Ageing is cool

There are several opportunities for us to learn from the mistakes or trials or successes in our lives, generally based on the various crossroads that we have encountered on the road of life.  Some philosophers contend that phycoanalysis helps people to understand and deal with the various situations in their lives that have affected them in some way or another.  Of course, information givers- those people who broadcast knowledge to a mass audience, portray aging, especially in american society as an ill, as a place that one should avoid.  This in turn affects many people in  a negative way, causing anxiety, at least to fear of aging.Yet, to me aging is great.  I have learnt a lot, failed a lot cried a lot and dodged many projectiles-both figuratively and physically. And time has taught me how to avoid, make up, work harder, rest, or keep chugging along depending on the situation.

There is no other way to learn about life but through living it for oneself. In the same way, it is highly improbable that we can gain knowledge, wisdom, wealth, and understanding without the help of time.  While it is true that life is a downhill battle, and that certain age points, like sixteen, twenty one, thirty, and sixty-five, are milestones for many, most of these can positive ones if we are willing to believe that our life has a purpose.  Certainly, our purpose is independent of time.

So in essence: ageing is cool. Embrace it. 

Reward... [and punishment]

While I was in grad school, just to piss off my committee, an possibly to learn more about the world, I took a graduate level English class (I'm a chemist... lets just say they didn't like the idea, and wanted to make me take an engineering course to make up for it, but I digress).  I learnt a lot from this class, about the writing process, about logical flow, about the balancing of ideas and such. But, there are two things that i consider the take home lessons for grad-school as a whole:  that we should always take time to walk in the shoes of the other, and that life is made of weird juxtapositions, word, or phrases that go together.  Examples of these are black and white, gold and silver, and reward and punishment.

Rewards are cool.  Rewards are in the purest form, a token of gratitude for doing a task correctly. Note here I said doing, and not completing. The tokens also come in many flavors.  From words to actions to tangible objects, tokens of gratitude are meant to offer praise to one for being considerate, selfless, sharing, kind, and other things like these.  Not surprisingly, our brains have become used to gaining rewards, up to the point where rewards affect our brain chemistry.  Rewards make us happy.

Of course, there is the opposite of reward- punishment. Punishment is bad. Like a reward a punishment in its purest form is a token of disapproval for not completing a task, or for doing something in a way that is not expected or approved by the other. Punishments taste sour, make us sad, mess up our brain chemistry to the point that we feel sorry for ourselves.  Punishments shame us.  Most people despise punishment.

Because these paired words have so much effect on people, the concept of reward /punishment has been exploited for centuries with the main purpose for controlling people.  Religion offers the token of a heaven for people who follow their "moral" ways, credit card companies offer us points to save on more crap that we already have or do not need.  And governments have prisons for those people who royally eff-up.

I just lost my trend of taught.

Anyways, my point is, rewards are cool.  Punishments suck.  People use these to mess with our heads, to the point where we try to reward/punish our selves to mess with our own heads.  Crazy!

Now I need a reward, hmm what will it be?

On fear.

Fear is a self fulfilling circular construct that makes us weak. Yet fear was designed to protect us.

Sounds like some smart infuluential person should say this, and maybe they did, but I got a chance to think about it.  It appears that there are so many phobias in the world.  People are afraid of heights, birds, cats, mice, caterpillars.  Many people know that their fear is irrational, but still they have the fear.  Such fear is innate, and no matter what we do to trick our minds  into believing that we can deal with this issue, the slightest moment that we run into auto pilot, start to cruise in order to deal with external stressors, the possibility of triggering that fear increases.

So what do we do about it.  Can we avoid stress all of the time? The short answer is no.  Can we avoid shifting into autopilot? Well we must eat, and to eat we must take the stress of work and society.  Thus we must learn to recognize when we enter autopilot.

To summarize, stress enhances fear.  Fear makes us crazy, craziness makes us stressed. Thus we should learn to recognize when we are stressed to avoid getting crazy.

Partnerships

Humans are social animals.  We need each other to survive.  Whether it is the case that we need a job from some one or a company so that we can have that necessary funds to get our business done, or it is that we invite people into our company so that we can share our lives, our joy sadness or whatever.  We are indeed social animals and I am one too.