"Follow your heart" is often used in the same way "follow your passion" is. Most times it ends up really meaning: follow your feelings, which can get you in a lot of trouble.
Conventional Wisdom
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You're overlooking that many make post such as those for the ironic humor.
The older you get, the less anticipation. At 15 you can't wait until 16. From 16, 18 sounds like an eternity. From 16 to 21, it may as well be decades. After that, many are focused on work, family, or other grown up responsibilities in day to day lives and perception of time loses some of its meaning.
I get that perception of time changes (subjective), but I don't see how objective time (e.g. the clock moving at the same pace no matter what) can change.
In the sciences, conventional wisdom is formalized with peer reviewed publications where the reviewing process weeds out dubious claims and bad data and bad data analysis. Nonetheless, it is surprising the process regularly fails. Many Nobel laureates went through long careers being the jokes at scientific meetings because they were a little ahead of their time and correct in their observations.
The burden on all of us is to sort our seeming truth, group psychology, and sanctioned mistakes to burrow out the bed rock truth, which is seldom comforting nor what you start out thinking of as rock solid. Unexpected is the food of science. If a "truth" is emotionally satisfying to you, it may be wrong.
The burden on all of us is to sort our seeming truth, group psychology, and sanctioned mistakes to burrow out the bed rock truth, which is seldom comforting nor what you start out thinking of as rock solid. Unexpected is the food of science. If a "truth" is emotionally satisfying to you, it may be wrong.
That's just it, no one said it did. It's personal experience often taken out of context. Sometimes meaning isn't literal and you just have to know how to recognize when you see it. Ever have a job you despised and time felt like it flew by on break but dragged while working?
I could always manage the "fake it" part, but the "make it" proved elusive.
I don't believe anything until I fact-check it with Snopes...the ultimate authority on everything...you know that dude accused of embezzling the company funds and his morbidly obese cat and ex-wife...and his porn star/escort concubine. I mean, if you can't trust them, who can you trust?
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?
To a great extent it is the subjective experience of time that I'm referring to. But there are also other more mysterious experiences of time that are not so easily explained. Such as time slowing down during a traumatic or dangerous event such as a car crash or some violent encounter. This is very commonly experienced and is the person's consciousness actually slowing down their direct immediate experience of time passing, to the point where they can actually perform some action that would otherwise have been impossible if the time had passed in what we consider normal speed.
Another common experience is a great acceleration of time such as in near death experiences where people see their whole life "flash before their eyes" but yet experience the details of it. There is also how we experience time during sleep, where several hours pass in what we perceive as mere moments...or dreams that seem to go on for a very long time but sometimes occur in just the last minute or two of sleep.
I have had only 2 "psychedelic" induced experiences in my life, but in both of them I experienced a profound altering of time...including even time going backward.
So I'm just saying that even though it may all ultimately be subjective, there is a real mystery in how we experience time through consciousness...but the real mystery is consciousness itself.
I can't remember who said it or wrote it, but "time exists in eternity and eternity exists in time".
Sad these days how someone who actually has the ability to go through with embezzlement doesn't have the wherewithal to keep their feline's weight in check.
Ah... Lesson 1 from the turn of the last century: Time is relative. No, the clock does not move the same no matter how old or young you are. It is dependent on rate of movement as well as where one views the experience.Maybe I'm just too dull to get it, but the clock moves the same no matter how old or young we are.
And... for a one year old, a day is exactly 1/365 of their sum total of life experiences.
For a ten year old, a day is exactly 1/3650 of their total life experiences.
I don't want to even begin to think about how that applies to me... Accept to say that conventional wisdom gives me only 120 months to live before I die. When I was young, I had many more months in my pocket book before I reached the mean age of life expectancy. Trust me when I tell you, a month of life is a pretty big deal.
It's not always the platitude or aphorism itself that I bristle at, but rather the aphorist's confidence that their pith can hold the considerable philosophical burden placed upon it. Most aphorisms have some measure of truth to them. But the truth they have is relative to the circumstances to which they are employed to address. The better aphorists understand this, and their sayings are often promoted as proverbs over time. Answer and answer not, and all that jazz.
Many people mistake wisdom for simply being able to sound profound. Many self-help grifters rely on such credulity then and now.
I think that's why I appreciate more those thinkers who challenge those whose storehouse of knowledge rests solely in the aphoristic. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard is just such an example. So many of the aphorisms therein are such obvious homespun hokum. The point was to illicit a laugh, but also provide some practical wisdom too.
Many people mistake wisdom for simply being able to sound profound. Many self-help grifters rely on such credulity then and now.
I think that's why I appreciate more those thinkers who challenge those whose storehouse of knowledge rests solely in the aphoristic. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard is just such an example. So many of the aphorisms therein are such obvious homespun hokum. The point was to illicit a laugh, but also provide some practical wisdom too.
Of course but, it also can result in solutions. No adage should be unilaterally applied in life, too constricting. They can suitably applied or misapplied. Context gentlemen. Context!
It depends on the nature of the statement, but I have no problem with challenging a particularly absurd assumption, or, as Harlan Ellison once put it, pissing on the parade. If someone gets butt hurt, that's for them to discuss with their therapist, and if someone proves me wrong, then I learn something new.
H L Menken is credited with writing, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste or intelligence of the American people."
There's no actual evidence that he either wrote of said that.
What Menken did write was this:
"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
There's no actual evidence that he either wrote of said that.
What Menken did write was this:
"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
That was a insult, you don't know me, how can you say that, you don't know what I been through, you should not be on the forum.
Conventional wisdom, like they say for common sense, is neither conventional nor wise much of the time. But sometimes it sticks and is useful. When I was in grad school, I ate frequently at a hole in the wall falafel store ($1.25 sandwich!) Which had some dreadful inspirational posters on the wall. But I have nonetheless remembered three pieces of CW from these posters that stuck with me because i read them so often, and which have served me well:
1. Leave everything a little bit better than you found it;
2. Never grow zucchini unless you have a lot of friends; and
3. Call your mother.
1. Leave everything a little bit better than you found it;
2. Never grow zucchini unless you have a lot of friends; and
3. Call your mother.
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