November 2004 Archives
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November 30, 2004

Nihilism

Nihilism. The word that brings shivers in me.

At this point, I am confused about what life is about. What should I be motivated about?

I find no meaning in anything.

Why should I do a job? Why should I earn money? All these basically seem to serve some pointless purposes... To have a good life, where I can survive, and create a tiny world around me which will facilitate survival for a few other people as well. Is survival the goal of life? Then I should nurture kids for doing the same thing? And they do the same thing again with their kids? So that this continues endlessly?

There is of course no point in this.

Then all the other purposes of life appear pointless as well. Enjoying yourself and being happy are pointless since we are ourselves temporary, and hence whether we are happy or sad doesnt really matter. To create meaning, we try to impact things which are outside ourselves, and hope that those impacts last longer than our own life times, and yes, many of us manage to do that - whether by leaving a child behind, or a building, or a company, or some money to the charitable organization, or some new idea, or some new organization, or some positive impact to a lot of people. But what have we got by changing our impact time from less than a century to one-and-a-half centuries? Or to two centuries? Is this the purpose of life? To change our impact to the world, and thus our meaning, to about a century or two?

Following religion and sustaining culture are pointless. Sustaining name and fame of the family are obviously pointless.

Most of everything is pointless.

Becoming very successsful is pointless, since success doesn correlate linearly with happiness. Is Bill Gates the happiest man in the world? Sometimes, I feel that some people working in cafe's might be some of the happiest...What I mean is, ofcourse, that being rich is not a necessary and not a sufficient condition for happiness, though having a basic level of money might be necessary to satisfy the biological beast within us.

Ofcourse, if we assume that fulfilling our biological goals (of survival and reproduction of ourself and of this and other species) is "the Moral Right", then we can put some purpose into all this.

Of course, this is just an assumption... but it works in a limited way.

Though, with our brain, we as a species have gone beyond that.

We found that we were fighting against each other for survival, and we were having lot of emotional/mental/physical suffering in doing this.

And with just survival as a goal, the consciousness in our mind did not want to accept the fact that its only purpose was to help the organism live and that that was the reason for its evolution. This refusal to accept made us seek more abstract, absolute and permanent goals.

We developed the concepts of God, meditation, faith, etc.

Interestingly, the concept of God, in some ways of looking at it, brings with it both absolutism and nihilism. Trying to concentrate on the specious, non-present God declaring all normal survival-based, ego-based life as materialistic, basically is nihilistic since the attempt to use faith as nihilism nullifier seems obvious.
(incomplete)

living life

Basically if you go down and see the trees, grass, cars, streets and people, and a smile appears on your face, you have learned to live life.

November 29, 2004

gita

From the short introduction to Gita page by Shri Asaramji Bapu, here are my brief notes:
Attraction to relatives/friends/fellow people is called materialistic, since this is temporary. Only soul is described as eternal. The "the knowledge of God and Truth; perishable nature of the body and immutability of the Soul" is told to be more important.
Krishna says, "That which is born shall die, But the Atman(soul) is neither born nor shall it die. Then what is the reason to be sad? If you do not do your natural duty, do not follow your own dharma(religion), do not fight in a religious war as a Kshatriya(warrior) should do, then dishonour will come to your door which shall be worser than death." Thus, duty of a person is considered very important -- more important than your relationships with other people and other materialistic desires. (Q: But how can duty be called non-materialistic? It comes about only from materialistic and temporary entities. Secondly, why action is necessary at all? I think that action should not be required since it only furthers goals of temporary material life. In fact, making yourself happy is also materialistic, since your happiness dies with your brain which produces the emotions. Then what is soul? Consciousness?)
" The person who performs his duties honestly and with sincere efforts disregarding the fruit of action becomes even minded."
"By constantly surrendering your action with all your heart to my All Knowing Supreme Soul, you fight this battle without any expectations, attachment and agony."
(to be continued)

ego

To be or not to be, that is the question. (Shakespeare)

To be or to become, that is the question.

To have ego or not to have ego, that is the question.

To do or not to do, that is the question.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

November 24, 2004

Firefox memory leak

I find two problems in Mozilla Firefox very troublesome:

  1. Firefox has many memory leaks. After opening up multiple tabs and windows, and then slowly reducing them, the memory usage doesnt go down. At this point I have 7 taps open in one window, and the memory usage is 286MB, with 193MB currently in physical memory. This is ridiculous. Ofcourse other people have also found similar problems.

  2. It crashes some times. Though I have noticed that this 1.0 release is not crashing that much, but earlier ones were.

UPDATE: Finally this issue is getting widespread exposure in Information Week newspaper. Hopefully this would cause firefox to take notice.

November 18, 2004

Convention

Convention is hitting me from all directions.

Today I had a phone interview, I screwed it all up. I was sleepy in the morning. I hadnt prepared for the interview. I was not very positive in the interview, I was lying on my bed, in a sleepy mood, when I gave the interview. All sort of convention is hitting me from all directions. Running away from conventionally accepted good habits is suicide.

I should basically now come down to the basics of what life is about -- what people do. What people think as good habits, just follow that. For example, get up in the morning, have a bath, keep your teeth clean, keep washing your clothes regularly, be very sincere about jobs, study, be disciplined, dont eat in front of the television, dont listen to too many songs, dont talk on phone with friends too much, take care of your books (i gave some of my important books to people in the college, but never cared to get them back), take care of your health, eat well, eat good food, early-to-bed-early-to-rise, worry about others in the family, worry about business, etc etc etc etc.

My all inconventional habits are actually troubling me now.

All convention is good. I must learn to live with that.

Commune - new blog

Anouncing my new blog -- Commune -- this will be a normal blog, wherein I will write conventional stuff - like my life, whats happenning, etc.

November 16, 2004

earthquake prediction right?

Some UCLA Geophysicist had predicted in April 2004 that an earthquake atleast of power 6.4 will strike Southern California before Sept 5, 2004.

Hmm, did the prediction work?

The list of worthwide significant earthquakes shows only one significant earthquake in california in this year, which is the one that occurred on September 28.

Well, if this one is considered as the earthquake he predicted, the prediction went wrong for many reasons

  1. the earthquake occurred on Sept 28, 23 days after his deadline
  2. the earthquake occurred in Central CA, and not southern CA
  3. the earthquake measured 6.0, so was less than 6.4

Another earthquake prediction gone awry.

Lets grow together

"Lets grow together."

November 11, 2004

google and yahoo search

what the heck,

Yahoo! Search's page (http://search.yahoo.com) is now almost a mirror of Google. (http://google.com).

I would have thought of Yahoo as one of the last companies that would run out of ideas and just copy pages from another website!! (well they have a different search engine itself from Google though)

November 9, 2004

Cars (Incomplete)

So I started the drive from Fremont BART.

I didnt know where I was going,
But I thought I knew the general direction.
Somebody had advised me.

I also had the map with me,
But the map was very vague,
you could hardly trace through it.

I started out slowly.

I saw many many cars,
all going in various directions,
I wondered where they were going.

I saw some of them going in one direction,
I joined them.

We had fun
(incomplete)

November 7, 2004

Direction is more important than the current position

Where you want to go is more important than where you are.

Where you are might be a situation that you dont like -- there might be a lot of problems associated with it.

But what I am now thinking is that I have been making the mistake of cursing where I am for all the pr0blems I had. That is not the right approach. I should instead try to look in the direction where I want to go, and think about how to go about it. If that involves solving some of the problems you currently have, then solve them. This keeps you in track of where you want to go, and also prevents you to just keep bickering about your current situation and doing nothing about it.

A simple example would be that we can try to curse us for not having a particular set of skills that you would need to get selected for nice jobs. The way to overcome is to think about it, and ask yourself really what you want to do -- and then try to head in that direction, by developing the required skills.

This simple (kind of obvious too) advise would help me in many ways I think.

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