Welcome to this week’s 5BF: reading about depression during depression, David Hume: the philosopher you should read and why you don't, the strangeness of death, Bojack Horseman and the punishment of life's continuation, what Descartes meant by his maxim and why he was wrong, and more...
1 – what I am reading
Reasons to stay Alive by Matt Haig – it is October 1st
today. A new month, and hopefully a change of times for me; that is, some
motion forward or outward from this stagnant place of darkness, confusion, frustration,
and panic. Reading Haig’s book has given me a sense of consolation which I always
look for, even after having suffered from depression multiple times before:
that I am actually ill, that it is not just me thinking all this onto myself,
that I am as helpless to feel okay now as I’d be helpless to walk had my foot
been fractured; and also that it is going to be over and I wouldn’t be angry
about having suffered another episode, or exhausted about the future episodes
that may entail. And this book does provide all of these as Matt talks about
his own depressive episodes and link them to how depression and anxiety affects
everyone who comes under its grips. I cannot bring myself to write about what I’m
going through in any other, separate documents, so it is here that I pour my
inner desperate cries. I’ve put off every other book that I was reading, I’ve
stared to smoke more, and have been exploiting anti-depressants, but still,
there seems to be no stark way out; it meanders along, like a shadow I hate to
carry with me. Most of 2020 I spent in dramatic pain, with little reliefs throughout.
2021 didn’t start off well either, and while there were a few interludes in
between, I’m nonetheless here in this mess again. And all this accounting of
time, with an overbearing credits of pain, depression, hopelessness, anger, and
very little debits of happiness, joy, and calm – all of this is inescapably up
my face and constantly reminds me of how long I’ve been miserable. ‘Life is a bitch
and then you keep on living…’
2 – this week’s articles
It is strange how our minds seek certain things for its
survival amidst dread and despair. Articles were one of those things for me, so
I listened/read many of them.
Hume the Humane @aeon – Julian Baggini writes how the philosopher David Hume is never talked about amongst today’s youth, because he lived a balanced life without drama; he didn’t drink poison to kill himself like Socrates or didn’t go mad like Nietzsche. Yet that’s exactly what makes him probably one of the best philosophers and human beings of all time.
How to study effectively @psyche – rejecting all the widely used methods for studying, like cramming, rereading, highlighting, this articles suggests with science to back it up the ways that would actually help you learn and retain what you study. Methods like spread-out studying and self-testing.
How to be anxious @psyche – while clinical anxiety can be debilitating, the existential dread or anxiety talked about by the existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger can be a force of creativity and potent liberation from the norms.
Kierkegaard: young free and anxious @philosophynow – this article focuses on the Kierkegaard’s theory of existential anxiety, like the unsettling concept of vertigo.
Dostoyevsky’s stenographer and then his wife @LitHub – a short and telling account of Anna Dostoyevsky, and how she became the Russian author’s stenographer.
Why we struggle to believe we’ll die @aeon – instantiating Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilyich and his surprise at his own mortality, this article explains how we accept the outside and detached idea of death, but struggles to accept the inside, personal, truth of it.
Descartes was wrong @aeon – related to the philosophy podcasts I’m listening these days, which I’ll talk about later, this article rejects the isolating and detaching philosophy of Descartes’s view of self and replaces it with the African philosophy of a person becoming a person through other persons.
Bojack makes life longer than death @vox – this article talks about the finale season of Bojack Horseman, as well as the legacy of the show, and explains how this show surpassed all expectations and became one of the most original, real, and moving TV shows ever!
3 – what I watched
Bojack Horseman @netflix – the first four seasons of this weird series I watched few years ago when I came across it. A horse with a human body who was once a famous TV star living his out his not-so-popular life in Hollywood, with other animal and human characters. While before I thought the show was funny, original, and at times deeply insightful about the postmodern world, the last two seasons of this show that I watched in the past weeks showed how amazing this show has really become. I cannot gather my thoughts articulately enough about how incredible this show is, but the Vox article above showed do justice in giving the show its well-deserved endorsement.
The Deuce s02 @HBO – pornography was what lured me towards watching the first season of this series. But after the first season, I realized how brilliant this series is, from its amazing characters and how they come together to tell a story which brings the 1970s New York to life and the porn industry that took off from there. Season two of The Deuce convinced me that this was one of the best TV I have ever watched!
Old (2021) – lasted M Night Shyamalan movie about a couple
of families that to vacation on a remote island which turns out to be haunted,
and they start aging rapidly. Only later do the surviving members find out that
they were part of an experiment.
4 – podcasts I listened to
Rene Descartes (Ep 28, 30) @philosophizethis – despite the host’s irritatingly childish method of explanation, this podcast nevertheless proved to be a good way of getting to know individual philosophers and their works. These two episodes explain the times and the famous maxim of Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’, as well as Descartes’s argument for God’s existence.
Blaise Pascal (Ep 31, 32) @philosophizethis – these two episodes introduce Pascal as the contemporary of Descartes who invented the calculator at the age of 18. Being a philosopher as well as a mathematician, Pascal is known for his ‘wager’, a case for believing in God, as his theory of positive expected value.
5 – this week’s Quote
The tragedy of any one life isn’t that it ends; it’s that it
continues and continues and continues, and often the people you thought would
always be there fall by the wayside.
Vox article (Bojack Horseman)