RUBBISH

People talk shite about music: "this is better than that." In my view nothing is any better than anything else necessarily. You just like some things more than others. That’s the beginning and end of it. What you’re really saying when you say this is better than that is: "I am better than you."

PROOF

There are probably few things in life that can be proved absolutely, maybe none at all. But if there are, it is probably a relatively small amount of the things that we care about. You can’t prove that a song is good for example, or that an action is right, or an emotion is true. You can’t prove that you love somebody. You can’t even prove, free of scepticism, that anything exists outside of your own consciousness. So proof doesn’t say very much beyond conforming to a set of values i.e. things that are empirically testable, can be repeated, can be confirmed by observation. In other words, things that conform to sense experience.

MAILER ON MONROE

Norman Mailer remarked that the combination of great ambition and high sensitivity in a person was not a good thing. He was referring to Monroe. It can’t be so unusual a mix and may apply to many. Being subject to the bi-polar aspects of soaring determination followed by bouts of crushing insecurity virtually goes with the territory for certain types and not a few creatives I would have thought. Anyone prepared to take things to the edge I imagine could be similarly prone.

ASK NOT WHAT

In the end, you’ll be measured in life by what you give to the world, not what you take from it. Being merely a consumer is nothing to be proud of. Humanity will look back on this period of unabashed materialism with some contempt, that a great opportunity was lost.

FEELINGS & SOCIETY

It’s probably the case that men validate feelings less than women. That doesn’t mean they’re not feeling as much. The individualisation in society just now has brought an increased validation of feelings generally (men & women). This is probably good for personal psychology because it might decrease the amount of inner conflict. The danger with such validation is that it becomes more acceptable to act on feelings. This can be bad for human relationships and for wider society both of which are dependent on restraint. If people acted on every impulse the result would be anarchy and chaos.

RANDOM

There is no such thing as random, only bigger and more complicated patterns that can’t be identified, patterns that are too difficult to see, which would require an almost infinite amount of knowledge to analyse. How could you know that? It has to be a matter of faith. Atheism is a leap of faith because you can never really know one way or another whether God exists or not. You just have to take a view based on the strength of your faith and go with it. So with random.