannot be trusted by the viewer. Some of the more well-known examples of unreliable narrators in modern cinema are Fight Club, American Psycho, and A Beautiful Mind, in which the main characters are revealed later on in the storylines to be suffering from mental illnesses of sorts. So...
What is Psychologically "Normal"?
All people experience sadness, as a normal, healthy emotion. If statistics can be believed, then most people in our society will face depression at some point in their lives, which is distinct from sadness in that it can be characterized as an emotional dysfunction. At the extremes, it's easy to distinguish between the two. Someone who feels unhappy for a day or two because they've lost their job is clearly distinct from someone whose despair...
Fantasizing about Women
I have a 13-year-old cousin who loves the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, most notably the Lord of the Rings series of books. She's gone so far as to teach herself the language that Tolkien invented for his characters, which is called Sindarin. This makes sense because, when she was younger, she was possessed by one of the most vivid imaginations I had ever encountered in a child. She didn't grow up watching any television. Yet, at the...
Conspiracy Now!
I was in my mid-twenties when the 9/11 conspiracy documentary Loose Change was released to some mild Internet acclaim. I was in the demographic of people which was most inclined to subscribe to its theories (e.g. young, white men), so I had a few friends bring it to my attention. For those of you who don't know, 9/11 conspiracy theories essentially claim that the United States government was somehow complicit in the attacks. I'll admit that,...