philosophy

Into The Wild

Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the ending. If you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now!

Listen to Eddie Vedder’s cover of Hard Sun written by Gordon Peterson from the Into The Wild Soundtrack as you read along:

I was profoundly moved by this film telling the true story of Christopher McCandless’s journey of self-discovery into the Alaskan wilderness. Directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless, this film hit me hard and I found it hugely cathartic. Despite a packed cinema, it was as though there was just me and this film connected to each other; I cried almost the whole way through.

Part of the reason I connected with it so strongly was that I first saw it while on a journey into the wild of my own: a solo 2,500km motorcycle road-trip of self-discovery from my home town of Sydney to … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I found this book about the power of intuition fascinating. Essentially the idea is that when we develop expertise and intuition in a certain area, our intuition can become a more reliable guide than what we end up with by using our analytical thinking. The trick is to know when to trust our snap judgements, and when they are likely to lead us astray or bias us in some way. Often we are quite unaware of our biases and unless we’re aware of when they’re operating, we go along thinking that we’re making objective choices when really we’re not.

Although it’s tangential to the main theme, one of the most interesting insights I got from this book was in the section on spontaneity where the author talked about the golden rule of improvised comedy: characters accept everything that happens to them. They accept whatever … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago