Love of Lights

Procrastination is a killer. It kills success and potential happiness. It is the perfect companion to anxiety. It is a symptom of fear. As I've increasingly grown more anxious in life, my procrastinatory tendencies have surged. Knowing that to do something now will serve me well, I put it off all the same. I'm doing it right now with the final edits of 3 essays I have to do for mid-January. Every day I don't work on them is a day of less research and less perfection, and yet I avoid checking my emails and the comments my professors have because of some kind of fear . Fear, really, is the main issue here. Fear really has a hold on me. I fear the most ridiculous things, the smallest things. I fear what people might think, which manifests itself in a thousand little avoidances and procrastinations. Don't get close to people, you'll come across as too needy. Don't post too much online, you'll come across as too attention-seeking, or people will see through th...

Over the past 5 years, I have unravelled as a person somewhat. Going into my first year of university, I recall being enthused, passionate, loving, and ambitious. I wanted to develop intellectually and personally; I wanted to build friendships and desperately find love; I wanted to perfect myself in the art of living -- perfect my intellect, perfect my sociability. Of course every 18 year old is an idealist if they haven't been truly broken yet. Up to that point, I had had terrible things happen to me from a personal point of view -- I had been moved around the world a couple of times, which meant being torn from friends in a heartbreaking way; I had witnessed the destruction of my mom and step father's marriage; I had loved deeply and unreciprocally. All these things cast wounds that turned to scars, but there is such thing as youthful perseverance, and I broke through it. I think these tough times planted the seeds of anxiety and depression in me, ready to blossom at a lat...

Self-efficacy is a concept in behavioural psychology that basically describes one's belief in oneself. Yeah, it sounds lame and clichéd, but this is something that people have attempted to scientifically study and have patterns and explanations about. Basically, high self-efficacy means you have a "can-do" spirit; low self-efficacy means you doubt your ability to achieve your goals. I've fluctuated in levels of self-efficacy throughout my life. As a child, I believe I've had extremely high levels of self-efficacy: I can and will be an author, I can and will get into x university, I can and will be one of the smartest in my class, etc. etc. One of the key features of self-efficacy is that having it affects outcomes . In other words, psychology has shown: if you believe you can do it, you have a higher chance of successfully doing it. Isn't that crazy? One aspect of success is literally self-fulfilling your own prophesies. Over the past few years, I've h...

I was basically just gonna say I realise you can be in a relationship and just secretly still be attracted to and interested in other people, but by doing it secretly, I feel like it just makes it worse if it turns out your feelings for another person are actually serious. Like, if it were just understood by the people in the relationship that it’s normal to still be attracted to and interested in other people, you could just be more honest and feel less guilt and hopefully there would be less animosity. So for example, if I were with a girl for a while and she mentioned one day that she’s been hanging out with a guy and she thinks she might have feelings for him (and he might have feelings for her), I’d naturally be a bit jealous and sad, but then I would ask, “Does this mean you don’t feel anything for me anymore?” And if she said yes, she’s lost her feelings for me -- sad day, and the relationship is over. But the honesty also leaves open the possibility that she says, “No, I just ...

One way to figure out how to improve your levels of happiness is to figure out what circumstances make you sad and to minimise them. This might be more effective than merely trying to figure out what makes you happy and doing that, simply because it's easier to get sad than it is to get happy, so blocking sadness out at the root provides you with a kind of safety net, so to speak, upon which you can build your happiness. In other words, if you're trying to build your happiness on rotten foundations (having not yet removed and cemented over the possible sources of sadness), your happiness is likely to crumble more frequently. Now, sadness, like almost everything, has a structure by which it operates. It's not impossible that all the things that make you sad make you sad individually, with no connection to each other, but typically there is a shared feature amongst them that makes you sad. Instead of analysing every single thing one-by-one, it's going to be more useful ...

I'm a naturally anxious person. I vacillate between thinking I perhaps do have a mild disorder I should see somebody about and thinking it's just a fall-out from my way of thinking and my personality. Of course those two things aren't mutually exclusive, but if I think of it more in terms of the latter than the former, it makes me feel as though I have more agency over it. Lately (and for the past, like, 8-10 years of my life, but particularly lately) I have contemplated just that -- what ways can tinker with my way of thinking that might get me to be less anxious. I've come up with something that I want to try to internalise. If I don't reflect too heavily on the possible results of an event, my natural disposition is to expect that the worst case scenario will be horrifying and to avoid putting myself in that position. That's called being risk-averse, and I don't remember ever actively deciding to be that kind of person, but it just happened at some poin...

Hello, blog, it's been a while. The last time I wrote here was a week after I had done my last exam, and now I'm almost half a month away from beginning my masters course in philosophy. I snagged the grade I needed to -- I did all right. However, I won't lie, not everything is dandy. There are difficult times ahead. Frankly, this is the first time I'm going into a year of independence with no real clue about how my finances are going to work themselves out. I'm setting myself up for some difficult times, and perhaps I haven't been the wisest in the way I've decided to delve into this. I know of another friend that got a job for a year and has picked up a masters and is doing that part time as she works on the side: a much more fiscally responsible tactic. However, I was scared and anxious to plough on with life and had no other options really. I've never held down a job, so I have no experience in any field, and there is nothing I want to do except thi...

So, it's over. About a week ago, I came out of my final undergraduate exam. It was a difficult exam that I was massively underprepared for, but I hope I did not do so badly as to require a resit, or as to have pulled my average down from the aim of a 2:1 to a 2:2. If that does happen, I'm aware that I kind of deserve it. I lost my spirit with regard to revising for Italian, so I basically didn't. Let's just hope to god things go okay re other grades. Well that was a depressing opening. I wanted this to be a retrospective about my time at uni and then a prospective about my future, but now I'm already a bit down from thinking about those exams. Dang. No worries, onwards with the show. I think what I'll do with this post is break down my time at uni as I remember it, year by year, reflecting on how I've grown. Then I'll consider the future briefly (tho I seem to do that often on this blog anyway). Here goes. Pre-Uni What bright and hopeful days -- on...

I think morality works essentially in the following way: Firstly, we have certain reactions to phenomena, negative or positive. This is the basis of "good" and "bad". I think the negative responses are more likely to be universal than the positive ones, because we have more evolutionary incentive to avoid bad things than chase particular good things (I could be wrong about that, but it's a guess). Secondly, actions can result in phenomena that we either react positively or negatively towards. Those actions that result in negative phenomena (i.e. we feel negatively towards the result), we feel they are bad. Those actions that result in positive phenomena, we feel they are good. In other words, our basis for moral reasoning/justification is: if the action results in a negative phenomenon, it was bad, and the inverse for good. This sounds simplistic at the moment, but we'll see why morality is fucked up in a minute. We grow to learn what actions result in...

I'm at quite a low point in my life right now. I'm in my final year of university, coming to the end of a joint honours degree, half of which I tried terribly to get out of but wasn't able to. As a result of that, I'm probably going to do poorly in that half, which will bring my overall grade down. On the one hand, this is upsetting because I know I am capable, I'm smart, and I have drive in an amenable environment, but, given my present environment, all those things have been lacking, and I've been a very poor version of myself. Still, though, university is coming to a close, which means two things for me: 1) this terrible situation is coming to a close, and 2) I need to think about what I want to do next. This is a terrifying prospect, naturally. When you're at a low point in life, feeling like the past 4 years have been a questionable investment, you start to panic about figuring out what to do next (in a pragmatic sense). So, I don't want to focus ...

At the moment, there are quite a few interesting political events occurring in the world. At some point during my university career, I've become somewhat more of a political creature -- which is typical of many, I guess -- so I've been keeping an eye out on what's been going on, in a minimal sense. The three things that one is constantly bombarded with in the news at the moment is: the rise of Trump in the American presidential candidate race, the unstable conditions in the Middle East causing mass emigration from the affected areas, the United Kingdom threatening to leave the European Union should the referendum swing that way. I'm the first to point out that commenting on and having opinions on political matters is a deeply difficult thing to do: to be able to speak trustworthily, you need to know about the social conditions in the country you're talking about (which in itself is multifactedly and "soft" - insofar as things will depend on context, so gen...

I want to be successful. I've always wanted to be successful. I'm particularly drawn to the tales of people who have made something of their lives, who have directed their energy towards something and proved themselves to the world in some way or another. None of this is particularly unusual. I think it's a fairly normal human emotion to have ambition and be drawn to those who have acted on and achieved something with their ambitions. However, desiring success is dangerously close to desiring fame , and these days that latter thing is a dirty thing to desire. There is a difference between the two. Having success does not entail having fame -- this much is obvious. You can be a successful employee at a company and have nobody but your co-workers and industry peers know your name (perhaps not even them, to be honest). You can be a housewife and raise wonderful children, and be known to nobody outside of your community and family -- this is a kind of success. So, success mea...