Category: deep thoughts

there are days, about once every few weeks, where i consider how lucky i am to be living in the western world with an immense amount of personal and property safety.

i don’t fear recklessness on the roads. i don’t fear being robbed on the subway at night. i don’t fear walking on night streets of toronto, or running for 10km by myself through empty north york streets. i trust the water in my tap is drinkable – and i trust that it is effectively limitless. i can be warm when i want to be, and i can choose how to dress based on my own desires and not ones imposed onto me by a government. i’m not scared of public diseases on the subway.

all of these thoughts have actively went through my head in the last few months – appropo nothing, really. just a daily gratitude for .. being insanely lucky and privileged by the virtue of being born to the right people.

hell, i feel so safe that i’m cool with random people staying in my apartment for money.

and naturally a lot of these thoughts are raised when i read of any news in the world, and then i stumble onto sentences like this:

Russia is classified as a high-income economy by the World Bank (having a per capita GDP exceeding $14,000). 

14k per person, that’s … such a low bar. and i know it’s not income, but i mean, trinidad is doing better than russia.

clearly money isn’t a clear causation of safety, but inarguably there is a correlation there and … we’re all just really lucky, that’s all i guess i am thinking. forget lotteries, we already won compared to the other 6-7 billion.

quoting for truth.

…There has been an observation since the time of the ancients regarding virtue formation (or, habits-of-character formation), namely that we practice what we want to become. It’s like learning a sport, actually, and the same principle applies to all kinds of things in life. When we first try to learn a new skill, it feels stilted. But sure enough, with enough practice, we get good at a particular thing, such that it becomes automatic, even without trying. 

And here’s the really cool thing about it, actually: you will find that actions can influence emotions. It’s been shown that people who practice being happy, courteous, loving, etc., will actually start to feel these things simply by virtue of going through the motions. So not only does the skill become developed through repetitive activity, but your emotions will likely also feel happier as a result, and smiling becomes even more natural. It’s a vicious cycle of goodness.