Hello everyone, hope this post finds you well. This week was all over the place honestly, and I did a lot of disconnected things. Here are the interesting things that stand out for me:
I use Arch, btw.
I finally made the switch over to arch Linux this week. The most important factor influencing my decision was simply the fact that Arch is fun (in the masochistic tinkering around with everything until you create a powerful tool personalized for you kind of way) and that I would get to learn a lot through the configuration process.
It is still not completed, however the whole process was in retrospect not as bad as I had imagined. I still have to config files etc. sorted out to create a truly personalized distro, however the process of shifting taught me a lot about mounting, partitioning disks and computer architecture stuff.
I would recommend this for anyone who enjoys the process of tinkering with things to figure stuff out. It’s like vim in a sense where editing almost becomes a game to find the most efficient way to modify a text file which can make even mundane tasks interesting. There is something truly wonderous to me about having a machine fully configured to your needs. I’ll probably make a guide this week detailing the process.
Poetry
I have been meaning to start my Instagram poetry account for the past two months nearly and this week I finally got around to doing it. It is rather daunting to post things on social media and put them out there for criticism, but it’s a fun experience. I will need to learn more about the principles of design and engagement in the upcoming weeks to truly grow this.
Here’s a link to my poetry page if you want to check it out. The first poem I published is called ‘The Space Between’ tries to capture some eerie, absurd but ultimately bittersweet, humanist emotions.
Adlerian Psychology and Philosophy Rant
This week I started reading ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi. The idea of teleology as opposed to etiology when it comes to a primary framework for understanding our actions seemed quite powerful to me. It shifts the locus of control back into our hands, and allows us to attribute the meanings we desire to our past experiences. In my own life, I have also observed how the goal is decided first, and the rationalizations are manufactured by the mind around it. Whether one is totally free to choose their goal is something the book did not make arguments for yet, and what I found is a little bit unconvincing but I don’t know for sure. (considering things like Body Keeps the Score, it is hard to say that we can deny trauma in its totality when it has manifested in somatic conditions, or rather how much your conditioning influences your goal setting).
I also reread through some parts of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (Swami Vivekananda’s commentary) and watched videos and read some more articles about Deleuze. I also synthesized much of what I was thinking about as a result of all these musings in a blog post on my old blog which was basically a philosophical rant combining ideas from all these different places (but is a bit hard to decipher so I would advise you to be patient).
That’s all for this week. You may have noticed that the form of this letter is a bit different from the last one I sent. I am still experimenting (and would love to hear your feedback) on how I can make this weekly letter valuable to you. If you have any comments or thoughts, feel free to mail me back or comment on the website. Thank you for reading.