Old Jules, is your life a tangled web of lies or are you a straight shooter?
As nearly as I can discern my life isn’t complex enough to have any room for lies. Sometimes it takes me two shots to dispatch a predator chasing my chickens, however.
Old Jules, have we evolved ourselves to death?
I don’t believe we’ve evolved ourselves to death. We might have selectively bred and culled ourselves to death through war, genocide, feticide, and media-inspired ideals of ‘perfect mates’ and beauty. The 20th Century did a lot of culling and a lot of selective breeding concurrently. The outcome of that insofar as the human gene pool remains to be seen. I happen to live in the ‘wild’ and it’s good from my perspective, but I don’t know whether it would make anyone happy unless the person was inclined to be happy anyway. Probably contentment is a lot more difficult in a more complex social environment, I’d guess based on my own experience. Solitude works for me and it might work for others. As for marriage making us happy or making us unhappy, my personal view is that it’s unlikely. Trying to depend on something outside ourselves for happiness seems doomed to failure.
Old Jules, what’s a definition of love? Why to do some relationships work and others fail?
You already know what you think love is. It is that. Marriage is an agreement of a man and a woman to attempt to live together in harmony. It can work by accident, or it can work by explicit communications between the two parties involved. If each has explicitly defined what’s expected of the other and each has agreed to march to the drum of the expecations of the other in precise detail it can help. It can also help if each agrees to confine the expectations to those communicated and agreed to, as opposed to allowing them to take root and grow in the background without anything being communicated except through sulking, hand-wringing, tears, and “What’s wrong?” “Nothing!” “No. I can tell something’s wrong. What is it?” “Nothing.”
Old Jules, what is God?
Consider an egg with a self-aware, intelligent chick inside. To the chick the inside of the egg is reality. Outside a hen turns the egg every several house gently pecks it, all manner of external environmental phenomena reach the shell and are communicated inside to the chick in the form of noise, movement, vibration, temperature, etc, which the chick is able to sense. But the reality for that chick is inside the egg and its in for a tough job of work figuring out what it’s all about, whether anything exists outside the wall of that shell. Now expand the shell and put 6 billion chicks inside it. God is the hen.
Old Jules, what’s a small detail that you wish other people would realize?
That what other people realize or don’t realize is not their affair, not their business. Dealing with our own realizations and lack of them is plenty difficult enough and we aren’t skilled enough at it to justify a belief we’re wise enough to know what other’s need to realize. I surely wish others would realize this. Yes, I surely do.
So Far From Heaven 