What was the 10s’ as a decade? My pat answer: a seismic shift in American culture. What used to be nerd culture went mainstream, or more accurately, became gentrified. The Internet Lost Its Joy. Smartphones and social media fed off each other, stuck in one gigantic circle-jerking feedback loop. We are all online all the time. No such thing as AFK.
Continue reading Best Films of the 2010s: A RetrospectiveTag: pessimism
Hemingway
According to Ernest Hemingway, we are born with a raw optimism, but as we acquire knowledge of life’s inescapable suffering and fundamental emptiness, we are irreversibly damaged. Therefore, we must avoid the pain of thinking too much or feeling too much.
Continue reading HemingwayCarlyle
The British essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle was just another chronic melancholic, easily irritable thinker who failed to locate any profound meaning in life.
Continue reading CarlyleSchopenhauer
The absolute brilliant philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was a cranky loner whose ingenious acumen have had a profound effect on modern man’s dignity. He argued that severe pessimism is the only perspective from which the world can be viewed soberly.
Continue reading SchopenhauerShakespeare
The moral and philosophical predicaments of Shakespeare still haunt us today. His sonnets exhibit a fixation with time, uncertainty and death, whereas his plays explore the gory existence beneath the pleasant veneer we manufacture.
Continue reading ShakespeareNihil Sub Sole Novum*
Discontent with the increasing wealth and unchecked corruption of the Roman Catholic church helped to interrupt and eventually break down the stagnant worldview of the Dark Ages, and the long slumber of free inquiry slowly began to end. For the first time in a thousand years, investigations into the nature of things could be directed without clerical tampering and the threat of heresy.
Continue reading Nihil Sub Sole Novum*Apropos of Nothing
In 314, the Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan assured the Christian hegemony over several competitors. You’d think the anxieties and melancholia present during the Roman Empire’s decline would be partially alleviated with the official sanction of Christianity. Hardly!
Continue reading Apropos of NothingSeneca
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, one of Rome’s most famous philosophers spent a large part of his life trying to convince his student Nero the finer points of being a Stoic-flavored philosopher-king. While he did demonstrate unselfish nobility in his writings, his life was rife with greed, made base with expediency, and plagued with conspiracies. Continue reading Seneca
Lucretius
Not only was Lucretius my all-time favorite Roman philosopher, he was also the greatest of philosophical poets who lived through one of the most anarchic periods in Roman history: a time of dictatorship, civil war, and conspiracies. No one was safe from this world. Continue reading Lucretius
We Know Nothing
The hallmark of the Hellenistic era was chaos due to the deteriorating political influence of the city states and countless ruinous wars among autocratic rulers. That Tyche, the mercurial goddess of chance, was highly venerated everywhere, clearly indicates the instability of the time. Hellenistic people were deeply cognizant of the omnipresence of contingency in their lives.