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Linear cause-and-effect thinking—pinning future strife on past grievances—oversimplifies reality. Influences weave forward and backward, social and personal; a dynamic interplay shaping existence.
Our need for control/stability drives reductive rationalizations, but reality resists such simplicity, demanding holistic understanding amidst chaos, not merely guided by logic, faith, or “gut feel” but a blended amalgam of animalistic intuition and rational subservience.
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In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism and retrocausality challenge common sense.
Scientifically, superdeterminism states that particles’ paths are predetermined since the Big Bang, undermining “freewill.” Meanwhile, retrocausality assumes time as non-linear, so the response (effect, outcome) stimulates the preceding action (cause, stimulation), invoking a confusing many-worlds theory.
These hypotheses offer a solution for intractable problems, a third determinant when simple (known, common-sense) answers unravel under scrutiny.
Mapping this logic, by accepting current truths we find ourselves needing a more bizarre solution to unlock understanding of the universe… and people.
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Clear-sighted intelligence cuts through rituals and platitudes, exposing truth. Yet, it isolates, alienating you from friends, society, and love.
Seeing too clearly is a burden.
Yet, the path back to friends, society, and love is not to blind yourself, but to push through the initial discord and alienation to rediscover a deeper perspective.
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William James’s “The Will to Believe” defines a “live” hypothesis as one that resonates personally and compellingly motivates action, while a “dead” one fails to inspire. (James offers the example of religion: to a non-Arab, the existence of the Mahdi is a “dead” hypothesis.)
A “live” belief blends logic, temperament, and experience (framework of reference), often embracing comfortable uncertainty over abstract foreign certainty.
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Common sense hinges on a “final vocabulary”—an unexamined framework of truths shaping our judgments. The ironist resists this closure, finding such truths contingent, not eternal.
Unlike metaphysicians (or realists), who question in order to seek firmer ground, ironists destabilize inherited meaning, aware that claims to universality often mask circular reasoning. Irony becomes both method and refuge, exposing how “truths” rely on consensus, not necessity (wisdom of crowds or madness of the mob?).
Thus, relativism is less a flaw than an honest confrontation with interpretive fragility. Irony, then, is not nihilism—it is intellectual humility resisting dogma disguised as clarity.
(from Richard Rorty)
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To be a romantic is to be unable to live with a distinction, a separation. The romantic urge is a unification of all things: emotions, hopes, and dreams are also reality, just as the transcendent abstractions are also ontologically immanent.
According to the grown-ups, this is juvenile. Those hard-minded, soulless pragmatists cut themselves off from sublime wonders, creating a bedrock of stability upon which they are but one more rock.
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Many educated individuals forego parenthood not from disdain, but realism.
Burdened by debt and stagnant wages, they confront an economic architecture that defers adulthood and denies autonomy. To raise children responsibly is to possess time, stability, and capital—resources increasingly elusive.
This isn’t mere delay; it’s structural disenfranchisement.
The path to family is blocked by serfdom disguised as opportunity: endless education, precarious employment, and unreachable housing. What emerges is not immaturity, but recognition of systemic design—one that privileges subjugation over stewardship, and obstructs the generative act of creating a hopeful future.
On the other hand, having children while acknowledging this is to embrace hope or faith in progress, or to maintain at least that it is not so dire as hyperbolic blog posts announce.
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Common sense aphorisms can appear contradictory but often point towards a truism.
“It’s not what you say, but how you say it”
counterposed with
“It’s not what you say, it’s what you do that counts”
leads us to realize what you say is not essential (content), but the aesthetic form or concrete event is our means to derive meaning.
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When nebulous things like desires or memes are measured—mapped as flows of social capital—they become commoditized and materially reliable: abstract quantities become ‘quantifiable’ at scale and thus more influential.
This epidemiological spread of influence swells through exposure: the more it floods our environment, the more it converts into belief and belief into action, bypassing logic and destabilizing what we consider ‘real.’
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Criticism often serves as an intellectual escape, allowing us to scrutinize others while avoiding deeper engagement with reality.
We readily dissect motives, biases, and flaws in individuals yet neglect the same rigor when examining institutions, ideologies, or our own inconsistencies.
This selective application of reason reflects a cognitive bias—externalizing problems is easier than confronting personal or systemic change. We are logical, but are selective in our application of reason.
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