Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 30 2023

In the immortal words of Creed Bratton of The Office, “If I can’t SCUBA, then what has this all been about? What am I working toward?” While this is quotation is meant to be funny since a man working an office job (with plenty of references to drugs, murder, and other seedy activities during the workday) for decades was all leading up to a...

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Enjoy the Process

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 23 2023

This is a difficult post for me because my mind immediately goes to everything that's difficult for me to be disciplined about: I know that there are many more for others, from calling their friends and family to saving money every paycheck to doing their homework. There are many things in life that require frequent or strenuous work to attain or...

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Entropy and Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 16 2023

There is a long list of questions that people ask that show a genuine misunderstanding of how life exists in the universe—or, if they do understand it, an unwillingness to accept this law of physics. Questions include: The most common manifestation of this in modern times is when people look around, see someone better off than them, and then...

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Be Happier by Committing to Something

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 9 2023

One of the most interesting ideas in positive psychology over the last couple of decades is the idea of “manufactured happiness”—that is, the idea that your brain makes yourself happier as a result of certain behaviors. Daniel Gilbert, who has done a lot of research on happiness and choice, conducted one study on this topic that assessed an...

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Non-Consensual Harm or Expense vs. “The Greater Good”

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 2 2023

I wrote in a previous post about the ethics of selfishness and altruism. Effectively, it’s a misconception that selfishness is always bad and altruism is always good; you need to be selfish enough to take care of yourself so that you are not a burden on others, and being altruistic when it harms you is not necessarily a good thing, either. But I...

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You Don’t Have to Save the World

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 26 2023

The most common cliché for people graduating from school is that they want to “change the world”. Of course, that is a very subjective statement since you change the world just by existing (because it’s different than if you didn’t exist) and there are plenty of ways to change everything—from the Pet Rock to travel to Mars—that can be seemingly...

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It Will Always Be Something

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 19 2023

There’s a saying, “It’s always in the last place you look.” I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who quickly retorted something along the lines of, “Of course it is; if you kept looking in more places after you found what you were looking for, you’d be a crazy person.” Obviously, the joke is in the double-meaning of “last place you look”—meaning both...

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Misconceptions about Growth-Oriented Meaning

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 12 2023

The idea that the meaning of life can be so simple and elegant is a tough one to digest; there’s a reason why people say, “What is the meaning of life?” as a joke when someone asks them to bring up a topic for light conversation. But if it’s that simple, then why do people ponder it so deeply and frequently? Well, the answer brings up many...

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Chasing Fulfillment

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, July 5 2023

If you ask someone what they are chasing in life, they usually answer one of two things: Now, we all know the happiness paradox: if you chase happiness, you’ll never get it. The reason why people say that is that if you cannot choose to be happy now with what you do have such as your health or family, then nothing can fill that void. It’s why...

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Life is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 28 2023

The haves vs. the have-nots. The majority vs. the minority. Good vs. evil. It seems like everything in life is turned into a conflict between two forces where one has to win and the other has to lose. Unfortunately, this taps into deep human psychology regarding everything from our fight-or-flight response to our tendency toward tribalism to feel...

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