Sunday Posts

The world took time to build. It's not obvious to everyone, particularly those who want to destroy it.  I am always caught between the enthusiasm for revolution and allegiance to tradition. I have been lucky to have been born in a time and place where revolutions came mostly peacefully. The greatest of those I personally experienced was the Internet Revolution, which changed lives and ended things but was bloodless. Therefore, I could worship revolution with relative calm.  It took me time to discover the revolutionaries. I met them and their victims mostly in books. There was some significant absences in my life too, people who disappeared in the midst of a revolution just slightly before my time. But these presences and absences were still romantic, an invitation to escape boredom, as I lived in a largely stable world. But eventually, I met real revolutionaries. These first-hand meetings were different. These people were not trying to fight against phantom power, Tsars and w...

Double life is a bad thing - synonymous of being duplicitous! If one has another self, one can't be trusted - as we won't know what their real intentions are.  I find this logic problematic. Having a double life, for me, could be living two lives, both equally real. This is the opposite of being duplicitous, as that assumes only one 'real' self is possible.  But, I argue, that in the modern life, either no real self is possible, or an infinite number of equally real selves are possible. As we live inside stories scripted by others, it will all come down to how we define 'real'. If this means authentic, as one is, this may not be possible: Put my phone in my hand, and I am already different from who I am! If 'real' means enduring, one could say that they have many enduring selves, which manifest when circumstances for them emerge. Nothing dies in the digital realm, if we come to think of it, and those selves may endure even after our physical selves have ...