I’ve heard it said that the world doesn’t owe you anything. If so, you don’t owe the world anything either. This idea rings false. It assumes there is no obligation between you and the world because you haven’t given each other anything. The world has given you life. How could that be nothing? In one sense it is nothing until you create something out of that life.
Takashi Izo’s blog has always been a blog in search of it’s topic. It began as a launchpad for a movie script. A few short fiction pieces have appeared here. There were lots of writing articles until they were moved over to the Writer On Fire blog. Then it became a positive psychology site and has continued to have articles on psychology and philosophy.
In the interests of cleaning up the focus, and because I also want to write more short fiction, the fiction articles have now been ported over to my new blog, Killer Stories.
Takashi Izo’s blog has suffered the most while I’ve been writing my novel. Since the book is taking much longer to write than I expected, I’ve decided to switch to multiple writing projects. That still isn’t great news for this blog. I have a 33,000 word outline of my own philosophy of psychology book. This blog would have a much more unified message if I would finish that book first. Thus, you will still see some psychology and philosophy posts from time to time, but it will only really take off when I’ve finished the book.
Thanks for dropping by.
Article text copyright 2012 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.
Not really. There never will be a zombie apocalypse. Even if some mad scientists were to create a bio-weapon that created a hunger for human flesh, the infected would eat each other. The uninfected would then kill off the zombie winners and the plague would be over. Since there’s been a bit of hype about the zombie apocalypse being imminent, I thought I might give my take on the possibilities.
The original movie zombies were long-dead corpses that arose from their graves and shambled through the jungle to eat the living. Decades of movies had slow zombies overpowering the living with surprise attacks and sheer numbers. Then, the excitement picked up with fast zombies. There have been a few other variations, such as zombies with guns.
Where zombie movie logic always fails is in the living dead angle. To move, they must eat. Either they eat their victims and fail to multiply or they only infect their victims and starve to death.
Could there be some lesser equivalent of zombies in the real world?
Regular readers may have noticed my post topics have been jumping around a bit lately. This is partly because I have more than one blog, but also too many other writing projects. It also doesn’t help having a full time job and an ongoing search for a new full time job.
I’m taking a break from blogging, but not a break from article writing. An article a day is my current writing priority. When I return to blogging, I will be posting much more frequently. Once a week isn’t often enough to get a decent number of visitors. I’ll have over 50 articles ready to go and be posting every 3 days or less when I return. That will allow articles to be more closely related and that’s especially important with some of the more difficult topics.
If you’d like to know more, you can read the full details here.
Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.
If you aim too high and don’t quite make it, you may still reach your goal. If you aim at exactly what you want to achieve and don’t quite make it, you fail. Of course, we should always aim too high. But, most of us don’t. Why?
When we set a tough target and miss, we feel like we’ve experienced a failure. This is the case even when we know we were aiming beyond our goal and achieved what we wanted. We perceive two goals, one higher than the other, and it’s the low goal we achieve. What failures we must be.
For someone who has studied nothing about psychology, there’s no mystery about how it works. They have no interest in the question. As far as they know, if someone has emotional problems they go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, receive therapy or medication and get better. A sunny idealized view, but one that is occasionally true.
The reality is that sometimes therapy and medication have no effect or even make the patient’s problems worse. But, this article isn’t about how psychology fails. The question is, why does it often succeed?
Hermann Hesse wrote books about people who lived more than one life in a single lifetime. The last one was published in 1943. Since then, few writers have made transitioning to a new life part of their novels. The requirement that the protagonist of a novel needs to resolve some deep personal conflict is usually handled with a new job similar to their old one, patching a failing relationship or finding a new lover.
Nonfiction books on careers do a little better job dealing with this. Most of what they write requires that your first career pays well enough that you have savings that can be used to get a degree that launches a new career. That is a transition between lives, but it’s rich people’s lives. It’s not what the average working person experiences.
