The world is in conflict. To name a few: we’ve passed 1000 days since the Ukraine invasion; there remain ongoing conflicts between Israel and Hamas; North and South Korea are still at odds; and an atheist-theist war is dividing the west.

They’re certainly no easy way to resolve these conflicts, otherwise they would be happening. Needless to say, these wars are larger manifestation of the conflicts you face in your everyday life. Perhaps if we can elucidate the source of these conflicting ideas, we can begin to understand how things have gotten so far.

That begs the question, are they complicated, or merely complex?

In your 20s, the most common line of advice from older friends is something like “explore and learn as much as you can before you turn 30”.

It sounds like great fun, but as you get older you start to wonder, how much learning is too much?, or more specifically, how much of my learning is actually an excuse for my turning away from responsibility and action?.

It is quite difficult to argue that learning is not beneficial, but is there a way to lead your ‘era of exploration’ in a way that is actually productive? For example, i’m sure if you dug deep enough, you could derive some the utility in studying the impact of the Beetles on today’s culture of music, but as pre-med in undergrad, perhaps that isn’t serving your goals of becoming a neurosurgeon. If you have an iota of sense, you would understand

As a researcher, scientist, academic, truth-seeker—whatever you want to call it—I ask myself pretty much everyday: ‘what’s the point of telling the truth?’.

That’s a serious question you may want to ask yourself; or more specifically if we want to get to the crux of the matter, “why not lie?”. You can craft your words so that you can avoid taking responsibility for things you probably should, or to get some sort of advantage that you don’t really deserve—which happens all the time, by the way, and for good reason. There’s certainly appeal to it.

So, you might wonder ‘if I can get what I want, when I want it, why not do that?’. I think part of the answer is…

I felt that title was warranted, given what awaits. We’re going to dip our toes in the deep end—the Mariana Trench is probably more accurate.

Decoding the metaphysics of the universe. That’s quite the mountain we’ve got here—perhaps I’ve condemned myself to something rather Sisyphean.

I think we’ve started forget how important writing is—and by ‘we’, I mean us in the west, the most literate people in the world, now and ever before. The world of education has been raided by…