Dispatched from Mars

Remotely working in today's digital economy without seeing anyone all day. What does it take to succeed?

We read and discussed an interesting article titled ”Why Books Don’t Work” by Andy Matuschak. We felt the problem isn't so much the medium or how to write the book. It’s something else...

We discussed the realities of retirement, how different people think about it and deal with it, how we think about it, what it means philosophically as well as scientifically.

What do we mean by the word "love" in English? It means so many different things that it seems meaningless. In Japanese and Spanish, love means something much more specific.

What is the optimal number of people to have a conversation with? What happens when we keep adding more people? Why do some people, particularly autistic people, have a hard time engaging in a group conversation? What do we mean by "social skills"? We theorize on these issues.

To get along with others, we often have to tell people what they want to hear, not what you are actually thinking. We talked about the implications of doing this, and what happens if you never told the truth. The conversation then shifted to talking about our education system.

We discuss René Girard's theory of scapegoating.

Discussed René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.

Evan is not sure if he is an artist or photographer—he knows only that he can’t stop seeing the world through his cameras. That is how he seems to process what happens in life—a camera as a phenomenological mediator. As long as I have known him (almost two decades), he has always been recording his life on his cameras. It’s as if his impetus is to give himself more time to understand what is happening. It wasn’t a coincidence that he captured the moment the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Amid the mob of people trying to get away from the building, Evan aimed his video camera up at the towers and kept it rolling.

What does it mean to follow your passion in today’s "gig economy"?