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The downside of a goal oriented world

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All around us, day in and day out we are suffused with messaging to be our best selves. As Henry Rollins sang “Do it, don’t think about it, do it!” (which Nike immediately stole and turned into their own “Just Do It” ad campaign). Self help books instruct us in a miriad of ways about how to visualize our goals and how to achieve them, despite the odds. After being dragged to church the preacher has us pray as a way to reach our goals, no matter what. I remember thinking at this time that I guess that I should leave my wife and kids to reach my goals, unachievable otherwise. This “Achieve your goals, no matter what” mantra that life gives us causes tension and is probably the root cause for many broken homes. Many of you have endured from me over the years an expression of this tension. My massive mental bag of goals, such as having hours a day to play my piano, ride every skatepark in the world, yada yada, have given me nothing but grief. I have great kids and a hard ass May as...
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The Good Game

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Can a single person make the world a better place? I propose a game to fix the world. All it would take is the sacrifice of most of one billionaires wealth. If Jeff Bezos donated 152 billion dollars to the game, he would still have, as of July, 20 billion dollars left to himself. Here’s the game: Announce to the world that those between the ages of 20 and 40 today would have a chance to win 1 million American dollars in 5 years time if they have completed a 4 year college degree, with a greater than a C average, and have less than $50,000 (I’m not sure about this amount…) in total family assets as of today. 150 thousand winners throughout the world would win. The distribution of winners would be completely unbiased and based upon population density as of the current census. Where you are designated as living, as of this past census, is where you would be counted. The only other criteria that would be taken into account would be how good the person is in 5 years. During that time, ...
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Temporally Symmetrical Consciousness

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After reading an article the other day describing a new theory that time may be symmetrical, running backwards at the end of the universe, I began to contemplate that reverse universe. The opposite of entropy and everything that ever happened going backwards. The universe would be devoid of consciousness, or would it? You may remember some records created to play back spoken words when played backwards. Sure, not too hard, but consciousness? Perhaps this will remain in the realm of fantasy till the day that we create our post life consciousness that will have virtually limitless intelligence. Perhaps, if they find that time is symmetrical, they will then endeavor to create such a consciousness. I’m fascinated by this reversible consciousness idea. It’s kind of nice to have Dark Matter and Dark Energy as unknowns to mentally see if what we know about it would fill in the missing puzzle piece of some grand conjecture. Perhaps this one?
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