⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🧠 Science Hasn’t Refuted Free Will: Philosopher Christian List argues the skeptics aren’t reporting a finding but assuming one, a reductionist picture of human beings that neuroscience has enriched psychology without ever replacing. Read it here.

🎲 Any Human Ever: More than 100 billion people have ever lived, and this site draws one at random from real demographic data, a year, then a place, then a life, and the result is almost never the history you carry in your head, because most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief. Try it here.

🪞 Why You Haven’t Been Yourself Lately: Andy Min and Thomas Sullivan spent more than a year chasing one question, who are you, through the woods, a few adrenaline-soaked dares, and the science of the self, in a film that is half video essay and half spiritual odyssey. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A dead tree, giving life to another. This is the bonsai of Fairy Lake, near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island: a Douglas fir sapling rooted in the tip of a log that sank long ago, living on whatever the rotting wood beneath it gives up. Starved of soil, it stays small, a whole tree balanced on the remains of another. Captured by Michael Johansson. See it on Instagram.

🕰️ Time Billionaires

In a society obsessed with the pursuit of riches, we overlook the wealth we’re born into: time.

Time will always be more valuable than money.

An old and dying man with a large bank account, a mansion, and many profitable businesses would trade it all to be 25 again and in debt.

Consider this...

1 million seconds is 11 days.

1 billion seconds is 31 years.

If you’re younger than 47 and you expect to live to the average life expectancy of ~78 years...

That makes you a Time Billionaire.

This is a notion I picked up from Graham Duncan.

It helps properly frame the true value of time.

Rather than something to take for granted, it’s seen as something of immense value.

People so often race through life with their heads down trying to acquire riches. But are they spending their wealth of time properly?

Are they properly soaking up life?

Have they ever intentionally stood in the rain?

Can they properly appreciate the beauty of a flower?

Of course, it’s okay to use our time to earn money but if money becomes our reason for living then we have lost sight of what matters.

We end up caring more about how we spend our money than how we spend our time.

You want to build a legacy? Fine.

Build one. But never forget the importance of your presence in the lives of those you love.

That’s how the most valuable inheritance is made: the memories left in their hearts after you’re gone.

No amount of prestige or riches could mean more than love felt and time spent.

So how will you spend your billions?

🍂 Where Vanished Days Gather

Reflect on these words from John O’Donohue, from his book Eternal Echoes:

🤓 Learn This Word

Pataphysics: The science of imaginary solutions. Coined by the French playwright Alfred Jarry in the 1890s as a deadpan parody of science, it studies the laws that govern exceptions rather than rules, and the universe supplementary to this one. Where metaphysics asks what lies beyond physics, pataphysics asks what lies beyond metaphysics. Jarry insisted it be spelled with an opening apostrophe, ’pataphysics, to ward off a pun he never explained.

🕸️ From Around The Web

How to Be Psychoactive to Each Other

“And somewhere around here I started wondering how psychoactivity is a broader definition than drugs. Something is psychoactive when it changes the distinctions, states or possibilities available to consciousness. If so, people are wildly psychoactive to each other. We just have a terrible vocabulary for it. We say someone has “good energy” or someone else is “draining.” We feel “more ourselves” around one person, and smaller around another.

But these seem like very different phenomena collapsed into one vague meter. There are people who increase your conceptual resolution but make you less certain. People who make improbable projects seem executable. People around whom you become funnier. People who make you confessional for reasons you don’t entirely understand. Some people are stimulants. Some anaesthetics. Some solvents. And some seem to enlarge the world.”

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