Someone Will be Happy You are Dead

There is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen. Suppose that he was a good and wise man, will there not be at last some one to say to himself, Let us at last breathe freely being relieved from this schoolmaster? It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceived that he tacitly condemns us.- This is what is said of a good man. But in our own case how many other things are there for which there are many wh...

 On Balancing Work and Rest

In he morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?- But this is more pleasant.- Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spid...

 Aurelius Quotes on Mindfulness

2.8 Rarely is a person seen to be in a bad way because he has failed to attend to what is happening in someone else’s soul, but those who fail to pay careful attention to the motions of their own souls are bound to be in a wretched state. 2.11 Let your every action, word, and thought be those of one who could depart from life at any moment. 3.4 Do not waste what remains of your life in forming impressions about others, unless you are doing so with reference to the common good. For you are...

 Why Humans Evolved to be Active

Humans of all to be much more physically active than our ape ancestors. Typical chimpanzee walks maybe two to three kilometers a day, and they take maybe what, three, 4,000 steps a day. A typical hunter-gatherer takes about 15 to 20,000 steps a day. Per kilo hunter-gatherers spend about twice as much energy per kilo on being physically active per day than our ape cousins. And importantly, that physical activity occurs as we age, right? So Americans are pretty inactive, as we all know. A typ...

 "Race" in D&D

As a social scientist who studies male-dominated subcultures, I have done research that put me in spaces where I delved into reactions to issues of race in gaming. A key question is this: Given how charged the term race has been, why would games use it to discuss differences that have nothing to do with the way we traditionally use the word? Dungeons & Dragons is not the only game to use the term in this way; so have many other digital and analog fantasy offerings. But the celebrated game...

 Quantifying Animal Farmed Animal Suffering with Neuron Co...

The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman animal interests is difficult.67 Humans are literally outweighed by farmed animals: land-based farmed animals have 70 percent more biomass than all humans.68 Land-based farmed animals also outnumber humans greatly, by a factor of three to one, with 25 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs alive at any one time; farmed fish outnumber us, at a very rough estimate, ten to one, with around 1...

 Dead Internet Theory is True

Of the platforms where we know flesh and blood humans do spend enough time, 92% of all content is created by 10% of all users, and engagement with different posts can vary from 0.03% to 0.1% of all viewers. In other words, of the 52.6% of internet traffic which is human-driven, about 9 in 10 users stuck to messaging friends and family and just passively consume contents mostly meant to sell them stuff, or see if they would be interested in propaganda campaigns ran by governments, both theirs ...

 Anthropocene Traps

The concept of evolutionary traps has been used almost exclusively for studying how non-human species respond to cues in anthropogenic environments [24–34]. Key examples include artificial human lights attracting insects, island species responding naively to the presence of introduced predators, and seabirds not being able to discriminate between the cues of marine plankton and marine plastics [34–36] (figure 1a). In the context of humans, evolutionary mismatch is a much more fr...

 How the Human's Short Lifespan Influences Their Behavior

Humans are the most adaptable and ambitious people among the common races. They have widely varying tastes, morals, and customs in the many different lands where they have settled. When they settle, though, they stay: they build cities to last for the ages, and great kingdoms that can persist for long centuries. An individual human might have a relatively short life span, but a human nation or culture preserves traditions with origins far beyond the reach o f any single human’s memory....

 What Would an Atheist Say to God?

Why did you stay hidden? Why did you stay silent? Why did you demand faith instead of providing evidence? Why did you reveal yourself in a book full of historical innaccuracies and theological contradictions? If you knew that the vast majority of humans you created would end up in hell, why did you create them? Why did you create hell? How is infinite punishment justice for a finite crime? What is the point of torturing someone in hell if they can never get out of it and never learn? Why woul...