Mukesh > Recent Status Updates

Enkidu's death brings home to Gilgamesh the reality of mortality. Despite their heroic achievements—slaying Humbaba, defeating the Bull of Heaven—Enkidu dies a lingering death, his fate sealed by divine decree. The grave goods and funeral rituals cannot prevent his death or restore him to life. They can only honor his memory and secure his well-being in the afterlife!!

"This was the world in which Black people lived with tuberculosis in
the U.S.—one where they were told by the medical establishment that
their illness was caused by weaknesses and susceptibilities inherent to
their race, or else by freedom and citizenship itself. we continued to blame it on the sufferer, but with a radically racialized and stigmatic lens that
caused more harm to the ill than previous forms of stigma"

My TBR is increasing day by day, last year it was 400 books to read but now it's probably 2 thousand books, and there's a reason why that's happening.
Whenever I open insta, I feel a sudden urge to save all the posts which consists of recommendations that's why I don't even open that app anymore because it reminds me of the number of posts I've saved and also I ask AI daily to give me the a lot of recommendations

Cato's discourse demonstrates that old age need not be a burden if one has lived well, maintained intellectual pursuits, developed good character, and followed nature. The key to a happy old age lies not in external circumstances like wealth and position, but in inner resources of wisdom, virtue, and active engagement with life through intellectual pursuits and service to others.

Gilgamesh urges Enkidu to forget death and seek life, invoking the wisdom that the careful man must be cautious but not paralyzed by fear. He quotes the proverb: "Let him who goes first be on guard for himself and bring his comrade to safety!" and declares that it is they who made a name for days long in the future.
"‘Forget death and seek life’—to live, one must stop fearing death. That's the hero's creed."

I'm changing day by day, nowadays I don't enjoy the same animes I used to watch before, I don't like the same comedy shows I loved 1 year ago, also for movies, I don't watch the most popular movies which depicts violence or just drama, like I would always prefer to watch "Young Sheldon" over Dhurandhar any day and today I watched Suits (the same law firm drama which I wanna see in my real life as well) which I loved!

Before Homer's Odyssey.. let's start with The Epic of Gilgamesh.. the oldest epic of humanity
It's very poetic, I liked the dynamics like how the Enkidu and Gilgamesh were rivals before but later on become companions and I already got the spoiler thanks to google search... Elegant story, must read

"DENNETT: If someone plays the "faith card" – saying "I'm Christian, I just have to believe this" – the polite response is: excuse yourself from the discussion, because you've declared you can't proceed with an open mind. If you can't defend your view, don't put it forward. We won't accept faith as justification. Defend your Holy Book in reasoned terms, not because it says so – that's arrogant and a bullying move..."

Interesting, very interesting...
A man's search for spiritual fulfillment

"....let us learn to increase our continence, to set bounds to our pride, to assuage our anger, to look upon poverty without prejudice, to practise thrift, albeit many are ashamed to do so, to apply cheap remedies to the wants of nature, to keep all undisciplined hopes and aspirations as it were under lock and key, and to make it our business to get our riches from ourselves and not from Fortune alone..."

"As soon as you have
devoted yourself to philosophy, you will have overcome all disgust at life:
you will not wish for darkness because you are weary of the light, nor will
you be a trouble to yourself and useless to others: you will acquire many
friends, and all the best men will be attracted towards you: for virtue, in
however obscure a position, cannot be hidden, but gives signs of its presence...."

"Evolution bypassed our intuition for relativity and quantum strangeness. Yet our evolved brains built mathematics to precisely predict these invisible realms. This mental power lets us grasp what we cannot directly sense. It's a triumph of abstract reasoning over biological limitation. We now navigate the universe beyond our senses"

Seneca says:-
"No one," I say, "that will give me no compensation worth such a loss shall ever rob me of a day. Let my mind be contained within itself and improve itself: let it take no part with other men's affairs, and do nothing which depends on the approval of others: let me enjoy a tranquility undisturbed by either public or private troubles."

Hobbes thought we're all selfish, driven by fear and greed. If society collapsed, we'd steal and kill to survive—because in a world of scarce resources, it's rational. Life outside society? "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Why lock your door? Because we know others would take everything—and Hobbes says we're no different at heart.

Epictetus, a former slave and crippled Stoic philosopher, taught that while the body can be shackled, the mind remains free—because our thoughts are our own. His practical wisdom helped Vietnam POW James Stockdale survive years of torture and isolation by choosing not to be moved by what he couldn't control. A philosophy forged in suffering, but built for resilience.

I really miss the direct message feature we had here on goodreads, although I agree that there were some people who were not trustworthy and they would often promote their own agenda (crypto, scams etc.).
It was fun for normal people like us, who wanted to talk to someone with genuine curiosity and similar interests but nowadays even that'd get lost in their notifications.

Wisdom for Socrates was not knowing lots
of facts, or knowing how to do something. It meant understanding the
true nature of our existence, including the limits of what we can
know. Philosophers today are doing more or less what Socrates was
doing: asking tough questions, looking at reasons and evidence,
struggling to answer some of the most important questions we can ask
ourselves about the nature of reality...

"Is the pious being loved by the gods because
it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?" Let's go for it..

"Many young men decide that maybe by being "nice," they will stand out from the other guys and might gain the approval of some member of the opposite sex. This decision is especially important if the young man has already been conditioned to believe that he is not OK just as he is.
It is this strategy formed in adolescence — trying to attract a woman and
her sexual favor by being nice and later carry into
adulthood"

Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation
(even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. No matter
where we are, there are some things we can identify, make use of, and
predict, and some things we neither know nor understand. No matter who
we are, Kalahari Desert–dweller or Wall Street banker, some things are
under our control, and some things are not.

Suggest me some non-fiction books which you think I must read as a 21y old aiming for polymath!!

I missed the old debates of atheism vs theist so let's give it one more try!! I miss Hitchens tho, he was a great writer, and overall good debater as well and his old debates are gold and I often try to watch those videos as well

interesting book so far, the most fascinating fact I learned was that even TB was romancitized or seen as a divine or badge of honour for poets etc. So we either romanticize a disease or we see the affected person as inferior but we still lack the ability to see it from humanistic pov which is exactly the middle ground here, you don't romanticize nor you ignore, but you cure the person!!
Ebola is also mentioned OMG

""Something like 90 percent of people die of disease, a phenomenon so
entrenched in human life that we attribute most such deaths to “natural
causes.” Many of us feel a certain relief when we learn that someone
has died “naturally,” especially when the death occurs at what we think
of as an appropriate age, About half of all humans ever born died
before the age of five""