Ask Lemmy

Rethinking Thin

The concept of calorie counting works. Just paying attention to how many calories all food has, results in changed behavior. At least, it did for me.

Answered once already but I'll do it 99+ times if it exposes more people to understanding themselves.

How to Read by Mortimer J. Adler. Thought it'd be prudent to read it before trying to read though science journals. My mother was drinking dandelion tea blindly because she's body-concious and The View fed her detox woo-hoo magic.

That was likely the first instance I was aware, of my own volition, that I didn't know despite having had known 'how to read'. An introduction to the Dunning Kruger effect before I was aware of it.

The following 4 years was a spiritual speed-run that likely wouldn't have happened if I didn't read this one book. Not even the skills, but the connection to powerful ideas like philosophy, sociology, theological discussion, morals and purpose... And I'm still not done the back!

Special mention to video game Noita. Trying to resolve the lore and all the outside reading I undertook to do so unironically helped my awakening as it's deeply tied into the journey we all must endure.

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.

Shock for the Secret Seven. It's a kid's book that was given to me by my godfather. It was the book that made me fall in love with reading.

For the worse: I, Lucifer by Glenn Duncan. The eventual thesis stuck with me and changed the way I think about the world and my own relationship with the divine: That the only true way to show that you are an independent, free-willed entity is through perversity, intentionally making mistakes, doing things on purpose which you know are wrong. It's stuck with me, an invasive meme that I can't shake. I can't say it's made me a better person, but it's certainly made me more of one.

Honestly reading nietzsche in college was mind blowing for me. Started with “the gay science” and read like 3 more of his books in a row. Will probably reread his “genealogy of morals” again soon.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

The glass bead game by Herman Hesse.

I grew up an intellectual in a family of people far less concerned with matters of the mind. Not bad people, just otherwise engaged.

A voracious reader since a young age, I had begun by my early teens to see connections between things that felt somehow strange, perhaps even wrong or oddly blasphemous. I felt like I didn’t understand things very well and that these connections were somehow a product of my ignorance. That I was perhaps guessing at something and getting it very wrong. I felt I had oversimplified a complex thing and although exploring those connections was always fun to do, I’d never speak of them.

The glass bead game thought me that my intuition was right, or at least shared by a number of people. That there is a fabric of from which reality is spun. These connections I was tracing are the product of the pattern recognition propensities of the human mind and as such they are a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

Is there a connection between The Art of Fuge and certain architecture? Yes there is, not due to some mystical thing I am ignorant of but because architecture is influenced by many things including nature, classical music, mathematics, art and music.

As a young person this image of human exploit and how it ties in with nature eventually weaving the two together into a harmonious whole was deeply satisfying and provided me with a feeling of sanctuary and belonging that lingers a still in my own work and in my art. It is a blueprint for my life.

Two books that I read in high school definitely changed my life: first was Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. There are intentionally misspelled words, almost no punctuation and very little traditional structure to his writing (it's about him having DTs in a cabin on the coast in northern California). I was literally not aware that you could write books and not follow the grammatical rules they teach you in school, I remember showing it to my friends like "Look at this?! Can you believe it?!"

The second book was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, which also has a non traditional structure, is full of potty humor (and I'm not trying to be polite, it's the best way I can put it), is filled with doodles and is just fucking bizarre while also being very readable and funny.

Kids need to learn the rules of how to write, but they also need to be taught that rules are meant to be broken sometimes.