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How to live an intellectually rich life

utsavmamoria.substack.com

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Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#31

Post by phrotoma »

tomrod wrote: post #12

I tried this for awhile, but was dissatisfied. I found myself a constant consumer of intellectual material instead of being an engaged participant. Once I realized that, I set course to become more of a producer of useful things. That's led me to woodworking, to running a consultancy, to producing AI/ML for nonprofits, and to writing academic works. All in all, I enjoy life substantially.

Years ago I realized that if I bluntly categorize the things I do with my free time into buckets of "productive" and "consumptive" it's the productive things that make me feel pretty great.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#32

Post by WillAdams »

For my part, one of the most striking things which I recall from my youth was reading Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and the Abbé Faria contending that everything a gentleman needed to make his way in life was contained in less than 100 books --- which he had memorized the content of, and could impart to the young Edmond Dantes.

A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....

Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...

Suggestions and comments and recommendations welcome.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#33

Post by awanderingmind »

patrick41638265 wrote: post #23

Not sure about the intellectual part of it, but how to live a rich life? Surely not by secretly cherishing a feeling of superiority and sophistication because these sentiments will cut you out of a lot of insights and encounters that make your life rich . True, life is a farce in a lot of ways, but who cares? Accept it where you can't change it and find your own islands of happiness. These may be intellectual if you…

Good insight about how feelings of 'superiority' or 'sophistication' can suck the joy out of life. I fell into this trap myself, and it took a long time to get out of it.

That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#34

Post by safety1st »

BoxFour wrote: post #25

This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part: Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example. Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s M…

Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.

You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#35

Post by BoxFour »

alabastervlog wrote: post #29
BoxFour wrote: post #25

This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part: Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example. Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s M…

> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example. From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong: "You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way". The act the right way is the hard…

Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day.

He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.

It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#36

Post by BoxFour »

dwcnnnghm wrote: post #30
BoxFour wrote: post #25

This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part: Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example. Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s M…

The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.

Thanks, that is what I was thinking of.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#37

Post by webdoodle »

RajT88 wrote: post #22

> In August 2018, in the last month of my three-month sabbatical, I arrived at the Hamta village in Himachal Pradesh. I rented a one-room cottage, and my caretakers were Dolma Aunty and Kalzang Uncle, a couple well into their 70’s. I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form. It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's oft…

The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#39

Post by alabastervlog »

BoxFour wrote: post #35
alabastervlog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example. From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong: "You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way". The act the right way is the hard…

Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day. He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness. It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly a…

There's also an awful lot of really boring and silly Stoic physics and metaphysics in there, which topics for some reason people who love the book rarely bring up, LOL.

Re: How to live an intellectually rich life

#40

Post by fsckboy »

there are 25 comments here now, but none of them yet mention the opening idea of TFA, that if you click the first link you see on wikipedia and lather, rinse, repeat, you will get to philosophy every time.

if true, this is fascinating.

...

i just tried it a few times, and it worked! although the reason seems to be a bit less interesting. biography page: "so and so was a botanist" --> and we're headed to philosophy. "political party" --> decision making. "vehicle ramming attack" --> --> power.

encyclopedias start each page by saying what category something is in, and you inevitably category your way back to, metaphorically speaking, earth, air, fire, or water

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