Essays on freedom and personal fulfilment by Chris Barclay
I’m just back from another week in China where I faced many temptations. These confronted me like ghosts from my past, taunting and double-dog daring me to submit. There was bread – the temptation to spend it as if I were still a single guy. The temptation to jump – back into businesses that I […]
Continue ReadingThis week I sometimes felt frustrated when trying to soothe our three week-old baby girl. She’s not particularly fussy, but requires a lot of attention. When my wife sent me some tips on how calm the baby, courtesy of Ask Dr. Sears, it got me thinking about how as adults, we devote a majority of […]
Continue ReadingIt’s said that when we’re asleep we’re half-awake, and when we’re awake we’re half-asleep. As creatures of habit, we often fail to notice that we fail to notice how our unconscious desires produce consistent results. This is what we learn to call, “just the way things are.”
Continue ReadingI am staying true to my blog’s theme this week, despite the opportunity to wax lyrical about the birth of my daughter today. Rather, I want to challenge the notion that by having a child, we are somehow giving up our freedom, and that we will never be as free as we have been. Common […]
Continue ReadingI am a huge fan of HBO’s The Wire, and like The Sopranos before it, I was sad to see it end. While The Sopranos reminded me of a Greek tragedy, The Wire unfolded like a sprawling Dickens novel set in present day Baltimore, portraying its broken social, political and economic institutions with artful precision […]
Continue ReadingI recently came across an essay on The Good Life by Jim Rohn, who calls himself “the world’s leading motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur.” I watched some of his videos on YouTube, including one in which he exhorts an audience not to be “broke, stupid and ugly”. Talk about the power of positive thinking! I […]
Continue ReadingFrom previous posts, you’ve probably come across my interest in the virtual world. This is not the computer/cyber world, though we’ve built computers to mimic the processes of our own brains. The virtual world I’m interested in is one constructed from our own mental projections. It’s the waking lucid dream we refer to as reality.
Continue Reading