In “The sickness unto Individualism” (2002) Jon Bon Kierkegaard writes: “now or never, I ain’t gonna live forever, I just want to live while I’m alive”. For the recipient, it is the utmost challenge to investigate which “now” is meant by the meditator. Is it the ‘now’ that divides into the splits of a second, a ‘now’ that vanishes into nothing? Is it the ‘now’ of a day that vanishes with the necessary world pause? Or is it the ‘now’ of a generation that aggregates itself similar to a state of termites building the most beautiful termitaria without, however, ever achieving knowledge of the process that has brought them to beauty. Is it the ‘now’ that conceals the infinity of time behind the moment? Well done Jon Bon Kierkegaard.

There are many additional negative impact factors of smartphone:

• Near-sightedness pandemic (particularly in Asia, while France has already banned smartphones at school)
• Smartphone-addiction
• Higher suicide rates of teenagers can be linked to smartphones
• Empathy loss the more time on the internet (especially in conversations) and less life-satisfaction
• A link between ADHD smartphone use even in adults
• Decreased sleep quality and quantity
• An increase of accidents on roads (phones “cause performance deficits such as delayed reaction times and inattentional blindness”

• Vergangenheitsbewältigung = “dealing with your past so that you can overcome your trauma”
• Vergangenheit = past vergangen = it has been gone gangen = past of to go [gehen]
• -heit = noun-indicator
• Bewältigung = an overcoming by one’s own powers, a process of turning something aroundbewältigen = to overcome
• also compare “Gewalt” = violence

I sometimes feel that I still try to understand the history of philosophy that has arrived within me with me in this world. I try to understand how philosophy could have arrived through centuries of thoughts in my thought. It is not pure thinking but thinking that is veiled in a mountain of language. Language that that was genetically and historically installed or codified in me. It is like an ancient riddle that is written in a mixture of hieroglyphs and alien signs. It is like me being a transcript or a piece of paper for someone’s or something’s message. Moreover, then all of it might be just a joke in the nothing. Given the possibility of nothing, understanding my past feels sometimes arbitrary. Shouldn’t the future matter more than the past?

Nevertheless, we think of the future like we think of the past. It is a special kind of memory, a picture with a different algebraic sign but still a picture like the past. The future I think of is like my past in this sense: If I already don’t understand my past, how could I understand my future?

Favorite Movie: Interstellar
Favorite Childhood Movie: Terminator 2
Favorite Tom Hanks Movie: Forrest Gump
Movie That Makes You Cry: Elephant Man
Favorite 80’s Movie: Back to the Future
Favorite Comedy: This is the End
Favorite Sports Movie: The Warrior
Favorite Courtroom Movie: 12 Angry Man
Favorite War Movie: Star Wars – The Return of the Jedi
Favorite Animated Movie: Wreck it Ralph
Favorite Horror Movie: Cabin in the Woods
Most Overrated Movie: Fast and the Furious
Favorite Gangster Movie: Once Upon a Time in America
Movie You Can Always Watch: Terminator 2
Movie With The Best Soundtrack: Inception
Movie You’re Embarrassed To Love: Zoolander
Favorite Christmas movie: Die Hard

I am looking into the idea of how smartphones, the internet and phones have changed us in the last 30 years. Please answer the following questions:

How have smartphones changed us?
How has the internet changed us?

There are some areas of change that seem to be important, maybe you consider them for your answer:

• Business
  • Smartphones enabling on-demand access to friends, family, colleagues, companies, brands, retailers
  • Advertisement
    • advertising is more effective and can be set-up in networks
    • advertising can be related to in-store purchases through cellphone location
    • specials can be offered for people logging-in with their phones
  • Higher Connectivity
    • No husbands bringing the wrong things back home
  • Business districts adapt better to customers desires
• Education
  • virtually unlimited information and unlimited miseducation
    • smartness depends now on particular skills to filter noise in your networks
  • “revolutionary devices enable on-demand access to friends, family, colleagues, companies, brands, retailers, cat videos, and much more.”
  • virtually unlimited information”
    • unlimited conspiracy theories
    • “personally relevant stimuli”
  • Sleep Reduction because of more blue lights and responsive Entertainment
  • Loss of boredom. Time not filled
• Health
  • “revolutionary devices enable on-demand access to friends, family, colleagues, companies, brands, retailers, cat videos, and much more.”
  • Harder to concentrate; easier to get distracted
• Social life
  • endless entertainment
  • Loss of boredom
  • Responsive Entertainment (more customers)
  • People look at their phones more than at other people.
    • Privacy violation becomes more likely.
• Additional thoughts “Three things come to mind from the old days: 1) I used to stand around and be bored at bus stops, 2) we used to get lost in the car often, 3) we often missed connection with another person and stood around wondering where they were. 4) also, we had pointless arguments about details of movies that are now resolved instantly by IMDB.”

If I embodied my philosophy, I would attempt to become nothing and to disappear behind my questions, disappear in the power or probably rather the weakness of the other. I say that because I believe that there is no force of reason that could beat the force of employed reason. Yet, my questions are no criticism. Criticism would lead to a stalemate. So how could I as somebody who wants to see the truth lose myself in the dark caves of other people’s opinions? Humans are caves to each other.

If there is an undiscovered philosophy in my life, I would see it more as an intellectual way of living than a way of academic suffering and political discussion. I rather admit that I do not know. Philosophy, in that sense, can embrace its demise and live as an undead person between its worlds, transcending and materializing itself in its love of death and life. Philosophy is dead, long live philosophy!

The exclamation of independence is always the indirect concession that there are dependencies left, chains that should be destroyed. Of course, the desire for independence expresses the pain of dependencies. With respect to what subjects could Americans be more emotionalized? Yet, the first dependence remains as the world. We cannot eliminate the pain of being born. The world’s natural injustice will prevail and if it did not strike us yet, it waits like a grim reaper who could strike at any moment. Second, dependence remains in the human society who all share the same body. We can only gain independence with respect to our dependence on others. Otherwise, the pursuit of independence would be achieved by moving into the cabin in the woods. It is the paradox that when the slaves only desire their independence from their master, most of the time, they dream big, they dream of being the master. Dreaming big and failing big, the American reoccurring trauma. Progress is the unwilling shift towards new trauma.

Thesis 1: This openness to the other is why Socrates did not only reconstruct the ideal society according to the image of the soul. On the contrary, the city is not only an image of the soul, the soul is an inner city. The borders of this inner city – the body and social armor of a person – are some degrees the walls of the city to the outside. When the soul transitions from its inside to the unknown (the irrational outside), it realizes that the inner city needs a constitution.

Thesis 2: The meaning of science is not its independence but its independence within true dependencies.

Thesis 1: Reason is, as Brandom would say, an inferential activity.

This means: Reason connects general ideas with concrete experiences.

Thesis 2: But if reason connects, it is an activity that attempts to relate speakers to each other. In terms, of Socrates it attempts to relate their souls. Though hidden behind their walls of an impenetrable body – their city– rationality is the connection and the divide between the cities of souls.

Truth cannot be gained by reason alone.

Blog Recommendation of Emily Lynn

In one of her articles Emily argues that health is “a messy, complicated, sliding spectrum that itself contains many spectrums.”

No sickness unto death. Thinking about health we must come to the conclusion that it evades the common binary. As long as we are in between our birth, the sudden appearance of ourselves and death, we are a mixture of elements obtaining their own quality. The idea of the non-binary should serve to develop a deeper view of ourselves

Note: I would like to amend that I am not rejecting the binary, but we have to know how the binary is usually applied falsely. Referencing Wolfram, it could be that our complex appearance, indeed relies on a simple binary operation.