Kategorie: Bücher

Weg mit der Meinung der Leute: unzuverlässig ist sie stets und zwiespältig. Weg mit den Studien, die du ein ganzes Leben lang betrieben hast: Der Tod soll über dich das Urteil fällen. So sage ich: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen und gebildete Gespräche und Worte aus Lehrmeinungen der Philosophen zusammengestellt, und eine gepflegte Ausdrucksweise zeigen noch keine wahre Seelenstärke; selbst noch so Furchtsame führen kühne Reden. Was du geleistet hast, wird sich dann weisen, wenn du in den letzten Zügen liegst.

Seneca Briefe, 26. Brief

Don’t click „Like“. Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. The reason I’m suggesting such a hard stance against these seemingly innocuous interactions is that they teach your mind that connection is a reasonable alternative to conversation.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Digital Minimalism

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Cal Newport

Gerade lese ich ein Buch mit dem Titel „Digital Minimalism“ und ich kann die Beobachtungen von Newport durch meine eigenen Beobachtungen bestätigen. An einer Stelle kritisiert der Autor beispielsweise, die Social Media Feedback Buttons (wie Like, Share, Comment):

Consider, once again, social media feedback buttons. In addition to delivering unpredictable feedback, as discussed aboce, this feedback also concerns other people’s approval. If lots of people click the little heart icon unter your latest Instagram post, if feels like the tribe is showing you approval – which we’re adapted to strongly crave. The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates as sende of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefre it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this „vital“ information.

Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport, S. 21

Der Grund, warum ich ursprünglich auch ein Blog betreibe, die keine Funktionalität für Feedback anbietet ist, um genau diese Punkte zu vermeiden. „Likes“ sind eine Art Währung. Damit Beiträge wahrhaft unabhängig sind, ist es nicht zu vermeiden den Beiträgen dieses Belohnungssystem zu entziehen.

Empfehlung: The Courage to Be Disliked

von Ichiro Kishimi und Fumitake Koga.

Das Werk hat ein paar spannende Ideen und ist sehr angenehm zu lesen. Es ist so aufgebaut wie die Dialoge Platons. Sie ist geschrieben in einer einfachen Sprache, und übermittelt das wesentliche. Und das ist auch, was meiner Meinung nach ein gutes Werk ausmacht.

Though many people think of philosophy as something difficult to understand, Plato’s dialogues do not contain any specialized language. It is strange that philosophy should be something that is discussed using words understood only by specialists. Because in its original meaning, philosophy refers not to “wisdom” itself but to “love of wisdom,” and it is the very process of learning what one does not know and arriving at wisdom that is important.

Ichiro Kishimi – Afterwords

Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works

Vaccination exemplifies a common feature of innovation: that use often precedes understanding.

[…] an illustration of a great truth about innovation, that people underestimate its long-term impact.

The simplest ingredients – which had always been there – can produce the most improbable outcome if combined in ingenious ways.

Goethe had now come to the conclusion that all forms of human knowledge are manifestations of the same life force he had intuited in his nearly death experience as a young man. The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connection, graps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.

Mastery – Robert Greene

At every hour give your full concentration, as a Roman and a man, to carrying out the task in hand with a scrupulous and unaffected dignity and affectionate concern for others and freedom and justice, and give yourself space from other concerns. You will give yourself this if you carry out each act as if it were the last of your life, freed from all randomness and passionate deviation from the rule of reason and from pretense and self-love and dissatisfaction with what has been allotted to you. You see how few things you need to master to be able to live a smoothly flowing life: the gods will ask no more from someone who maintains this principles.

Marcus Aurelius

Die Herrschaft über sich selbst ist die höchste Form der Herrschaft.

Seneca, Briefe an Lucilius, 113. Brief