I find my self asking many of my friends these days to start blogging or at least posting commentary on interesting web content. My motivations are partly selfish and partly altruistic. The thought process:
I like to befriend smart people. They have good ideas. Conversations about good ideas lead to better ideas. Geographic constraints should not prevent good ideation. The internet allows us to discuss ideas in a way without geographic or even temporal constraints (our conversation need not be at a time when we are both free).
I suppose if I were living in the pre-internet era I would be a letter writer, exchanging ideas with old colleagues from University on pen and paper. Email would be a similar mechanism to letters, but it seems like a waste to not share conversations that others may find valuable. Hence, blogging satisfies my selfish desire to learn from my friends and also achieves the good of perhaps inspiring others or encouraging them to think.
A few weeks ago, I convinced my friend Vishal to start blogging. He has made up for lack of frequent posting with some pretty lengthy and technical essays. Vishal is MD/PhD candidate and his blog is A Tough Pill to Swallow.
Today, I’m very excited that another old friend, Vincent, has started publishing. I cannot help reblog his sentiments on the Odyssey:
The human condition - Last person standing thought experiment
In The Odyssey, the author or redactor implies that he who lives alone must be either beast or God.
I agree. I contend that people, whether or not they identify themselves as misanthropes, in fact live only because other people live. Ask yourself, after all.. If you were the last person alive, would you want to keep living? For how long? Only if you had a dog? That’s what I thought.
First, let’s deal with an objection:
Of course, I am very willing to listen to those would live on, but I don’t think there are many. Those who do defiantly assert they’d be happy without people (even if they could survive easily, which they couldn’t) may suffer from a lack of imagination.
There are, however, recluses, who choose even without a sort of postapocalyptic impetus choose to live lives mostly or almost entirely devoid of human contact. But the very fact that these people are considered to be strange highlights that they are different than most humans..which brings us back to where we started. Also, many recluses only stay recluses for a certain period of time (psychoses like schizophrenia are likewise of varying but often short duration), after which they once again seek out human contact.
Last, even to a recluse the knowledge that he / she could NEVER meet anyone again would probably seem more depressing than uplifting (if it were all of a sudden compulsory rather than voluntary).
So? So what Vince? You call that vInsight?
So this: the above entails that the purpose of life lies in our relationships to other people. It also implies that the other things we seek are sought merely as means to the end of relationships with people. In the case of money this is pretty obvious (because money is never an end in itself but only a medium of exchange to get other things), love is of course impossible without other people..but there are other things sought that are quite surprisingly not ends in themselves. Hell, some are even subversively not ends in themselves. What about I myself? That’s an interesting one. Is it possible that I love myself only because my fellow humans exist? I think the answer is yes. And I need to start living like that.
via http://www.freewebs.com/vinsight/thoughts.htm - Vince’s interpretation is spot on and the author’s insight is brilliant. Pretty much every difficult question in life, you can find an answer to in the Iliad and the Odyssey. I happen to like this answer quite a bit.
Keep publishing, friends. I am listening.
