After Camu the most important question is that of suicide or in other words the only serious philosophical question is “Should I kill myself?”

I ocasionally wonder how it would be to die, what if a brick would fall down a house smashing my head? What if I would stumble and fall on the train tracks? What If I was old lying in my bed like grandpa slowly dying? What If…

Naturally, I would never do suicide, but not because I have a tight relationship with life (that is not to say that my life is bad in any way or form) but more the opposite, my most central fear is death. Or not fear itseld but the thought of not existing.

Recently, I read Plato’s “The Apology” and “Phaedo”, in which Socrates get sentenced to death, and his friends asks him, why he doesn’t just ecape (which he could have easily done)? On which Socrates answers: “For the state of death is one of two things: either it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no consciousness of anything, or it is, as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place. And if it is unconsciousness, [40d] like a sleep in which the sleeper does not even dream, death would be a wonderful gain. For I think if any one were to pick out that night in which he slept a dreamless sleep and, comparing with it the other nights and days of his life, were to say, after due consideration, how many days and nights in his life had passed more pleasantly than that night,—I believe that not only any private person, but even the great King of Persia himself [40e] would find that they were few in comparison with the other days and nights. So if such is the nature of death, I count it a gain; for in that case, all time seems to be no longer than one night. But on the other hand, if death is, as it were, a change of habitation from here to some other place, and if what we are told is true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessing could there be, judges?”

I like that sentiment.

I lied -— I switched from Debian to NixOS because the SSD with Debian on it failed. Also, I couldn’t resist the allure of managing everything through one unified configuration file.

On an unrelated note, what’s the deal with double seats on trains? If I’m sitting next to someone, and a two-seater nearby opens up, should I switch seats or stay put? Switching would make things more comfortable for everyone, but I don’t want the other person to think I moved because they smell or are somehow disgusting.

A long time ago, at least 5 years back, when I came home from school, it was bulky waste day. People put waste like furniture out on the street, where a truck would later pick it up.

On that day, as I was walking home, I saw a monitor lying there and decided to bring it home with me. It wasn’t a new monitor, quite the opposite. It had a maximum resolution of 1280x768 and was 19 inches in size, but it was good enough to use as a second monitor.

One issue, though, was that the monitor only supported VGA, which my graphics card didn’t support, so I bought a VGA-to-DVI adapter.

This setup worked fine until recently, when I updated my graphics card driver and kernel. The update introduced a bug that caused the second monitor to be detected but display only a black screen.

There’s a solution: to downgrade the graphics drivers and kernel, which I tried. However, I encountered issues with dependencies and ended up uninstalling packages, which accidentally “nuked” my system.

Fortunately, I was triple-booting and still have my old Debian distribution, so I’m going back to Debian.

Today, I encountered one of the biggest tangents in my life, and I wanted to take note of it.

I was reading A.J. Ayer’s article, The Claims of Philosophy, where I stumbled upon the sentence, “Few men, indeed, can ever have reasoned worse than Hegel, the arch-pontiff of the nineteenth century, but at least he claimed the support of reason for his fantasies.” This made me curious about Hegel (a big mistake).

I had heard a bit about him before but knew nothing in detail, so I searched around and found a two-hour video about him. After an hour, I stopped because it made very little sense to me and switched to another, shorter video by a professor. This one, at 45 minutes, was much more understandable—I highly recommend it.

In the video, the professor said something like, “The classical phase starts with the myths of the gods and then shrinks down to human scale […] if you know the movement from Aeschylus, with his moral rigor and seriousness, to the complete moral abandonment in Euripides […], there is clearly a movement from gods to heroes to men.”

This piqued my curiosity about when these people lived because I recently read Plato’s The Republic, where he already complains about the moral decline (in Book 3, section 1.(b)) in mythological stories, referring to Homer, the most famous poet from whom many great Greek myths, like the Odyssey, come from.

I looked it up and found that Homer was born around 800 BCE, while Euripides was born around 480 BCE, nearly a four hundred years later. It really does seem like throughout history, people have always complained about moral degradation.

From Euripides’ Wikipedia page, I learned that he was prophesied at birth to become a great athlete. This got me curious about the Olympics and whether they continued uninterrupted or were resumed later. It turns out that ancient Greece held around 195 Olympiads (possibly more, if some were unrecorded), and the games were officially resumed in 1896.

This led me to wonder why the games had been paused. They were outlawed by Theodosius I, the last Roman emperor, before the Roman Empire was split into a eastern and a western sections. The split, I think, began with Diocletian, who appointed a co-emperor to help manage the vast empire.

And that was the tangent.