interesting post, short and sweet i suppose. As are most things in life though.

Personally, structured systems of thought are not my cup of tea, though i do enjoy reading about other peoples thoughts about them, and how they’ve been constructed together in the past, as it’s a rather explicit method of defining something, which is the point of these systems to begin with.

I’ve always been kind of attracted to the concepts of anarchy by the very nature of them. I’m very much an anti-political person, i hate explicitly defining things and boiling them down into simple concepts, when often times that’s not possible without losing a lot of what creates that environment in the first place. Counter intuitively i really like these systems from the perspective of conceptualizing complex systems without having to go through every little detail present. I think nihilism is the most prominent example of this. It’s often sited as a “paradoxical ideology” which i think is the point of it existing. Without things like nihilism, it’s hard to quantify what really makes life interesting. Not that you can’t find these aspects about them without such concepts, just that it’s evidently much clearer in a systematic manner.

incoming rambles, it gets iffy :)

the value you get from any given ideology is not what it espouses, it’s what it instills in you. For me the value i’ve gained from stoicism for example, is not what it preaches, but what i’ve extracted from it with regards to materialistic possessions. I’ve learned to grow a healthy relationship with the materialistic possessions that i do have however. The value in the item is not of the item itself, but of it’s relevance to me, and what it means to me as an extension of myself. For example i own a handful of older thinkpad models as i’m a computer nerd and tech enthusiast. They’re old, cheap, and second hand, so the value of them has already been accrued by another user. For me however, the value in them is what i’ve done with them, and what i’m continually able to do with them. As a linux user it’s mostly linux, and other related things

I don’t know much about japanese culture, but from what i understand, they have a relatively similar concept of materialistic possessions in some aspects, which i think is interesting.

Hey - sorry for replying so late to this threat - , I thought if might interest you that Marx himself was actually fairly versed in Epicureanism. The subject of his doctor thesis implies that he was extremely educated about Epicurean physics and, by extension, ethics. So just wanted to let you know that there is a reason why these two are so similar :)

By the way, great blog post! It was very well-written. I enjoyed reading it!