For all the progress updates in one place:
Progress Update: May 2024
Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during May 2024
The Comfort Book
Dopamine Nation
Burnout
Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
The Human Predicament
Candide (Voltaire)
Becoming Bulletproof
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (William James Philosophy)
The World I Live in and Optimism (Helen Keller)
Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James
What is Existentialism? (Beauvoir)
Hagakure
The First Philosophers
A Year with Rilke
The Comfort Crisis
Tiny Beautiful Things
The Gift
On the Nature of Things (Lucretius)
A Guide to The Good Life
Philosophy of Existence (Karl Jaspers)
Don’t Believe Everything You Think
The Upward Spiral
Heidegger: A Graphic Guide
Essay:
The Skeptic by David Hume
Notes:
• If I have the stamina to maintain this pace, I might complete the bulk of the research in about a year. Then I’ll switch gears to focus more on organizing everything I’ve been compiling and spend more time writing.
But, as the wise philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” We’ll see what happens in the coming months.
• So the obvious question, given the volume of reading, is, “How can you retain anything from all those books?” I don’t. At this point, my reading is for exploration, understanding, making connections with what I already know, and to stimulate my own thinking and writing.
I want to know what’s out there (what has been written before) and open my awareness to different perspectives, philosophers, and ideas.
At the same time, I want to understand these ideas in relation to others I’ve encountered and develop my own. This guides me into what to research further and provides more context for everything I learn.
For those familiar with my previous book, these represent the explore and understand phases of the learning model. Memorizing comes later.
Basically, my first encounter with a book is to mine for gold; the processing of the gold I find comes after.
While I read, I take notes, bookmark, underline, and write my own ideas on the subject. Then, I revisit those notes and underlinings to study the material and combine it with information from other sources to create master documents, which ultimately become the skeletons for chapters (I’ll explain this process in more detail in future posts).
• Hume continues to impress. He was passionate about philosophy but never allowed it to consume him. He was as engaged with the world and people as he was with the world of ideas, switching effortlessly between them.
Another aspect of Hume that I love is that he was tough and critical of ideas, yet gentle with people. It’s as if he took philosophical discussion as a professional sport meant to be played seriously but never losing sight that it was still just a sport and that once a match was over, there were no grudges to be held and no enemies in sight, just competitors to be respected as fellow humans that simply held different views.
For him, there was a time and a place for debate, but outside of that, we were meant to be “merry” and friendly, enjoying what life and people had to offer.
Much respect for Hume.
• I had never read anything about or by William James, so both books, “Sick Souls, Healthy Minds” and “Be Not Afraid of Life,” were a great introduction.
I only took a few ideas from those books, but the ones I took were great, like this one: “It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.”—William James
• In addition to the books on William James, I enjoyed “Becoming Bulletproof” by Evy Poumpouras. She’s an all-around badass and wrote an excellent book on the skills she learned while serving as a US Secret Service agent. The book covers too much ground, so it occasionally loses focus, but it’s still worth reading.
• There was a lot of good stuff this week.
Reading Simone de Beauvoir was invigorating. She was smart, sharp, knowledgeable, and a great writer. “What is existentialism?” covers some of the main points of the philosophy and the unique contribution that de Beauvoir made to it.
• Rilke was right up my dark alley. I’m not much into poetry, but I got some gems out of “A Year with Rilke.”
• Tiny beautiful things. The book is a collection of no-BS advice from Cheryl Strayed, A.K.A. “Dear Sugar,” on relationships, hardship, loss, and much more. Damn, she’s good. I’ve had this book for a long time, I’m glad I finally read it. It deserves the hype.
My favorite book this week was “A Guide to the Good Life.” It’s an accessible book on Stoic philosophy.
Since I’ve already read many books on stoicism over the years, I didn’t get many new insights or stories, but it was still worth the read. The author does a great job organizing Stoic ideas and turning them into practical “exercises.”
If you want to learn about stoicism but don’t know where to start, “A Guide to the Good Life” is an excellent introduction.