The Glass Prison
What you don’t know is that you were born inside a glass prison. The way you look at the world appears clear to you, it appears that you see what is, but you do not. You cannot. Your vision appears clear, but you are looking through glass. If the glass is tinted red, you think the whole world is red, and if the glass is tinted green, you will see the world as green. You think that the green you see is the same as the green that others around you see, that you are having the same experience. But what if you are
Heavy, Leaky Jars
I’ve talked about this idea before, but let’s be clear. A lot of those things you call goals, a lot of your desires are simply heavy, leaky jars. ‘Leaky’ because as Liam Hounsell puts it, you keep trying to fill them but they don’t stay full. ‘Heavy’ because they take huge energy to carry, to lug around. As such, they burden your existence. Take the young man who desperately wants to be a famous business CEO. By holding up such a goal, the boy immediately becomes less than his ideal self. From the outset, he is doomed. All due to his perspective, he must
The Mirror of Erised Test
The Mirror of Erised is a magical mirror from the Harry Potter series of books and films. You can familiarise yourself here. It does not simply show one their reflection. Harry’s friend, Ronald Weasley, looks into the Mirror and sees himself achieving sporting and leadership glory at their school, clearly jealous of his older, high-achieving brothers. Harry on the other hand sees his parents, who died protecting him when he was young, standing beside him. The two can’t make sense of their differing visions. It takes the intervention of the wise school Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, to fill Harry in on the mirror’s magic; the
Continuums, Spectrums and Scales, not Absolutes or Binaries
You are used to looking at some people as disabled and others, maybe you, as ‘abled’. You are used to looking at these people as black, and these people as white. You are used to thinking that you are not good at sports, but are good at reading books. You are used to thinking that he is a failure, and that she is a success. You are used to thinking of people from Africa as poor, and people from Western countries as rich. You are used to thinking of the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and that you are either good at things,
The Apocalypse Test
How does one run an Apocalypse Test? One simply imagines that tomorrow the apocalypse begins - this is an event of catastrophic destruction which interrupts most or all social systems. We run the hypothetical Apocalypse Test to ask ourselves what still matters when everything we’ve taken for granted is threatened and interrupted. Things that do not pass the Apocalypse Test. Social media followers no longer matter, because our digital systems have fallen. The stock market no longer exists. Your ownership of your assets is now contestable - you will struggle to defend your claim to a single deed of land, as the deeds you signed