Our greatest furies spring from unfortunate events which we had not factored into our vision of reality.

– Alain de Botton

Simple things such as when someone drives poorly or when someone cuts the line makes us fly off the handle. But oftentimes, we've done that ourselves. And we've always had a valid excuse for it. Well, similarly, in many of these cases, maybe the guilty party did have an excuse too.

We simply don't factor that into our vision of reality.

Imagine then, what all we don't factor when shit goes seriously wrong.


Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

– Charlie Munger

Requires no commentary.


Have you thought about what experience is? It is the feeling in response to a challenge, is it not? To respond to a challenge is experience. And do you learn through experience? When you respond to a challenge, to a stimulus, your response is based on your conditioning, o the education yo have received, on your cultural, religious, social, and economic background.
...
If you do not break away from your background, your response to any challenge only strengthens or modifies that background.
...
So experience does not free the mind, and learning through experience is only a process of forming new patterns based on one's old conditioning.

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

I know this is a long one and I've cut out a couple of sentences as well. We are pattern machines. We are taught to eat at certain times, sit at a desk and study/work at certain times. And respond to certain situations with certain actions. But isn't that just programming - the same function runs every time a certain action is triggered?


Thanks for reading. And do share anything that caught your fancy.