Category Archives: Philosophy

God Bless America movie and What Would You Do

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Yesterday Keven had some new ideas of what we could watch as we both were having our days off and simply wanted to spent time not doing that much outside but staying together. Well, we ended up going quite early in the morning for food shopping and then to check out the dog park with Nora as we try to socialize her as much as possible before she turns 5 months and the dog become more guided by habits than by exploration 🙂

Anyhow, when we came back, we were watching some episodes on youtube of what would you do that were touching different social situations and dilemmas whether someone should get engaged in the situation that took place. And it is shocking to see how many people are being ignorant of what is happening around them and at the same time we were really touched by other people sensitivity and good will. This raises a question where is the line between minding your own business and being a good citizen that cares about other human beings. The story that brought tears in my eyes was actually the situation where a lesbian couple comes to restaurant with two kids and the waitress is being very impolite and rude. One guy wrote to the couple such a touching note that it was impossible not to get touched by the sensitivity of this guy. It shows that sometimes we actually don’t know where we can get support and who will be the ones that will help us. To be honest, this guy did not look that much as he would be caring about other people and here you go, it only shows how judgemental anyone can be, including myself. I always try to overcome this stigma of being judgemental about other people, but from time to time I do fall into this gap. I definitely recommend checking all the different situations of What Would You do and reflect on how you would act yourself. I definitely helps to evaluate what are your values and what you consider to be important in your life.

Then at night we decided to watch some movie and Keven suggested to watch “God Bless America”, so we watched it. The beginning was really good and as I love sarcasm, I really enjoyed it, but then more and more my attention was drifting away from the movie. Why? Well, because all of us always think that we are better than others, by others I mean anyone. We are better than our neighbour, because he….(insert yourself), we are better than our relatives, because we (insert again 🙂 ). Don’t get me wrong, I am not judging, because I act like that sometimes, but you know what? Everyone, I mean everyone always think that they are better than someone else. Keven is working in a place where drunk people can come and spend a night and most of people that come there are really low class people, but even they think that they are better than their neighbour or relative, because….So, it was the same with this movie…The guy decides to kill the reality show star, because she reflects how degraded the society is and how shallow the values are and how much people are not able anymore to have an authentic conversation and because his own life is going downhill and he thinks that he is gonna die anyway from brain cancer. Eventually he did not kill himself and ended up killing all “empty and shallow and disrespectful” people together with teenage girl. What’s the moral? I don’t know. I just know that anyways, watching them exploding brains of other people was no fun and that this leads nowhere. So, then it got me back to the series of “What would you do” and got me thinking about society and about values. Yes, I do agree that our society is very materialistic and that I myself sometimes am very judgemental, because I don’t find value in cars and jewelry and any other signs of wealth. But, on the other hand, if it makes people happy, why should I care what values do they have, but then I start wondering if they were thinking about values that they have or they just accepted the value system offered them by mass media. If the values are not authentic and just copy cat of what fashion offers, shouldn’t I try to talk and see whether they can evoke their own thinking. So, the hero of the movie, chose simply to kill those that do not share the same value system with him and is rather opposite from his own. But then again, what is worse? Being shallow or being killer?

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Saturday morning Education

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You know what is great about all the social media? That you end up exposed to things that you maybe would not have seen. This morning, I made my morning smoothie and coffee, sat in front of computer and checked my FB. I am lucky to know people from all walks of life and this time my attention was caught by link posted by a friend from my times in university where I was studying philosophy. Not only it is a great video and very nicely done, it also brought many memories as I highly respect Spinoza and his way of thinking and he was first philosopher that I wrote a paper on that appeared to be in philosophical conference. So, this video brought back all the memories of analyzing some part of Spinoza “Ethics” and going through the proofs of existence of God and how much into it I was. Sometimes I wish to go back to study, I still feel great need for intellectual stimulation, but at the same time I know that even though I have a great capacity for analyzing, I am not that much of creative type and probably would never end up being a creative thinker. So, I don’t think that academic career would be best option for me, however, I can tell you that I utterly enjoyed my years of studying and being buried among the books 🙂

Awake dreaming

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“One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead” – Oscar Wilde

I’ve been thinking sonoften and torturing myself with distinctik between real life and dream life. The distinction between conscious and unconscious, real and unreal. I am often confused when I feel as if I would seeing my life from outside. That makes me feel as if I would be an object of matrix, especially after having a period of really vivid dreams that resemble so much reality. Then I start wondering what is reality, where is it’s limits. Descarte famously stated “I think, therefore I am”. But then does it mean that when I think in my dream and try to solve problem that occurs in my dream, I am living the dream, so it would be reality given at that moment. Sometimes it is so hard to wake up that silently in my head I wish I would never have to wake up, but I do, because I feel I have, because I don’t want to miss my life.
But sometimes every day life is so routinous that it does not even feel real. There is this saying “Days are long, but years are short”. Sometimes I do feel that my life is a dream, because I can’t tell what I did last week. Well, I can tell, but tgat would be probably the same what I did a week before or before before. Probably that is why I like trying out new things and having projects, because I would not feel as if my days passed unnoticed and then converted into unnoticed years. When I think about it, the thing that saves me from overthinking is that if you ask me at any given moment if I am happy, I would say that I am. But when I think about the story of my life, there is not that much to tell. Wht do we alwqys feel that we have to tell the story? Douglas Coupland in his book “Player number one” said that there are only few special moments in everyones life and all the rest is everydayness. Does it mean that we life only to get those special moments?
The facts of your life seems to be much more important than how we feel in our everyday life. Our work defines who we are. I remember when I came Canada and I was not working, and I was meeting new people, they were asking me what is my job, I was replying that I don’t work, it was so hard for then to realize that there are plenty stuff to do if you don’t work. Actually, probabky you feel much more alive than working, because work, if you don’t like it or don’t enjoy that much even more deepens the feeling of absurdity of life. As Kierkegaard said “we are thrown into this world” and Sartre agreed with that and added that despite the fact that we are thrown into here, we still hold absolute responsibily for our lifes. So when you think about that… It doesn’t matter the statistical facts of our lifes, cause we are gonna die and statistic will die with us, all that matters how you feel your every moment, that is how you gonna feel about your life at the end, whether it would be dream or reality.

To think or not to think about happiness

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Happiness

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Inspiration

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“The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy“

Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld

You know it is so true…..I don’t know myself many people who live without envy and I definitely do not have a golden star for that. I try to eliminate any possible track of it, but I think I still have some left. At least I eliminated the need to compare myself to others. However, Imagine how wonderful it is not to have envy, I am sure that those people is so much more happier. First of all, it brings satisfaction with what you have. Obviously someone can defend this and say that people who are satisfied with what they have are not ambitious, because they do not strive for more. But at the end of the day, what does it matter? The only thing that will be important is whether you were happy in your life or not. I do not think that not feeling envy makes you passive in life 🙂 And it eliminates the other most important thing: comparison to the others. Instead of comparing all the time yourself to the other, you simply enjoy the success of the others and enjoy your own life. Isn’t that what it is all about? There always will be someone who will have “more” than you…It is like being in constant race for the horizon that can never be reached. There always will be someone more successful, someone having more money, someone having less money, someone having more responsibilities, someone having less responsibilities, someone looking better, someone looking less that good, someone having children, someone without children and so on. List is endless, it is just the thing that comparison to the others and building your life goals and satisfaction on such comparison leads eventually into dissatisfaction, because you can never be someone else.

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True rules of happiness

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I have a “Happiness project” calendar where each day you have something new written down…And somehow I forgot to takes of the pages from last few days, so I got quite few new ideas at the same time.

There is really nice one: “You can choose what you do; You can’t choose what you like to do”.

It is so true when you just think about it. I would like to like many things….I would like to enjoy art much more, but I don’t go to galleries and concerts, because I don’t like going. Keven would love to like wine, he thinks it is amazing to like wine, but he really does not like it, even though he would love to like it. There are so many things that seems so wonderful to be liked, but at the same time we know that we will never like them even if it looks awesome to like them…

The other one: “The absence of feeling bad isn’t enough to make you feel happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good“.

I don’t remember who said that the best source of feeling good is nature beauty. I don’t think that I have ever felt in my life more happy than capturing the beauty of nature. It can happen anywhere, at any time. Just walking around, lifting your head, inhaling and suddenly feeling unexplainable happy just being able to feel alive and feel it. It happens to me sometimes when I walk, I just feel happy that I can feel that I have the privilege to enjoy this beauty. And you know what? Just the realization of that feeling of happiness makes me feel even more happy, just because I am still able to feel it. The other source of me feeling good is my relationship, my marriage…Just looking at Keven makes me feel so happy, I can’t even explain, it is just feeling that overwhelms me by its power. I don’t say that I feel that every day, however, it happens pretty often and I am happy that I feel it and it just proves me that he really is love of my life. That realization once again makes me feel happy. I also find a source of feeling good when I work out or when I climb or do any intensive physical activity. It makes me feel good first of all because it brings positive energy and second of all, because it shows me the privilege of being able to enjoy my body and being able to push my limits. I am just happy that I can do that.

I believe that being able to identify the sources of feeling good already allows you to feel good. Of course, there might be days when it seems that nothing can make you feel good, so if in such moments you do have a list of the things that made you feel good in the past it should by itself already mitigate the feeling bad.


Telling It Like It Is

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Everything depends on the situation. I am a person that usually would tell as it is, but I learned that sometimes truth is not necessary and can hurt people. Anyways, it even brings up a philosophical question…What is truth? For instance, if I think that a dress is not fitting my friend, is it truth? I believe that this is just my perception that is subjective. Imagine in the same scenario that there is other person in the room and that person tells, that the dress look very nice. Is he telling the truth? you don’t know. He might be telling the truth, which in this sense would be expressing his subjective view honestly, or he might be lying by covering up his subjective truth. If he is being honest, then you have two truths that are equally valid and none of them has more weight. This is then for the person to decide which truth she find more acceptable. So, telling like not is is really tricky thing, because even if you think that you are right, actually, you are right just in the realm of your subjectivity that might be totally not reflecting reality. So, in such position it is better to hold your tongue unless you know that you opinion make positive outcome. I could develop this further, but I don’t think that someone would be really interested :))))

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On Acting My Age. What does that mean?

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Do I act on my age? Actually, I don’t know what that would mean. I act as I feel would be best for me. Would it be similar to what other people of my age do? Definitely not majority, however I don’t think I would be unique. I just like experiencing things differently. I stopped drinking my moms milk too early, i started walking too early, I started going to school at the age of 5, i was skipping classes, I dropped out of high school couple month before final exams and graduation and went to hitch-hike around europe at the age of 18. At 20 I studied in 2 universities simultaniously: law and philosophy, because I wanted to see my limits, at 21 I also started working part time in marketing, willing to push my limits even more. Then I graduated, kept working in marketing related area. Dropped everything after couple years and went to volunteer in farm in Italy and Spain for few months. Moved to live in BArcelona and worked in various jobs, like bars, hostels, pub crawls, because wanted to experience that. After couple years moved to Canada, try to enter to do MA and Phd and while waiting for results and immigration papers, started learning french and working as a nanny. If I Plan to have children, better get experience before. Am I acting by my age? I don’t know. I just keep following myself and my sometimes crazy life projects…Life is a gift, I just try to use it as much as I can and try not to forget this simple fact…