A reminder to myself.

Those fictional monsters we create in our minds often hurt us more than the dangers of which they were borne.  Fearfulness and worrisomeness, we pay a high price for them from our sanity, and yet all they do is steal our joy and sap our strength.  Sometimes we realize that the poison damaging our thoughts came from the same cup we poured onto ourselves.

The future is unknown, and could be full of danger and frustration.  But we forget that we can be strong when we need to, sometimes stronger than what we thought is possible, and for that reason we can face and overcome any struggle we might encounter.

There is no need to fear.  We should spend our thoughts instead on what makes us happy.

On Reading Leo Tolstoy's works

Leo Tolstoy's books are great, but not in the way those similarly sized tomes coming from the fantasy genre (my favorites are Brandon Sanderson's, Robert Jordan's, and George R.R. Martin's) where it's hard to put those down once you have started reading them. His books on the other hand are in the "must put down and think" kind of good category. Always, I get myself immersed deeply in my thoughts after just reading a few pages. And then I would avoid his books for several weeks or months because sometimes it can be very stressful the thoughts his writings make me entertain, thoughts that sometimes go directly against my pre-conceived notions and upbringing -- any book that makes you think really hard is good!

While I can finish those fantasy books in 3-7 nights (even the 1000+ page novels), I for example have been reading Anna Karenina for 8 years already and I'm only half-way through. Reading War and Peace took 5 years. And yet oh how I loved these books I've mentioned.

The years have quite piled on and there are still so many classic novels to read in my lifetime reading queue. I guess in the analogy of a marathon, I hope once I get over this Tolstoy hill things would be a lot easier. But actually I don't know if I am on a hill or if I am still running on a plain.

So back to my e-book reader (btw: most classical works are free since the copyright expired) and see what Tolstoy with his arrangement of words, and thoughts, will spark in my mind this time.

Economists/Businessmen and politicians will be the sole saviors of the world they themselves have ruined.

Just some spontaneous philosophical thoughts on a rainy Sunday evening:

It's not always an engineering problem.

For example: extreme hunger still exists in the world today not because we as a whole are not producing enough food (I have personally seen the wastefulness in food in rich countries) , but that the production and distribution of food is very disparate between the first and third world countries.  Factor in war, corruption in government and corporations, and highly inequitable trade agreements between countries, and one will realize we will always have a huge population of the world go hungry no matter how smart we would have become at producing food.

The best answers to our worldly problems can only come from good politics and more favorable trading environments for the less wealthy (I am looking at you middle men of coffee and cacao beans especially!  And also, High Frequency Traders --  you are just gaming the system.)

Economists/Businessmen and politicians will be  the sole saviors of the world their fellows (or even they themselves) have ruined.

And somehow that pisses me off.  I should run for President or something -- but again, this is also not an engineering problem.