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The Art of Living Well: Be Yourself and Don’t Compromise Your Freedom According to Montaigne
Montaigne advocates living an ordinary life well. Of course, an ordinary life is not a careless life. It is not easy to truly live a good life. How to live an ordinary life well can be said to be the center of his life thinking. The content of the following sections of this lecture is roughly centered around this center. To live an ordinary life well, you must first be a good person. Regarding the principles of life, Montaigne did not talk about any big principles. I followed his style and summarized his meaning in the simplest language. There are two main ones: first, be yourself, and second, be a…
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Cracking the Code of Life: What Top Psychologists Think About Love, Freedom, and Everything In Between
The biggest difference between the world’s top psychologists and ordinary people lies in their cognitive thinking abilities. So what do top psychologists think about life? the meaning of life The first is Freud. Freud proposed that people have two instincts, one is the life instinct and the other is the death instinct. The life instinct manifests itself as self-instinct and sexual instinct, while the death instinct manifests as destruction and desire for destruction. All human behaviors are driven by these two instincts. Freud’s views on the meaning of life are not straightforward enough. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s views on the meaning of life are very similar and more straightforward. Schopenhauer proposed…
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Unconventional Lives in New Zealand: Stories of Freedom, Purpose, and Breaking the Mold
I have lived in New Zealand for ten years and have met some strange people. Every time I think of their stories, I feel from the bottom of my heart: How can people live like this! A friend is less than thirty years old, a sassy girl, and loves to do things. A few years ago, she worked as a teacher in school, but then she found it boring and started a small business repairing cars. Later, she felt that there was no challenge in making money, so she handed over the business to her apprentice and became a prison guard herself. Unexpectedly, she got tired of being a prison…
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Hannah Arendt: The Thinker Who Escaped Totalitarianism
Experience is the sole object of our thinking! Nothing else!” This was Hannah Arendt’s declaration at the “Hannah Arendt Works Seminar” in 1972. The event was organized by the Toronto Society for the Study of Social and Political Thought. Arendt was originally invited as a guest, but she insisted on giving a speech at the conference. Hannah Arendt’s oeuvre is largely concerned with thinking. In her “Thought Diary” she asked: “Is there a non-authoritarian way of thinking?” At the outset of “The Human Condition”, she stated her intention: “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.” When she went to…
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The Freedom of Travel: An Escape from the Mundane
I’m not a person who likes to travel, I find it troublesome. Traveling is an opposition to everyday life without all the hassle to consider. First, the work is stripped away, and then the familiarity is stripped away. In the end, you do know that you are wandering in a strange place, and everything before is extremely far away from you. That is the feeling of freedom. On weekdays, a person can’t help but think that I can do it when I have money, I can do it when I change my job, I can do it when I buy a big house, and I can do it when I…
