Essays on freedom and personal fulfilment by Chris Barclay
In an upcoming post, I’m going to write about how to monetize a hobby. I feel I’ve achieved some success in this area, to the point where at the age of 42, I don’t have to go to work anymore; I pursue what I love and find a way for it to pay for itself. […]
Continue ReadingYou are perfect. I mean it. And not in a stereotypical American way of heaping praise on people to make them feel better about themselves. If your immediate response to this is, “nobody’s perfect”, this is what most people say, because we have been taught that we all have our weaknesses and must work on […]
Continue ReadingYou’re not who you think you are. This, according to movies like The Matrix, Fight Club, the Bourne Identity, The Truman Show, Lost Highway and many others. Not only are you somebody else, but you are actually living “in a world where nothing is as it seems”, to quote one of the most popular movie […]
Continue ReadingHaving spent my last 16 or so Christmases in Asia, I don’t feel its commercial impact the way I did in the U.S. I honestly don’t miss it. This year we bought a good-sized potted conifer and put it on a small rug in the den by the fireplace (the one we’ve yet to use). […]
Continue ReadingI took several classes on Buddhism in college and even went to study in Sri Lanka in 1986, where I attended the University of Peradinya, in the central highlands of Kandy, a fantastic place. As part of my field research, I wanted to know what it was like to be a monk so I became […]
Continue ReadingVictor Frankl in his masterwork, “Man’s Search for Meaning” talks about how in the midst of the Holocost, he realized that there was one thing that his Nazi captors could not take from him: his ability to choose how he felt. Frankl wrote about this choice as the last of the human freedoms as “the […]
Continue ReadingYou may have heard the practice of Japanese fishing ships keeping a small shark in their fish tanks. The first time I heard this I wondered, “Why would you want to put a fish in the tank that will eat other fish?” What the fishing companies found was that because they were having to go […]
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