Thanks to my kindle, this year I can actually remember the books I read. Here are a few summed up into one or two things that I took away from them.
As a Man Thinketh
- Every action can be traced back to a thought
Siddhartha
- Life is a series of loops
Games People Play
- We internalize rules as we grow up and depending on who we interact with we function by them.
The Dumb House
- The past is composed of random events that shape our lives which we have no control over, yet we look back at the past as if it made sense.
Thinking in Bets
- Good decisions can have bad outcomes, bad decisions can have good outcomes. Focus on the process of analyzing uncertainty. Think in bets.
Steppenwolf
- We hold multiple identities inside us, we are not a single individual but an ever changing self.
Fooled by Randomness
- Silent evidence, narrative fallacy, hindsight bias.
How Emotions are Made
- Emotions aren’t real they are actually composed of the result from the body’s self analysis called interoception. Which produces two things. A sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness and high arousal or low arousal, then the brain through prediction, culture, and environment creates an instance of emotion.
Denial of Death
- The awareness of our death creates a neuroses among people that we try and compensate for in a various ways.
Mans Search for Meaning
- There is no grand meaning in life, you find your own.
- You are responsible for your attitude no matter the circumstance
Lack and Transcendence
- A sense of lack, that we aren’t a self, permeates our every waking moment causing suffering.
- Indra’s net – An infinite net with infinite jewels in between. Each jewel reflects all the other jewels. A metaphor for the infinite interconnection of all things.
Hatchum 