Paulo Seabra

I think I can safely say I'm not a sociopath. That may be a funny way to start an essay, and an even funnier way to start a date, but I feel it is worth mentioning here. I think I'm a little strange as far as empathy goes, not because I don't feel it but because I don't feel it all that immediately. It's as if there's a delayed reaction, sometimes lasting months or years. For instance, I remember once when I was in school, I must have been thirteen or so, I saw this sorta nerdy girl running along the hallway, she tripped, fell down, and all the contents of her backpack went flying over her head. And everyone laughed... I didn't, in all honesty, I never found that kind of thing to be all that funny, though I do have a strange sense of humor nonetheless. So no, I didn't laugh, but I also didn't much care for it, that is until many years later when I was writing something down and this girl's fall came to me out of nowhere, and only then did I feel...

I was just watching some random clips of The Sopranos, as I every so often do, and I came across one of my all-time favorite scenes. It's season one, Tony gets picked up by Christopher who arrives late and after a string of recent screw-ups. Tony chastises him in his typical Tony way, but then Christopher opens up and they have something of a rare moment. And this moment is very relevant, maybe one of the most important moments in the entire show, especially as it pertains to the more psychological aspects of it, because it's the first moment where Tony and Christopher talk about depression. And the way it's phrased by Christopher, the way a relatively uneducated man verbalizes his innermost feelings, it's just so poignant and full of depth that I've come to steal the phrase and use it myself when describing what it truly is like to feel depressed – It is to constantly struggle when facing the regularness of life. “Can I try and explain here?... I don't know, T...

Ever since starting this here blog I've alternated my publishing schedule a bit. For the longest time I had this weird OCD impulse to upload a set number of articles a month, including this now past year, during which I made it my mission to upload three articles a month. Now I'm changing my mind and I'm gonna let go of those neat impulses to instead publish more randomly, whenever an idea comes to mind and I write it down and I feel it's nice ready to be shared. So this post sounds a lot like it should be under the Blog News tag, but it isn't because of the main reason why I'm letting go of my three or four or six articles a month schedule – because I'm writing a new book. I've never done this before because my first two books were finished before I started my blog, and my third one was started way before I even had any ideas to write a blog. But with this one it's different because I've done quite a bit of writing by now, and I don't plan...

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 ...