The more life you experience, the more you know nothing. I’m reading Principles by Ray Dalio and a main Principle is to keep an open mind which is hard to do. Ask yourself when you make decisions how you are arriving at them? Are you going off of instinct? Are you conferring with experts? When I’m betting a football game do I think I “know” what is going to happen or do I drunkenly throw money at the game.
I am a big advocate of the Win Friends and Influence People book and with that you learn the golden rule. It provides thoughts to understanding and communicating with other people. That book, along with these Principles, are laying groundwork for my involvement with human beings throughout my life. Win Friends was written in the 1930’s. Principles in 2017. A lot happened between these years to allow new literature to provide deeper insight. Evolution is the key to life and you should be continuously looking to evolve by gathering new information.
Knowing your weaknesses is essential to building. Keeping an open mind will help you learn from other people. This idea starts getting fogged up when you are told all your life to be decisive and a wrong decision is better than a no decision. Now you have this billionaire hedge fund operator who has traveled the world, had conversations with world leaders, and used every instrument at his fingertips telling you that being relentlessly truthful, and getting as much info as possible is a true principle to a fulfilling life. Sheesh. What’s a normal person supposed to do these days?
As I plow through the book, for some reason World War II started to interest me. This is probably completely off topic but I wouldn’t be surprised if the book triggered a thought in my head. Last night I read the entire Wiki page on WWII and it starts to make sense why so many Europeans speak English. It’s not like we, along with Britain, Russia, and China, didn’t influence the upbringing of many cultures after it ended in 1945. You’d think there’d be tremendous disdain for the USA.
I further thought about the 2 A-bombs that forced Japan to surrender and wondered why on Earth a Japanese man wouldn’t hold a grudge against an American. It’s not like I dropped the bomb, but my country did, and now they look at us and Donald Trump is our President?!? I’m not sure why I hadn’t really looked at it this way before. I think my thought process was “it was in the past”. I’m learning that the past is a good place to visit in order to understand the future.
Then I started getting interested in Vietnam and the Cold War because it became quite apparent to me that even though I may have learned bits and pieces about them in school, I really knew nothing. It got me to thinking that I’m reading a USA Wiki page and I have to imagine the history of this war is completely different in Vietnam. With all this swirling in my head I started to tire of the activity. I came to the conclusion that history repeats itself, people are still the same, and I’m a privileged white dude who didn’t have to fight in any of these wars.
Why is that whatever I feel like is at the end of the tunnel is nowhere in sight? I have near zero problems. I have money. I have shelter. I have good health. I have weaknesses like gambling and alcohol but even if I corrected them I’d be asking, now what? I’ll add that this isn’t depression. This is a realistic look at what the fuck is actually happening. People 100 years ago didn’t have the internet to gain this type of worldly view from their desk chair. We are evolved and it’s scary to think how quickly we’ll be teleporting to work instead of driving. What to do. What to do.
