The Mystic Ranger

I like being/interacting with peo­ple. I don’t think it’s par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive, but I find it per­son­ally pleasing.

Plea­sure is def­i­nitely some­thing one should be liv­ing for. Largely, if not entirely.
Play­ing, eat­ing deli­cious food, music, read­ing, think­ing, peo­ple, all that stuff.

Learn­ing, I believe, is another thing one should live for. ~Expand on this at some indef­i­nite point of time in the future.~
I do not know clearly why, but I believe the abil­ity to think, is of a great value. It is kind of what… makes us human, I think, in some weird short-sighted/egocentric view. One must try to enhance one’s per­sonal knowl­edge and expe­ri­ences, and as far as pos­si­ble, the sum total of human knowledge/wisdom/thoughts. As G.H. Hardy’s quote, for me, implies, the most impor­tant, and ever­last­ing things, are new ideas.

“A math­e­mati­cian, like a painter or a poet, is a cre­ator of pat­terns. If his pat­terns are more per­ma­nent than those of oth­ers, it is because they are made up of ideas.”

– G.H. Hardy

Com­pas­sion, I have come to believe, is a legit thing to uphold with impor­tance, in one’s life. To empathise with the world’s (beings’) pains, life, and try to cause an over­all bet­ter­ment. I can be as focussed/narrow as help­ing one’s own self, or fam­ily, to slightly wider in try­ing to help the poor peo­ple; to being as wide as the entire span of all liv­ing things (as far as pos­si­ble with­out con­flict of inter­est), and work for the bet­ter­ment of their con­di­tions. The ratio­nal Harry, seems to have pro­grammed him­self to hold sen­tience, with an incred­i­bly high regard. I can’t see pre­cisely why, but it seems like a nice moral to stand by.
† I recently kinda buried a kit­ten. Essen­tially we just car­ried it down­stairs in a plas­tic bag, and tossed it into the grass.

We had played with the kit­ten. There were two things that went by me. One, was that I was able to look at the body of the cat, and won­der why there had hap­pened to become large holes of wounds on its body. Oth­ers around me couldn’t bear to, as a mix­ture of sad­ness and dis­gust. I could not under­stand what switch I lacked in my head, that I felt no such dis­gust in par­tic­u­lar except want­ing to know why that wound was there, when I was look­ing at it care­fully. The other feel­ing, of sor­row, was fairly inter­est­ing. It was per­haps sub­dued because I did not have any strong attach­ment with the kit­ten. But there was still a soft feel­ing of loss. Some of it was sim­ply of the lack of the fairly cute and fun kit­ten in the room. But there was some feel­ing of the loss of a being. It was per­haps rather forced. I see it as a rather vol­un­tary and con­scious thought. But nev­er­the­less, there was a life in that body, which was lost. I felt sad.

And the vaguest term, the thing that seems to be of great­est impor­tance – of objec­tive value – to have in one’s life, I glean, is pro­duc­tiv­ity. There is seem­ingly no value of a per­son, not just in a cap­i­tal­ist, con­sumerist soci­ety; but in the basic car­nal, phys­i­cal (and pos­si­bly even spir­i­tual) sense of the world, who is not pro­duc­ing. So per­haps, the main ques­tion is, what must you be pro­duc­ing?
What counts, as a good out­put?
Hav­ing listed the things above, the answer, albeit in sub­jec­tive terms, appears to be rather clear.

One needs to work, in a way that is com­pas­sion­ate. Build­ing with a ‘love’, for people/animals/things.
That helps in build­ing the total knowl­edge of the world.
And in a way that one enjoys.

And doing the best that one can do. Doing the best that one believes can be done.

Noth­ing else, in my opin­ion and under­stand­ing of the world is last­ing, or more impor­tantly, matters.