Tag: random thoughts
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In my college years, I often lamented at length in my journals about so-called higher education being rarely more than an extension of high school. On some rare occasions, a professor would present more advanced and challenging material, but those happenings were few and far between. I was thinking about what my first class would…
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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the entertainment industry. It’s not really a novel realization, and it’s been hit on by quite a few critics and commentators, but it’s really beginning to bother me. Human creativity seems to be waning in such a dramatic way in recent years. There are so many formulaic attempts at…
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Illusions of success, or perhaps even delusions of success, have become the key reason that most talented individuals find themselves in dead-end avenues of employment or must struggle as “starving artists” in an attempt to get by. The issue is not in having employment where you have to answer to a boss or going to…
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Here’s the problem: it’s EXTREMELY hard to be random nowadays. “General Interest” blogs don’t often fare well unless they have super-viral content and extremely powerful social network presences. I’m not a pro at social media. I’ve rarely had anything go viral, outside of a few miracles on StumbleUpon, which sadly no longer exists. I’ve had…
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Whenever I get in a bad mood, I do what I can to reframe the situation. I try to put what’s negative into a more positive frame so that I can build off of that. One of the ideas that I’ve gotten when trying to figure out how to be more positive is the idea…
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Anti-intellectualism flatters the ego by lowering the bar. It preaches that ignorance is purity and intellect is arrogance—but that’s just cowardice with good PR. We’ve been herded into a comfortable disdain for complexity, told that questioning is elitism, and that clarity is snobbery. It’s trendy to sneer at ‘book smarts’ and glamorize gut feelings. But…
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Some time ago, while sifting through some old articles I wrote for the writing advice book I never bothered to finish, I stumbled across this passage that I decided to file away for later: “Write for you first, always. Just focus on getting your thoughts out of your head and onto a tangible medium. You…
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Life has become like a shitty MMO RPG with strategic elements. While this might sound like a spicy critique of modern life, it’s hard not to see some frightening comparisons when we start seriously criticizing the systems we find ourselves trapped in: bureaucracy, career ladders, performative social media quests, productivity tracking, even gamified apps that…