For all the progress updates in one place:
Progress Update: June 2024
Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during June 2024
The Infidel and the Professor
Hegel (The Oxford University Press one)
Foucault (The Oxford University Press one)
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
The Art of Resilience
Existentialism is a Humanism
Endure (The Alex Hutchinson one)
Cómo Hacer Que te Pasen Cosas Buenas
Endure (The Cameron Hanes one)
A Little Happier
The Upside of Stress
The Paradox of Choice
When Things Fall Apart
Afraid
Fearvana
Don’t Forget to Live
Not Fade Away
I also read the remaining three short essays by Hume on different life perspectives:
-The Epicurean
-The Stoic
-The Platonist
(I read “The Skeptic” a few weeks back)
Notes:
• It was a slow month compared to May (I read almost twice as much last month, though I knew that was unsustainable). I’ll try to step up the pace again in July since I still have about 200 books to read for the bulk of the research and I haven’t even gotten to the long, dense, and complex books I’m saving for the final stretch, i.e. Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), Being and Time (Heidegger), and some other titans.
• The best of the month was “The Upside of Stress.” It’s an excellent science book on the positive benefits of stress, challenge, and struggle. I’ll use much of the research presented in this book as the scientific support for some of Nietzsche’s ideas and Stoic practices that I’ll write about in my next book.
• The Infidel and the Professor was a recommendation from a friend. It’s about the friendship and philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith.
With friendships taking on a more important role in my life over the past few years, I find these stories of great friends inspiring and heartwarming, sometimes rising above the great romantic stories of history.
Hume and Smith, Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie, Erasmus and Thomas More, and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir (though romantic in the beginning, it was more of a loving friendship for most of their lives).
Without these role models of what great friendships look like, and the joys and depths they can bring to our lives, we could mistakenly call ‘friends’ those who are merely outing partners (‘drinking buddies’ and ‘convenience friends’) or acquaintances. That is not friendship.
The level of support, encouragement, complicity, and companionship of true friends rivals— and in many aspects surpasses —the glorified yet impossible vision we are often sold of romantic love.
“Life without friends is a wasteland. Friendship multiplies good and shares evils. It is a unique remedy for bad luck and sweet relief to the soul”—Baltasar Gracian
“No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it”—Seneca
“Without friendship, a human being is lost. A friend is someone who reminds you to feel alive. Having even just one good friend means that the world takes on a new meaning. One good friend can be your entire world”—Eddie Jaku
Here’s to all inspiring friendships and to great friends, and of course, to the noblest of them all, whom I do not deserve but lady fortune has been kind enough to grant me: @imdanielgp Cheers!
• Another week of dragging my feet to my minimum weekly reading target (4 books/week). This is what working on tedious, long-term projects looks like. There are dips and times when your mind rebels against doing the same work day in and day out, seven days a week, without short-term gratification or visible progress toward the end result.
You chip away slowly from a massive block of marble that will take years to shape into your vision. So, inevitably, there are days, weeks, and sometimes months when the chipping away loses all meaning and you only do it out of trust in yourself that it will amount to something.
However, whenever you go through those dips, your productivity suffers. No matter. It’s part of the process. The job is to keep chipping away every day, even if slowly and uninspired.
• I rarely read in Spanish despite it being my first language. I’ve spent so much of my life reading in English that it feels strange to pick up a book in Spanish.
For those who speak Spanish, “Cómo hacer que te pasen cosas buenas” is a great book that compiles some of the best concepts from psychology and neurobiology to enhance mental health and lead more fulfilling lives.
It was an eventful week that took up a lot of my time and, most importantly, diverted my focus away from reading. I still hit my minimum weekly target.
Of those four books, “The Upside of Stress” was my favorite. It provided the scientific validation for the main idea I’m exploring in my next book: the value of struggle for living a fulfilling and meaningful life.
From the Stoics to Nietzsche, many philosophers have emphasized the importance of changing our relationship with challenges and hardship. “The Upside of Stress” provides a solid scientific foundation for these ideas.
Tbook discusses the research and findings on the benefits of stress and why we should change our perspective on it, rather than trying to eliminate it. It’s one of the best science books I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommended.
• Both “Afraid” and “Fearvana” were excellent books on the nature, neuroscience, and psychology of fear.
“Afraid” has a more scientific tone, while “Fearvana” reads like a motivational/personal development book (though it’s well-researched, too).
If I had to recommend one of the two, it would be “Fearvana.” I took away many great ideas from it.
I almost passed on the book because of the things we are not supposed to judge a book by (but still influence us): Name, cover, blurbs.
The name and cover make it seem like a spiritual (or spirituality-based) book, which it is not. And the main blurb is from the Dalai Lama. So everything pointed to another book based on Buddhist teachings, and after reading so much based on Buddhism recently (including this week’s “When Things Fall Apart”), I can’t stomach another “There was once a young monk who (insert stupid thing he said or did), and then the master said to him...” story.
• On that last note, be wary of stories that start with some variation of “An old wise man once said...” or that involve a dynamic between a wise person/master and a naive student. In all likelihood, there was never “a wise man;” it’s the author borrowing authority from an imaginary figure to give importance to what he/she is saying.
It’s a cheap psychological trick to prime us into accepting an idea because it comes from a respectable source, so we are not only more likely to take it seriously but also less likely to challenge it (who are we to disagree with the wise? they must be right even if it feels off).
What’s more suspicious is that the “wise man” or master is rarely a specific man; he has no name, no background, no past, no future, not even a physical location. He’s just an archetype.
To step it up a notch, when was the last time you read a story from old traditions that began with, “A wise woman once said...”? I don’t think I ever did, why? The marginalization of women throughout history from intellectual and influential spiritual circles is obviously a cause (so we have fewer writings from them or about them), but the fact that the ‘wise people’ authors have written about are universally male (which is impossible even accounting for the marginalization of women), is evidence of not just obvious sexism, but also of the likelihood that those stories never happened and are only a ploy to bypass our critical thinking.
These authors, aside from being cowards and cheats who can’t stand by their writing but have to borrow credibility from imaginary authority figures to give their ideas undeserved influence, also compound their crimes with sexism by exclusively putting their words in the mouths of those who they believed would command the most respect of their time: OLD, WISE, MEN.
Down for a re-read of “The Alchemist,” anyone? ;)