Xamuel.com

Happiness is mysterious and elusive: we like to associate it with things like wealth, status, and success, and yet we see people wealthier than us, higher status than us, and more successful than us, who don’t seem particularly thrilled with their lives. At the same time, people who have nothing are perfectly capable of [...]

When I suggest people take work and jobs less seriously, a common reaction is: “I need money or else I’ll starve.” With technology continuing to obsolete human labor at a faster and faster pace, more and more jobs are gonna disappear, whether we take them seriously or not. A lot of people [...]

When people ask me, “What math should I study so I can (fill in the blank)”, the answer I give them isn’t quite what they expect. The best answer to this question is: whichever mathematics you think is the most fun and interesting. This answer doesn’t depend at all on what (blank) [...]

Blogspot doesn’t provide any way to get a static frontpage. I figured out a way to do it by editing the template. Of course, now that I’ve moved to Wordpress where this feature is built-in, I no longer have to use my own trick. But I figure it’ll be useful to anyone [...]

My biggest problem making conversation was I’d run out of things to say. And then, to make matters worse, I’d consciously try to come up with something. The universal law of conversation is spontaneity: if you think about what you’re gonna say before the words come out of your mouth, they’re guaranteed to [...]

Life seems to slip past, and the only real control we have is when we seize the moment and focus on the very present. All the pivotal, radical changes we make in our lives come in such times of present-moment lucidity. When we ask that very special someone that very special question, time [...]

Solipsism is the philosophical notion that you are the only consciousness in this universe. That might sound rather extreme at first pass, but we’ve all done our share of pondering: “what if this is all just a dream?” Yes, there’s no way to establish for certain whether or not you’re dreaming right now; solipsism is [...]

It has been said that our entire lives are just preparation for the few brief moments that really matter. Aside from those precious fleeting moments, the rest is autopilot. Days slip through our fingers like grains of sand while we act out scripts. Nor are these the scripts of an exciting play; it would be [...]

Having inherited a life of relative comfort and abundance, a life almost never disturbed by “Fight or Flight”, you and I have the luxury of spending our time in pursuits other than desperate self-conservation. The many missions this opens up can be broadly classified into such things as self growth, creative expression, exploration, and contributing [...]

I’ve been using blogspot to host my blog for a year and a half now, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I chose blogger from the beginning because it’s owned by Google and I felt that meant I could expect top quality. Unfortunately, I’ve been a little disappointed, as there’s a very [...]