#into-oblivion

#into-oblivion

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recently, the culprit has often been the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security is putting out white-nationalist dog whistles on X. President Trump posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The subtext of every egregious shitpost from the administration is the same: These people are in charge now, and the old rules don't matter. A great deal of what I find myself scrolling past exudes a threatening, almost anarchical aura.

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?'

Erving Goffman, the Canadian sociologist, built an entire framework around this in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His argument was elegant and a little unsettling: social life is theatre. We are always performing. Every interaction has a "front stage" where we manage impressions, modulate tone, and curate which parts of ourselves are visible.

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.

The better you are at managing your emotions, the less emotional support people offer you. It's not cruelty. It's perceptual bias. People take your composure at face value because it's efficient for them to do so. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people consistently underestimate the emotional needs of those they perceive as high copers.

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

Metaphors are linked to how we experience the world around us, according to seminal work by researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In English, we "move forward" with our lives and don't "retreat into" the past. We speak about people who are "cold as ice" and "heavy" matters we need to resolve. Some of these metaphorical expressions are more than just, well, expressions-they are actually based on our sensory experiences. This mind-body link is called "embodied cognition."

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.

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.

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.

A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.