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School of Thought: Existentialism | Hri-Write

Existentialism is a philosophical school of thought that deals with human existence, trying to explain the purpose of a human life. Existentialism, like many other schools of thought, is of course only a speculation and something we made up, take what you read here with a pinch of salt ( after all, I don't know any more about life than you do! ) If I were to try to explain existentialism easily, I'm afraid I'll lose out on its intricacies, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Existentialism, at its most fundamental level, says that every person is responsible for defining their own purpose in this world and that we are governed by our free will. Existentialism says that we are not here to 'find purpose', but rather to 'create our reality and purpose'. It sounds simple, but that's because I've tried to break down roughly a few centuries worth of study and philosophical evolution into four sentences. Existentialism originated as a school o...
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Hot take: The War on Drugs is a huge failure

I try my best to refrain from topics that have anything to do with psychotropic or psychedelic substances, but the implications of this topic in this day and age are so vast that talking about it would do more good than bad. The 'War on Drugs' was a name dubbed to the criminalisation of hallucinogenic substances during the presidency of US President Richard Nixon. It wasn't just a national campaign, because the US is a superpower, almost every country followed suit with some style of criminalising hallucinogens. This list included Cocaine, LSD, Heroin and the hotly debated Marijuana, which is making a comeback. Today, the war on drugs is a huge failure. The entire nature of the policy has caused numerous, devastating consequences. It's lead to mass incarceration (particularly in the US), anarchy, civil dissent and human rights abuses across the world. All of this comes at the expense of billions of dollars of investment into fighting drugs, while creating the ve...
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Popular posts from this blog

Where is all the 'alien life?' - Fermi Paradox and other theories

My first blog, ever, was about understanding the odds of alien life. I've gotten much better at writing blogs since then (or so I like to tell myself), and it would only be right if I reinstate the legacy of that one. We should openly admit that when we happen to be under a starry night and see a sight similar to this, we all have a react in a different and interesting way. Some people are left boggled by the immense size of the universe, others by the sheer glamour of the scene and if you're anything like me, you're paralysed by the sudden realisation that you have a negligible impact on the universe. The point is, we all feel something . When he looked up at the sky, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi too felt something, a thought that lingered around this question, "Where is everyone else?" It's been half a decade since Fermi passed on, but he left us with a fundamental query and idea. Fermi realised that in a universe as old and vast as this, there s...
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The Psychology of External Validation

A recent conversation intrigued me to explore this topic, and I find it perhaps one of the most relevant ones I have written about. So, here goes. I've known people who always get hundreds of likes on their posts hours within posting them. I have never been one of these people. I've never received many likes or shares, and when I was in my younger years, it was hurtful, in a way. I used to see my posts and shares sit on my wall for days with only a few likes, and back then, it was painful for me, so to say. It made me doubt my worthiness, and created a feeling that no one cared about what I had to say. I used to post a lot on Facebook just to see how many likes/shares/comments would accumulate in a few hours. I would be disheartened when that number didn't live upto my expectations. I'm sure some of you have had this feeling, and it's okay. Why? Why, just why is it like this? Why do we doubt our worth, why do we feel so bad just because someone didn't press...
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Why doesn't anybody talk about the ISRO?

Mangalyaan. It's a word you've probably heard a lot the last few years. That's because it was one of the world's cheapest space probes to reach Mars, collect data and relay it back to Earth, even more efficiently than NASA. Who was the genius space institute who developed this? None other than India's ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). Why didn't we hear about it as much? Because the ISRO isn't NASA. Or so we think. On a budget nearly 9 to 10 times tighter than granted to NASA, the ISRO launched the Mars Orbiter Mission to Mars orbit in late 2014. With this, India became the first nation to complete the mission in its first try, and only the fourth one to venture to Mars. Remember back when water was discovered that there was water on the moon? Who contributed to that astonishing revelation? Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar mission. Why did NASA take credit? Technically, it was their gadget aboard the mission that picked up the data...
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