My household is on a mission to make “websing” the word, as short for web searching. “I’ll have to webs that!” is just really funny to us… and works in German, too! “Das sollten wir mal websen.”
it’s not caught on yet outside, but we remain hopeful.
As my bullet journal I’m using a Midori MD notebook (A5, one page a day) with a pretty calendar sheet wrapped around for looks and the “official” plastic cover for protection. It’s nice, but not for those who dislike ghosting (I don’t care though). For the next year I’m thinking of going back to leuchtturm, mostly because I will need a more calendar-like format and less space, so it doesn’t make sense to lug around nearly 400 pages. And leuchtturm is pretty solid.
As my longform journal I’m currently using a nuuna A5+ notebook barely fitting into my Galen leather notebook cover. Some inks bleed through but I really like the 3mm dotted lineature and the outer design. I used to use the galen A5 tomoe river notebooks (blank) with this cover (same purpose), but I only have one left with the original TR and felt like delaying it’s use for another year. TR is great for showing ink properties, but feels a little bit flimsy.
For work I have a B5 stalogy notebook without cover, great for dated short notes. Also TR paper.
For various personal projects (like PNP characters and notes) I tend to use Clairefontaine paper bag notebooks, as they are good, look nice but are comparatively cheap.
For random notes I use the dotted A5 spiral pad by Brunnen. Works great for notes, even shows some sheen, bleeds through for wet pens, though. Since I’m going back to university next month, I’ll probably invest in an A4 one again.
Compared to magpies, hooded crows are much more grey than white in the lighter areas, but I see what you mean!
That’s a hooded crow, or Corvus cornix. They are pretty much the default kind of crow where I live!
I’ve also seen her feed them off of her trash food find in a way that makes me fairly sure that those three smaller ones have been in her nest not too long ago, wide open beaks and everything… only to have one of them grab the whole thing and run off to eat it alone.
She didn’t even follow them to get it back. Very “Oh, kids will be kids, and I wasn’t that hungry anyway…” energy.
I’ve been there, as well. Luckily (or something like that), I’m sufficiently poor to be noticably anxious about spending more than 200 EUR in one go, and with that managed to convince myself that now that I know the parts and their price, I can hold off until I have accumulated half the extra funds by saving (drew up a saving plan and everything as the last step of obsession, and then re-focused on saving).
That was in January. I have stopped tracking my money and actively saving for this by April, and now the new PC build is again just something I wanna do some day, but not right now.
Negotiating with myself to first work towards possible and reasonable, but ultimately unlikely financial circumstances, and then predictably running out of steam, is my go-to strategy for expensive stuff I really want right now, but don’t actually require to fulfill a need. Works surprisingly well!
I process ideas and concepts mainly visually, in forms, colors and movement entwining (the movement especially is the most important!).
Verbal thoughts occur, but they are more of a chorus, or chord, rather than one voice - there is always several aspects sounding out together, and it can be hard to pick the dominant one to verbalize for communication.
There are thoughts which have already been translated to words before and I can communicate then easily, but also deeper areas or newly occuring “movements” which are still only visual, and I have to put in a lot of work to put them into words.
There’s more, but this is as far as I have pre-verbalized…
Only this - I once read a book that talked about minds as a rainforest, brimming with life and built in layers and impossible to fully grasp at once. I think that metaphor works pretty well.
Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.
I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.
We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.
The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.
And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.
(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!
Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.
But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.
Thanks for the recommendation, that looks great! And I found out that my local library has it on DVD, so I’m gonna check it out next time I’m there 😃
Absolutely, yes. I managed to get “has to be treated in a clinical setting as it’s actually exhaustion depression” burnout trying to keep a job in research. And I wondered for the longest time afterwards how on earth I am supposed to earn a living being that way.
It really helped to realize that as long as I can pay for rent, food and other basic needs, I am not actually required to a) stick with anything I do or any path I choose and b) be accountable for my life or “career” to anyone other than myself.
With that in mind, I am now trying to find another way - I read (among other things) the book “How to be everything” by Emilie wapnick, which is basically career advice for people who want/need to do lots of things instead of having one specialist career path. It helps you explore what you actually need in terms of money and free time and variety, and gives you some example ways of how you could structure your life to meet these needs, with pros and cons.
As a result, I now set myself on a track to qualify for a job field which would allow me to meet my modest financial needs by working part time (yes, it’s software development), while still being paid during qualification. I’m hopeful I’ll always find something interesting to do in that field without requiring that soon-burnt-out need-to-know-everything-about-it-NOW passion for it all the time (which was quite necessary in research to tolerate the shit working conditions, and which I cannot sustain), and allows for ample time and energy to cycle through temporal interests at my leisure.
I can’t tell you yet if this idea actually works out for me, but I feel that I’ve covered all my bases to be sure that it feasibly could (which included an internship to make sure the working conditions aren’t shit, as well. Discovered they can be, but aren’t everywhere, so I tried to keep where they wouldn’t be for the getting paid part). I’m really quite happy to be on the way to finding it out, though. I’m starting in September. Check back in 4 years and I can tell you for sure!