On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

Seneca, 4BC - 65AD

You will hear many people saying: "When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties." And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren't you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Is it wise to plan to only begin living life only once you're elderly?

Seneca thinks not.

Breakfast with Socrates, R. R. Smith

Poached, fried, or Socratic?

Take commuting. You're on a train, in a car, or on a bike, and periodically you're held up by a red light. It might be frustrating, but a red light is a literal manifestation of the law of fairness, that everybody should be allowed to have a turn. And although it is very literal, it's also abstract, for it has a depersonalised authority that we all pretty much obey. In this it enacts what Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century political theorist, said about how to make societies run smoothly. You've got to have an abstract authority for people to look up to and obey, or else they would all turn on each other. He thought that abstract authority had to be embodied in a sovereign, but in fact it's been transposed into something as humdrum as the red light, which regulates people's behaviour and so stops what Hobbes called the 'war of all against all'.

Weg Lob

Blog may be an ugly word (prone to evoking unpleasant images lying somewhere between the meaning of the words bog and blob), but it is not a dirty word. Blogs allow you to edit your mistakes with more elegance than in a Moleskine; albeit less romantic in appearance. The severe back and forth crossing out of sentences and subsequent clumsy superscript substitutions aren't conducive to clarity. Admittedly, I could rewrite ideas into my diary neatly in logical format, but where's the time efficiency in that? My Milo could get poisoned today and no one would ever be able to interpret my Golden Gaytime thoughts tomorrow because I hadn't yet reorganised them.

My thoughts have the potential to be the philosophical equivalent of a Golden Gaytime, both in freshness and golden-like properties.

So it follows, I need to get as many ideas out as clearly as possible as fast as possible, without compromising either of these parameters. A central aspect of our rationality is the desire for maximisation. This can be read as doing the best thing we can at any time; in this case, blogging. A blog is also as cheap as Samboy Chips, in fact it is cheaper than Samboy Chips and even notepads; it is free.







Furthermore, ideas lay idle saved in Microsoft Word. It could be said that the idea of ideas is to give other people a new idea.
Hence, I ethically, rationally, economically and technologically (though not metaphorically, that's just silly) hereby resign myself to bogs and blobs.

Now I think it's time for another milo...