Our galaxy is a spiral disk, full of billions of stars, all swirling around a supermassive black hole. Stars form and die within the great crashing spiral arms, orbiting with the entire Milky Way for billions of years – an ongoing dance of creation and destruction, written deeply into the fabric of the Universe itself. Brian Cox
I’ve been thinking about this whole “when you grow up, you’ll be president” thing. But what’s even good about it? You’d have to decide who lives and who dies… How could anyone ever feel that he has the right to make such a choice? I mean, the worst a businessman can do is make an unpopular decision to downsize and replace people with AI, for example. But that’s not the same as deciding to start a war or ordering an execution for corruption.
New Year’s Eve (1984) by Russian artist Sergei Andriyaka
In my youth, I read Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and there was a line like: “Look at who surrounds you now – in five years, you’ll become like them.” The main idea was: surround yourself with businessmen, and in five years you’ll become a businessman yourself. I got really inspired by this idea and once even refused to visit a former classmate because she was a single mother – something I was terribly afraid of becoming. Anyway, I regret that now.
So why am I writing this? Later in life, I met all kinds of people—people at different financial levels, with different spiritual development, with various mental health struggles, even with suicidal thoughts. I think Covey’s principle shouldn’t be taken as dogma—that whole “success-only mindset, I only befriend people richer and more successful than me,” and so on. I think that’s a road to nowhere.
I feel closer to the Biblical ideas: “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others,” or “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” Because when you give desirably you will never have to.
In 1974, 23-year-old Dan Jury made a life-altering decision to move his 81-year-old grandfather, Frank Tugend, out of a nursing home and into his own apartment to care for him full-time.
I was watching a video which said that people who become rich often don’t turn to art (like painting or writing) but instead focus on making more money. The speaker mentioned that even Maslow noted that only about 3% of those who reach the top of his hierarchy of needs (self-actualization) will engage in art creation. This shows that self-actualization isn’t always about art. If we consider the highest point in the chakra system – the crown chakra – it represents unity with God.
I was thinking, will there ever be an .org social network? A non‑commercial one, where promotion wouldn’t be based on payments but on the amount of audience interest. Because nowadays paid social networks purposely limit organic page growth in order to sell paid promotion. Well, that’s the way they pay for functionality, security, and data storage. That’s understandable. But what if a social network ran on voluntary donations, like Wikipedia for example, just enough to keep it running, not to make profit?
