Why Would I Write

Category: Thoughts

  • The Power of Prayer

    Why do people even bother praying? Whenever something bad happens to someone, people say send your prayers to X or keep them in your thoughts and prayers. Does it even matter if you do?

    I keep hearing all the time that something is ‘God’s plan‘ so why even bother trying to ask for otherwise? If something is going to happen because it’s destined or predetermined, then what are you praying for?

    Isn’t trying to change an outcome going against your god’s plan? Why are you not going along with it? Are you saying he/she/it is wrong? Can god be wrong?

    Why would god listen to the words from your lips? Unless you’re saying you’re so powerful that god listens to you. If that’s the case, then why can’t you pray for everything you want in life and get it? People say you can’t pray for selfish things – isn’t praying for someone’s health selfish in a way? You want someone to survive so you can spend more time with them. If you didn’t intend on ever seeing that person again, you wouldn’t have bothered.

    What if someone else was praying for the same person’s death? Who does god listen to then? Does god even listen? How does god decide who to listen to?

    If god doesn’t listen, then why pray? Why aren’t we questioning god’s ‘shitty’ decisions in the first place?

    “Oops, I accidentally gave your grandma cancer. Deal with it.”

    Does an almighty and powerful god need to listen to people to know what to do? Does god even give a shit?

    Pray if it makes you feel better, or if you want to. Just don’t pray and expect anything to happen. If anything does happen, know that it’s because you worked to achieve it, or it was a coincidence. It wasn’t because you prayed for it.

    Change things you know you can instead of trying to invoke some mysterious force in the sky. It’s much more effective.

    Here’s a wonderful bit by a comedian I came across a few months ago on Netflix:

    Check out Daniel Sloss on Netflix
  • Too Many Choices

    Too Many Choices

    Thanks to the advent of fast internet connections, I’ve been spoilt for choice when it comes to things I want to waste my time on when I’m in front of the computer. Previously, I was limited by the amount of space I had in my hard drive. Terrabytes weren’t a thing yet, so I couldn’t store all my favorite MP3s and movies. Then came CD-ROM burners, which helped, but not as much as external hard drives. Those used to cost way more for less storage than you get now, and beyond the occasional thumb drive (to replace the lost ones I got for free from events) I haven’t purchased one in ages.

    my local MP3 collection

    Now I don’t even back up most of my files on physical media anymore. Thanks to Google Drive and Photos, there isn’t a need. Not to mention, Google does a great job of automatically sorting and tagging your photos (I know people care about their privacy, but I enjoy the convenience of typing noodles in the search bar to remember where I’ve been). Machines have come a long way thanks to all the captchas we’ve been doing.

    Google Photos

    If you want to watch a movie these days, just load up Netflix, or your favorite streaming site, type in a movie name and click watch. It’s that convenient. If you want to listen to music, just load up Spotify or YouTube, type in a song name and there you go! No more waiting for songs to download to your PC and launching them in a media player to listen to them. I still do the latter for music, but streaming services are great to check out new artists I have not listened to before.

    But like with all things, there are good and bad sides to them. While people might see it as a ‘first world problem’, it’s a problem nonetheless – having too many choices makes it difficult to decide what you want to consume. Yes, that’s right. You ever sit down in front of your TV, and browse Netflix endlessly looking for something to watch? I know I’m guilty. I see a show I think I might be interested in but I don’t watch it immediately. I add it to ‘My (neverending) List’, and look for something else that I might want to watch. Repeat this for maybe half an hour and decide that I’d rather do something else instead of watching a show. Come back to Netflix a week later and repeat the same process. It’s the same with Spotify. I have playlists of countless unwatched shows and unlistened music.

    my Netflix playlist

    While it’s not an issue having large playlists of unconsumed content, it could be a problem one day – when record companies or movie distributors lose the rights to the material, leaving empty spots in your playlists. And then you kick yourself for not checking them out earlier. Fortunately, there’s always the alternative coughpiratebaycough but most of the time you’ll look for something, download it and end up forgetting about it (at least that’s what I do).

    I guess it’s more of my consumption habit than a problem of too many choices. I should learn to pick and choose and stick with it. Which is why I’ve been choosing not to finish some games in my Steam library. When I feel a game is more trouble than it’s worth to complete, I uninstall and move on.

    my Steam library

    I’ve been doing the same thing with music and shows too. If I don’t absolutely enjoy something, I turn it off and jump to the next in line. I don’t have that much time in my life, shouldn’t I spend it on something else that I like instead? This philosophy has helped me to clean up my playlist (it’s still long but I’m getting there) and it is also why I play so much Dota 2.

    Also, interesting video about choices:

  • Elevator Silence

    Ever been in this situation? You and your friend are busy chatting in an elevator when the doors open and some strangers enter. Suddenly, all conversations halt and the floor number display is the most interesting object in the container (room?) second to your own shoes. I’ve always found that to be quite interesting – the fact that the lift becomes quieter the more people it holds. However, this rule doesn’t apply when there are more people who know each other than strangers.

    It’s not like the conversation was about anything offensive – people just feel compelled to stay quiet in the presence of strangers. Kinda reminded me of the no phone calls in trains in Japan ‘rule’ I’ve read about.

    I thought I had more to say about the subject but I didn’t so I googled the topic and found this really interesting article on elevator spaces. Elevators are basically small rooms, and that’s just how people seem to behave in confined places. This bit was hilarious:

     We would be – we would really distress people, though, if we stepped into an elevator and kept staring at the back wall, would we not? I mean, everybody else would get a little bit uncomfortable.

    Turns out there’s a lot of material you can read up on about elevators. From the article I linked, I also learned about a magazine called Elevator World. Also, unrelated but related to elevators:

    We definitely need some of these shaming elevators here