CxD #256: 🚫 School Subjects + 📚’23 #26: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½ The Lost Soul + A Philosophical Poll
Observation 1: It is shocking to me that in my entire career as a student— over twenty years in seemingly endless duration 😳, I have never had a single class in most of these domains: taxes, insurance, home repair, car maintenance, personal finance— and yet much of my adult life is spent incessantly dealing with them, like a swarm of mosquitoes that won’t stop biting me.
In my formative years, I did learn that there was a Nina and Pinta and a Santa Maria —all boats — that sailed across the great blue sea. No mention of the indigenous people’s cultures they found once they hit land, or the genocide that then took place thereafter, however…
Question 1: Almost all of our current educational system remains perversely useless; why?
Observation 2: Stress management ought to be expanded to Character by Design and include ethics, morality, and emotional intelligence, as well as the therapeutic skills and methods with which to cultivate them, wouldn’t you agree?
2. The Lost Soul: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
A beautiful, spacious, mostly visual reflection about our collective anxieties and how they stem from our increasing inability to sit still and just be.
I cannot recommend this enough as a gift to others, especially people who “don’t have time” but are constantly twaddling their thumbs on their phones or watching tv and the nasty news cycle, caught in the addictions of modern life.
3. Currently reading:
In it, I read a chapter that explained Immanuel Kant’s philosophy to me in a way that I finally had a big-time aha! moment, despite having read many summaries of Kant up to this point. So maybe my insight arose out of a cumulative effect, or maybe it was this particular author’s clarity that did it—or some combination. But now I understand why the phrase “objects conform to our knowledge” has Copernican-level impact.
Consequently, I’m hoping to take the pulse of our community and its relationship to philosophy. Any additional commentary would be useful, especially regarding specific influential names or books or struggles or victories.
A truly captivating, honest, revelatory conversation with the current world champion of magic about his process rather than the magic itself. So much humility and wisdom here, and utterly fascinating.
This edition of CxD brought to you from a mysterious island full of the majesty of life and all its bountiful highs and lows, beauty and tragedy:
To those not yet on board:
