Paulo Seabra

Some things are a matter of duty, some things are a matter of principle. Sometimes in life you need to burn the bridges and burn the ships, and then carry on in whatever path you've chosen. Indeed, sometimes two fierce rivals will hate each other but still deeply respect each other, while they may truly love a friend and yet not really respect him. Similarly, a student may love a teacher he doesn't respect, and may respect a teacher he absolutely hates, depending on how cool or how strict the teacher is. This is because for one reason or another, and maybe for reasons that are even a little irrational, we tend to see conviction as an inherently admirable thing, whether or not we are forced to. Then again, it is a strange thing to admire because some men of conviction have done truly wicked things in the same measure as some other men of conviction have done great things. It might as well be a double-edged sword, but whatever the case may be, the fact remains that conviction is ...

I know one or two things. Sadly, neither of them are about happiness, so I gotta give it my best shot here and hope I come even remotely close to something neat. Then again everyone wants happiness, regardless of how it is actually defined, and so everyone thinks about it and therefore has some fairly universal ideas of what it really is. For now I have three ideas that I hope to go into some detail about, even if presently I'm not too sure of what I'll say. I do know this though – if happiness really exists, then it is ever-fleeting. One minute you have a lot of it, the next minute it's all gone and replaced by a piano hanging over your head. For that reason, my takes on happiness might be fairly practical, or at least practical happiness is the only kind I ever had access to in my life, that is, at least assuming it's not the only kind of happiness that exists... Whatever the proper truth may be, of one thing I am safely convinced – happiness is not a spiritual, ether...

I think about these things a lot – coincidence, destiny, luck, all of it. Or maybe I don't think about them all that much but they do come up every once in a while. The weird thing is though, when they do come up, they do so with quite a bit of force. As such it's tempting to think synchronicity really is real, and that all these little details and little moments in our path were placed there specifically for us, kinda like a helpful NPC in a video game, either giving us a nudge towards the right direction or heralding the coming of a great advent, whatever the case may be. Other times though, moments of synchronicity don't seem to mean anything at all, or at least nothing serious comes out of them, and so whatever meaning they do have, it's hard to tell if it is truly there and we just need to find it, or if whatever meaning we do find is nothing more than a made-up thing. In that sense, I suppose, a theory that can't be proven wrong isn't a very good one, and ...

I was watching the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie the other day. A bit late to the party to be sure, as I always am when it comes to movies, and I guess maybe I was in a certain mood or state of mind or what have you, because the animal abuse scenes in it made me think about a lot of things. And while there are quite a few of those scenes, the main one for me is, as it is also often the case when it comes to movies, a small one, it is a small detail, a specific and very singular moment. Then again it might not be as insignificant as all that, in great movies the details never are. A lot of thought and work is placed behind all things, and maybe a lot of meaning too, and so now I'm left wondering if I'm on to something or if I'm overthinking everything, or if maybe in a few words time I'll reconsider, and then rewrite, and then delete, this entire page. And the thing in question would be Rocket's very first word, a short and simple word that doesn't even ma...

I like to look into a bunch of things that are best avoided when talking to colleagues and whatnot. One of those things is abortion, which is obviously a controversial and delicate topic that everyone, and especially every HR department, would rather avoid. Another one of those things I like to look into, one that is maybe a bit more accessible but still controversial, would be veganism. For me these two things sorta coincided over time, with my thoughts about abortion forming into a pro-life position even while, or maybe especially while, I was looking into veganism, agreeing with it in some ways, disagreeing with it in other ways, and even having spats with vegans here and there... Whatever it may be, I just kept finding lots of echoes of the two ideas as listening to vegan activists in video essays or podcasts makes me very often come across thoughts that I could very easily plagiarize into a pro-life statement. In fact, a quick exchange that I once “won” against a vegan was when ...

I've written about this topic at least once before, when I was more or less at stage two of my opinion on it. The first time I was confronted by this idea, when I was more or less as a teenager going into my early twenties, I immediately leaned towards the pro-choice side. I did so due to a combination of not seeing the embryo as a morally valuable thing in and of itself, and of believing that it would be kafkaesque to force a woman to carry something in her body against her will for nine months, and to then be forced to undertake the birth itself as well as the subsequent recovery with all its potential long-lasting side effects. In many ways those instances aren't washed away clean, they still make the entire matter of abortion a delicate one. Still, I've now come to see even the pro-choice name as a euphemism, and furthermore, like all things, and especially like all things nowadays, to win or to lose a debate about this topic is often contingent on optics, it's more...