Tag: philosophy

The Philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes

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Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite cartoon?
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Calvin doesn’t so much move across the page as erupt onto it. Like a small cyclone with boundless imagination and a staggering refusal to conform. Hobbes, on the other side, meets him with wit and affection and a philosophical steadiness that Calvin never quite attains. Their world often flashes to and fro between their backyard and the cosmos, between quiet suburbia and impossible fantasy, from nostalgia for a simpler time to the familiar anxieties of the modern psyche. Reading Calvin and Hobbes as a grade schooler, I treated the strip as pure fun and entertainment. But since then I’ve found it to be an unexpectedly rich index of the human condition refracted through Watterson’s lens of ink, play, and the irreverent honesty of a child.

To read the strip carefully is to see ourselves more clearly. To sit with it is to recognize the strange mixture of wonder and failure that defines humanity. And along the way, one gains appreciation for the fact that the most complex issues can sometimes be explained best in the simplest ways.

I. Daring to Imagine

Children imagine constantly, but Calvin imagines with unusual density and velocity. He becomes Spaceman Spiff, fleeing a pop quiz by recasting his teacher as an alien despot. He marshals snowmen into moral allegories and tiny apocalypses, like sculptures of doubt, dread, and delight that speak when he cannot. He turns a cardboard box into a transmogrifier, duplicator, time machine, and philosophical device depending on his mood.

His inner life becomes a kind of atlas for the rest of us. All his shenanigans remind us that our minds are a borderland where both truth and delusion reside. Watterson skips the lengthy dissection of this duality and instead illuminates it through a boy who cannot stop making worlds and a tiger who loves him enough to question each one.

II. Hobbes

Hobbes’s ambiguity is not a gimmick but a crack in the frame through which possibility spills. To adults he is cotton and stitching; to Calvin he is full of pulse and mischief. The strip leaves the interpretation open: imaginary friend, inner voice, independent soul, or evidence of how little adults understand the secret languages of children.

What matters is that Hobbes behaves like someone with a center of gravity all his own. Wry, affectionate, predatory in bursts, he occupies the space of a true companion. He spars verbally, punctures Calvin’s conceits, offers moral hesitation when it’s needed, and leaps into joy without hesitation.

Their relationship rejects the notion that children grow only under adult tutelage. Instead, it suggests that selfhood is a duet formed with the million interactions one has with others. If Calvin is the force of aspiration and unruliness, Hobbes is the counterforce that gives those energies shape.

Identity, the strip suggests, is not born alone.

III. Improvisation

Calvin is not on a quest to discover a “true self”; he is busy inventing one, then discarding it, then inventing again. Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man, dinosaur, philosopher—each identity a doorway out of confinement and into possibility. Developmental psychology frames this as exploration, but Watterson frames it as resistance, as a refusal to be caught in the nets of labels and expectations. And Calvin is allergic to containment. His improvisational selves critique a culture devoted to categorization and clarity of purpose.

IV. Morality

Calvin’s morality varies in a polar manner. He’s cruel one moment, tender the next, and always capable of mischief. Hobbes compliments him by meeting Calvin where he is rather than where adults believe he should be. This flexible, relational ethics stands in contrast to the rigid structures Calvin resists: punitive school routines, arbitrary rules, the moralism of adults who cannot articulate their own logic.

The strip also subtly challenges the idea that morality should be instilled through rigid rules and external discipline. Calvin resists systems that feel hypocritical or authoritarian, becoming the vessel of Watterson’s critique, aimed not at morality itself but at the ways society attempts to impose it.

V. Emotion

Calvin experiences emotion with almost no moderation. A math test becomes a Lovecraftian nightmare. A snowy hill becomes a site of ecstatic danger. A family camping trip becomes an existential crisis about bugs, cold, and mortality.

Hobbes helps navigate this turbulence all the time. He mocks Calvin’s exaggerated fears, saying, “If you can’t stand the pressure, don’t be a kid”. He acknowledges Calvin’s genuine dread, and dives headlong alongside him into joy, like during their sled rides that inevitably end in catastrophe.

The strip thus critiques a society that rewards emotional suppression. Rather than simply dismissing them for their drama, Calvin’s extremes give insight into the intensity of human feeling, because we were all kids once too.

VI. Critique

Watterson uses Calvin’s world as a mirror held up to our own. School becomes a factory of compliance. Consumer culture turns imagination into merchandise. Suburban repetition blurs days into sameness. The media’s drone replaces attention with noise.

Calvin resists instinctively, questioning rules that feel hollow or hypocritical. His rebellion is imperfect and sometimes destructive, yet it serves to reveal how often adults surrender to systems simply because it is comforting to in their familiarity.

The strip’s critique is timeless not because it predicts the future but because it understands the present. It reminds us to regain some more creativity and sparks in our lives.

VII. What Each Last Panel Leaves Behind

Calvin and Hobbes endures because it captures a surprisingly wide span of human experience through the lens of childhood without romanticizing it.

Yet the strip’s critique of humanity is tempered by its affection for humanity. Yes, we standardize what should remain flexible. We suppress curiosity to maintain order. We abandon play for productivity.

But Watterson’s final panels remind readers that wonder is always recoverable. A sled ride through fresh snow, a philosophical aside about stars, or a simple moment of companionship between boy and tiger reopens the possibility of joy.

Humanity is flawed, and in that, it is—we are—magnificent. In their mischief, in their arguments, in their invented worlds, and in their shared astonishment at being alive, Calvin and Hobbes transports into a realm where we can see our limits, yes, but also respect the forgiveness that encourages us to try again.

Winnie the Pooh and the Art of Being Fully Alive

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https://pixabay.com/photos/bear-winnie-the-pooh-toy-2982809/

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite cartoon?
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What a bear with very little brain can teach us about consciousness, mindfulness, and the ethics of care

At first glance, Pooh Bear seems simple. He walks slowly, he loves honey, and he forgets things. That’s it. Nothing complicated, nothing dramatic. And yet, the more you watch him, the more you notice: there’s a quiet wisdom in the way he inhabits his world.

Not wisdom in the “sage on a mountaintop” sense. Wisdom in the way he pays attention. The way he interacts with friends or navigates the small ups and downs of life.

The Power of Paying Attention

Pooh’s adventures are funny, but they also reveal a surprising truth about attention. Floating on a balloon to steal honey, he’s completely absorbed in the task, oblivious to how absurd it looks. Neuroscience tells us that attention is a finite resource.

We can’t multitask perfectly, and our brains are constantly prioritizing what matters. Pooh doesn’t “practice mindfulness” or meditate; he just throws himself into what’s in front of him. And he doesn’t overthink it. In doing so, he shows us how simple focus makes life richer.

And then there’s his forgetfulness. When Pooh tries to help Eeyore find his tail, he forgets details and causes a small ruckus. According to cognitive science, forgetting is normal. Research suggests that our brains prune memories to prevent overload and allow for more mental bandwidth for other things.

Care Without Drama

Pooh’s ethics are quiet. Checking on Piglet during a storm or helping friends in small ways, he makes the most of small actions rather than grand gestures.

Philosophers call this relational ethics, or care practiced in the moment rather than in theory. Pooh isn’t a moral model; he’s just kind because it feels natural. His friendships emphasize that being a good person is about the tiny, consistent ways we attend to others.

The Simple Joy of Desire

Pooh loves honey. It’s intense, sometimes compulsive, and it drives many of his adventures. From the perspective of affective neuroscience, desire and reward shape mood.

By grounding his happiness in something that he can get everyday (honey!), he lives a steady and reliable existence; he avoids the entrapment of the novel and the grand. In a world obsessed with achievement, Pooh’s satisfaction is a call to anchor our emotional lives in something familiar.

Lessons Without Preaching

Pooh, to put it simply, lives. The Hundred Acre Wood shows us that small acts of attention and care matter, that imperfection is human. And above all, that ordinary life can be magical.

You don’t think of a sage or an ideal when you think of Pooh Bear. But he sure is a good guide, a reminder that contentment often comes not from striving to be perfect, but from noticing the little things and caring too.

In his gentle simplicity there lies a lesson modern life sometimes makes us forget: you don’t need a lot to live well, you just need to be fully present for the small, sweet moments that surround you.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.

Why I Never Make Wishes

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I want my experience to guide me, not undeserved freebies.

Daily writing prompt
What is one thing you would change about yourself?
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I never make wishes. Not because I lack desire, or because I am practical in a boring sense, but because I want the arc of my life to emerge from my choices and mistakes, not from a free handout from the universe. A wish, by its nature, is a shortcut. An attempt to acquire a future without traversing the path that shapes the self along the way. I am more interested in that shaping than in the outcome itself.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience gives a strange kind of validation to this intuition. The brain learns most deeply through effort through what researchers call prediction error, the moment when expectation meets reality and the system adapts. Dopamine spikes which respond to effortful achievement serve to reinforce connections in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, helping us encode both skill and memory. If wishes were real, they would bypass that process. In a sense, it deprives the nervous system of experience, its most potent teacher.

Consider the subtle difference between a student who struggles for months to master a piece of music and one who magically acquires the ability with a single wish. Both may be able to play the notes, but only the first has undergone the kind of plasticity that transforms the mind. The hippocampus consolidates memories, the motor cortex refines its output, and the brain’s error-monitoring circuits, especially in the anterior cingulate cortex, learn to adapt. The journey, not the shortcut, builds agency. The wish, however tempting, is neurologically inert. Sorry, Aladdin. It asks nothing and returns nothing of value beyond the superficial.

Philosophy

Philosophically, my aversion to wishing aligns with existentialist thought. Kierkegaard wrote about authentic existence as reliant on decision, risk, and reflection. To hand over the authorship of your future, even symbolically, to some external wish is to abdicate the very process that makes life meaningful. Wishing collapses experience into instant gratification; it divorces outcome from effort, action from responsibility. And the self, stripped of its formative trials, becomes lighter, but also emptier.

Stories like Aladdin illustrate a subtle truth about wishing and effort. Aladdin becomes wealthy, meets the princess, and transforms his life, but only because the narrative allows him access to opportunity. In real life, outcomes are far less generous. Contemporary philosophy and social thought remind us that effort alone does not guarantee escape from suffering. Structural barriers, resources, and circumstance shape who can act on their potential and who remains constrained, no matter how hard they try. Refusing shortcuts or wishes is therefore a personal ethical choice because it shapes the kind of person you become, but it cannot erase the imbalances of reality. What we gain from experience is valuable, but it is never distributed evenly.

Therefore, this is not to romanticize suffering or struggle. I am not advocating for unnecessary pain or the glorification of difficulty. But I do believe that real growth requires living inside the friction of consequence and choice.

Ethics

There is also a subtle ethical dimension. When we wish for unearned advantages, we are implicitly saying that we value our own gain above the discipline of learning or merit. By refusing to wish, I am also, in a small way, refusing to outsource my development to luck. I am committing to a life where reward is proportional to engagement, where consequence is respected, and where experience remains my guide.

The Reality

Sometimes life is harder, slower, and less immediately satisfying than it would be if wishes were real. I miss opportunities that might have arrived on a whim. I watch others take shortcuts and sometimes envy their efficiency.

And yet, I want my story written in synapses that were built in response to challenge, not circumstantial fortune. I want my character shaped by choices that left a mark both on my mind and on my life. The wish tempts me with speed, but I choose depth. I choose learning. I choose experience.

Because in the end, it is experience, not magic, that teaches us who we are.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.

The Plastic Instinct

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How instinct and intuition shape us, and how the nervous system allows us to rewrite our oldest impulses

Daily writing prompt
Do you trust your instincts?
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We usually imagine instinct as something permanent, a force that precedes thought and resists revision, moves faster than reason, feels older than memory, and often arrives before we have a chance to interpret it.

A sudden flinch, a tightening in the chest, a hesitation in front of a crowd; these are signals from biology’s first draft of the self.

Intuition, by contrast, feels learned yet inexplicable. It is judgment from experience, from patterns we have absorbed but cannot fully articulate. The distinction seems clear: instinct is inherited, intuition is acquired. Yet according to neuroscience, they are closer than meets the eye.

I. Instinct as the First Draft

Neuroscience shows that instinctive circuits through the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and other subcortical structures operate at speeds that bypass conscious thought (LeDoux, 1996) in order to guide us toward survival. Instinct carries ancient wisdom, but it is not absolute, and in modern life some consider it an outdated architecture.

Instinct can change. Neuroplasticity allows the nervous system to reshape itself in response to experience, so emotional memory can be updated each time it is recalled in a process called reconsolidation (Phelps et al., 2009). Fear responses once thought permanent can be weakened through repeated exposure. Prosocial impulses can be reinforced through practice.

II. Intuition as the Brain’s Ongoing Revision

Intuition is the mechanism through which these revisions emerge through pattern recognition: the brain compressing thousands of experiences into a single instant of guidance.

A seasoned firefighter senses a building is unsafe before assessing the evidence. A guitarist feels the right chord before theory explains it. These are instincts refined by experience and practice.

The distinction between instinct and intuition fades because both rely on the nervous system’s ability to encode and adapt information. What feels immediate is often the negotiation between our ancient foundations and modern experience.

III. Rewriting Instinct and the Responsibility of Freedom

The possibility of rewriting instinct raises ethical and philosophical questions. If our deepest reactions can be altered, we bear responsibility for which impulses we cultivate. If courage can be trained, empathy practiced, fear tempered, then nothing stops us from imagining “ideal” humans—creatures optimized for rationality, cooperation, or moral virtue. History brings up a cautionary lens. Communism and socialism were once heralded as systems that could perfect society, yet the unpredictability of human behavior and the complexity of the world made total control impossible. Even carefully designed utilitarian experiments struggle to account for the emergent consequences of individual choices and the infinite ways context shapes action.

Maladaptive environments, however, can carve unhealthy patterns into the nervous system just as easily. The plasticity of instinct is both liberating and fragile. It allows us to grow, but it is also inevitably shaped by forces outside conscious control. In this sense, instinct is less a fixed verdict than ongoing revision. Human potential will perhaps always remain uncertain. We cannot manufacture perfection, yet we can still strive. So, the work of shaping instinct cannot be absolute; rather it fluctuates between what can be trained and what must be lived.

IV. Living Between Draft and Revision

Instinct is the prewritten framework of the self, a set of impulses we inherit before we can interpret them. Intuition layers experience atop it, shaping quiet guidance we rarely notice. Conscious attention is the instrument of our change, refining and redirecting without ever fully controlling the story.

Reflex can become deliberate as reaction can become understanding. We are neither prisoners of our earliest wiring nor masters of its total rewriting.

Rewriting instinct carries ethical weight. If courage, empathy, or fear can be trained, shaping the impulses of others through education, culture, or biotechnology is imaginable. History reminds us that attempts to “perfect” humans or societies fail, as the world resists total control. Yet this imperfection also carries hope: the same plasticity that allows harm also allows care, reflection, and responsible guidance.

To trust instinct is to honor its voice while recognizing limits. To engage thoughtfully is to co-author the self. Living fully must mean navigating the tension between inherited and cultivated impulses, letting both guide us. But this responsibility extends beyond personal growth. How we train instinct shapes the ethical contours of who we become. Courage cultivated in adolescence can influence moral choices in adulthood. Empathy reinforced through social experience alters how we respond to strangers. Fear tempered through exposure can prevent harmful overreactions. Shaping instinct means editing our identity. The ethical dimension is unavoidable: the self is inseparable from the impulses we refine, and the values we choose to embed in them.

References

  • LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. 1996
  • Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 2011
  • Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error. 1994
  • Phelps, Elizabeth et al. Nature, 2009
  • Sapolsky, Robert. Why Zebras Do Not Get Ulcers. 1994

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.

Frames of Identity

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the first impression you want to give people?
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The first impression you give someone feels simple.

A glance, a phrase, the slight tilt of your voice as it tries to decide whether to sound confident or careful. But beneath that moment sits a truth most people never notice. It may be easy forget that others never gain awareness of the full architecture you are. Rather, a moment of awareness is simply one frame in a long sequence, and your brain rushes to stitch these frames together so you can believe there is a solid self living behind your eyes.

Identity is not what we think. I understand it as a continuity the brain desperately creates from separate moments to make sense of the movement of our lives. Neuroscientist Anil Seth calls this a controlled hallucination. The mind fills the gaps so you do not feel the gaps. It connects the flicker of one second to another until the whole thing seems unbroken, like a film reel running just fast enough to appear real.

We like to believe we are consistent people. Yet the research on memory says otherwise. We are creatures of reconstruction. Every remembered version of yourself is edited, packaged for memory, and rearranged. The brain rewrites the story so you can wake up each morning and believe today follows yesterday. This introduces a unique conundrum. Rather than storing identity, we regenerate it every day.

So when someone asks what first impression you want to give, the real question is much, much stranger, and it sounds something like this:

Which version of yourself do you choose to step into the next moment of your life? Which frame do you choose as the doorway?

This is where things shift from science to philosophy. Time feels like a flowing river, but psychologists who study chronostasis suggest that much of time is perception layered on top of uncertainty. The brain inserts its own continuity to prevent us from feeling the world as a collection of tiny, isolated pulses. If we experienced pure discontinuity, we would lose our sense of self within days.

Identity is the story your brain tells so you can stay afloat.

And yet there is something quite beautiful in that. If the self is an invention, it means you are not trapped by whatever story you once believed. You have a say in how the next frame develops. The first impression you offer someone is a creative act rather than a performance. It is the moment you decide which what stays, and what goes.

The poet Ocean Vuong once wrote that memory is a story we carry in order to survive. I think identity is similar. A living thing. An ongoing choice. A narrative held together not by perfect accuracy but by the desire to be understood.

So when someone meets you for the first time, they encounter a glimpse. A soft outline of a self that is always shifting. You might wish people could see the fuller version of you, the one that carries all your experiences and contradictions and small private joys. But this gentle incompleteness is part of what makes human connection meaningful. We meet one another through keyholes. We will never know the full interior, so we stay curious, listening. We keep evolving our impression of each other.

The mind protects us from the terror of a fractured reality by mashing together all the sense-datum we receive each day into something that seems continuous. Our task is just to participate in that creation with care and to let ourselves change while accepting that others will only ever see fragments.

Identity behaves a little like starlight. From a distance you see a single shimmer and assume it is the whole story. If you could travel closer, you would find a roaring furnace made of collisions, and pressure, and centuries of change. The light you see from afar, while seemingly false, is simply the only version that can cross the distance. It gives you a place to aim your attention.

A first impression works the same way. It is the part of you that travels. The part that reaches others first. The person you are is not the glow but the whole constellation of experiences that shaped it. And the self beneath all of that, the one even you struggle to map, is the vast system of forces and history that the mind is still learning to name.

The good thing about all this is that identity does not need to be solved. You do not have to know exactly who you are to live as someone real. You can be in motion, gathering pieces, setting others down, changing shape without warning. For you were never meant to be a statue.

Even scientists who study memory admit that the brain edits and revises and rearranges our story. If the mind keeps rewriting you, then you are allowed to participate in that creation. You are allowed to change your mind about yourself. You are allowed to hold uncertainty without feeling lost.

There is nothing weak about that. There is nothing broken about being unfinished.

Identity is a conversation between what made you and what you choose next. It is a bridge you are always building, even when the blueprint is unclear. The gaps are not failures. The gaps are invitations. They ask you to imagine, to choose, to become.

And maybe that is the real beauty. We are not defined by the parts we cannot explain. Instead, we are defined by the meaning we learn to create from them. Every time you step forward, you add a piece to your ever-growing puzzle. It does not matter if you don’t see the full picture yet, because, truth is, life wasn’t made to make sense from the inside.

So if you feel unfinished, good. It means there is space to grow toward a self that feels honest. It means you still have room for new light. It means the story is unfolding and you are awake inside it.

You are allowed to be a work in progress. You are allowed to be a constellation still forming. You are allowed to discover who you are by living, not by knowing.

And that is enough.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.

Why Forgetting Might Be the Most Human Thing We Do

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We like to think of memory as proof of who we are. The things we remember become the architecture of our identity, yet beneath that structure lies something quieter, more fragile, and perhaps more vital: the things we forget.

Forgetting has always been treated as the mind’s flaw. A smudge in the lens. But what if it’s the very process that keeps the lens clear?

The Brain’s Gentle Refusal

Neuroscience describes memory as a process of constant revision. The hippocampus stores and reshapes what we take in, then loosens its grip when something no longer serves the present (Squire, 2009).

Researchers in Toronto proposed that the brain forgets to survive. Without that ability, consciousness would collapse under its own weight (Bjork, 1975). We would be unable to tell what matters. The mind that never forgets cannot change its mind.

Every day, thousands of synaptic connections fade, but traces remain as pathways that strengthen when we return to them. The rest dissolve into the white noise of experience, making room for new learning, new meaning, and new selves (Kandel, 2006).

The Poetry of Impermanence

When we revisit a memory, we rewrite it. The scene shifts, colors dull or brighten, dialogue rearranges itself (Loftus, 2005). What we call memory is really imagination tethered to a few truths.

There is something sacred about this impermanence. It protects us from being trapped in yesterday’s version of ourselves. It allows pain to lose its sharpness, allows love to change shape without vanishing. Forgetting is not the opposite of remembering; it is how remembering stays bearable (Hardt, 2008).

A Mind that Learns to Release

To live fully may mean learning to let thoughts fade without resistance. We do not abandon what we forget; we carry the echo of it. The brain understands this long before we do. It edits with care, choosing what we are ready to carry forward (McGaugh, 2000).

Some cultures have long understood this rhythm. The Japanese concept of mono no aware—the bittersweet awareness of impermanence—captures the beauty of forgetting. The ancient Greeks linked memory to Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, yet they also revered Lethe, the river of forgetting, as the path to peace (Assmann, 2011).

The self that remembers everything would have no room to grow, and the one who forgets too easily would lose coherence. So we exist between the two in a delicate equilibrium of holding and release.

The Human Art of Letting Go

Forgetting is not a failure of intellect but a condition of grace. It gives us the courage to begin again, to rebuild understanding without the burden of total recall. The mind renews itself in the spaces it empties.

Perhaps this is what it means to be human: to remember just enough to love the world, and to forget just enough to forgive it.

References

Squire, L. R. (2009). Memory and Brain. Oxford University Press.

Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press.

Bjork, R. A. (1975). Retrieval as a memory modifier: An interpretation of negative recency and related phenomena. In J. Brown (Ed.), Recall and Recognition (pp. 123–144). London: Wiley.

Hardt, O., Nader, K., & Nadel, L. (2008). Decay happens: The role of reconsolidation in memory. Trends in Neurosciences, 31(8), 374–380.

Kandel, E. R. (2006). In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. W. W. Norton & Company.

Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366.

McGaugh, J. L. (2000). Memory–a century of consolidation. Science, 287(5451), 248–251.

Schacter, D. L. (2001). The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Houghton Mifflin.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler.