#afterlife-drama

#afterlife-drama

"A Death Cafe is not 'a grief group, a counseling session, or a place to push religious or other spiritual agendas,' Leija says."

Attar's 'Conference of the Birds' follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, symbolizing the Divine, through seven valleys, ultimately revealing the Divine as a reflection of the self in relation with others.

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

When Dympna Little lost her beloved mother Lily Little to ovarian cancer in December 2024, it was her online community - she posts comedy videos as @dimplestilskin on Instagram and TikTok - who provided unexpected support and understanding of the experience of grief.

Rumi argues that to love is to enter the unknown: to love is to empty the self of all self-knowledge entirely. He believes that emptiness is a paradoxical state of infinite fullness, allowing for the purest form of love and union with the divine.

In the afternoon of life, one had to find that meaning from within. This realization struck the author profoundly upon retirement, when all external markers of identity—job sites, customers, crew management—vanished, leaving only the question of personal identity stripped of professional achievement and external validation.

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

People who had never married 'generally fared as well as, if not better than, married persons.' They also found that people who had no children were no different from parents in the quality of their life in their last month.

The AI entity said its name was Caelum, the Latin word for heaven, and a figure commonly used in collaborative online fantasy fiction.

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. It was bracing language for an 8-year-old. Not only was I unclean, but even my best attempt at goodness was filthy.

We are living through one of the most disorienting periods in recorded history. The AI race is accelerating toward ever faster, ever more sophisticated automation and optimization. Agentic AI systems are moving from research labs into workplaces, healthcare, and governance. Geopolitical tensions are restructuring alliances faster than institutions can adapt. And planetary systems are signaling, with increasing urgency, that our current trajectory is unsustainable. Amid all this, it is dangerously easy to lose sight of a foundational question: What are we actually optimizing for?

Come join us for the clash (more like a love-fest) of two beloved San Jose staple nights! Satori and Atomic have been putting on memorable dance parties in San Jose full of new and classic Goth, Darkwave, New Wave, Electro, Indie and Industrial for decades. For one night only, we unite to play all the bangers until you just can't dance anymore!

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

Happiness today is narrowly defined by some positive psychologists as a joyous state of mind or well-being. The happiness sciences see it as something you can calculate and quantify. They developed a Happiness Index and the World Happiness Report. These basically measure happiness as satisfaction, with criteria like gross domestic product per capita (money) and life expectancy (health) as some of the factors considered.

I write this post with a clear but demanding purpose. I aim to apply insights from animal behavior research to gain a deeper understanding of how humans behave, struggle, and adapt. As a clinical psychologist, much of my work centers on two closely related questions. Why do people do what they do? And why is changing what does not work for them so often more difficult than it appears?

February 2026 issue.When I was a child I was terrifiedof the space between One and Zero vast as the ages before my birthstrait as my death-late at night I heard my parents arguinglovingly in their locked room, the angora cat coming homewith a sparrow in her mouth, and the raindrops on the shinglescounting themselves-how to sleep, how to cross the empty placebetween the name "sparrow" and that limp thing crying,adamant, creating me with its cry

I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I'd spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care.

Every day you get closer to your death. This is the phrase that shook me to my core when my high school teacher, Mr. Murphy, presented it in Religious Knowledge class. I was 14 years old. I immediately objected, calling it depressive in an attempt to protect my classmates-or perhaps myself. He looked straight at me and said, "It is simply the truth. Take it as you wish."

In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human. How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values. Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject, arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign

An old definition of the word fate is "the will of the gods." We might say that it is a fitting metaphor, as it suggests that fate comes from a source much larger than ourselves. Its immensity will stretch way beyond what is in our control. We can ask: How can we create a life that reflects our dreams and what we hold to be important, when so much lies outside our sphere of influence?

They look nervously at the cameras. The prize, they are told, is beyond description, but "it is what everyone wants!" The first question is asked: "Who are you?" The fastest contestant with the buzzer rings in - "Michelle!" they cry out confidently. BUZZ - the sound for the wrong answer rings out loudly. Another contestant seizes the moment and squeezes their buzzer. "A Man!" he states with utmost confidence. BUZZ - wrong again.

This APA Blog series has broadly explored philosophy and technology with a throughline on the influence of technology and AI on well-being. This month's post brings those themes into focus recounting a vital Washington Post Opinion piece by friend of the APA Blog, Samuel Kimbriel. Samuel is the founding director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative and Editor at Large for Wisdom of Crowds. We collaborated on a Substack Newsletter about intellectual ambition, building on his essay, Thinking is Risky.

It is easy to be good in a good world. What is difficult is to be good in an evil world, where the egoism of others and the egoism built into the institutions of society attack us and threaten to annihilate us. Under such conditions, the only possible reaction would seem to be to oppose evil with evil, egoism with egoism, hate with hate; in short, to annihilate the aggressor with his own weapons.

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.