I want to try Ozempic. I’m fat and I want a pill to sort that out. References to a study that shows it increases one’s lifespan don’t help. What one should do is look for the original study. I know how to do those sorts of things now. I went back to college a few years ago and got a degree. I even have a post-graduate diploma, an actual diploma past a degree. For my degree, I had to write a 10,000-word dissertation. To do this, I had to grapple with terms like ontological and epistemological. I’m still struggling with these terms. Trying to determine whether something is real or not and how I set about establishing that reality is something of a mind fuck. When I went to school, I distinctly remember being taught not to ask questions, especially big questions. In my memory, secondary school appeared to be intent on producing compliant Roman Catholic factory workers. This is probably not unique to my part of the world. Obedient citizens would be a logical reason for the State to provide free education.

I did not thrive in this environment. To this day, I have not worked out exactly why. I referred to childhood trauma in a previous post. That might explain it. The possibility of ADHD is in the mix. Being taught to read by my mother at a young age surely didn’t help. My mother being proudly English has to have had some impact. I was not a rebel in any dramatic sense of the word. I just chose divergent orthodoxies. Certainties that I did not manage to shift until I was in my late thirties.

I did not have the critical skills to decipher what I was being inculcated with. I did not have the critical skills to examine my beliefs. I simply did not have critical skills. No one thought to teach me them. The closest I came to grasping the concept of unfounded and unexamined belief was watching Life of Brian about fifty times in my teenage years.

While the movie was banned, illegal copies were readily available. I remember the first time I watched it. My mind was blown. I recognised so much in it: the religiosity, the tribalism, the smallness, the rank stupidity, the casual cruelty. While I did not grasp the most important theme of the film, the danger of certainty, just enough of it seeped into my brain to eventually allow me to confront that very weakness of my personality. That quickness to judgment, that inflexibility, that cognitive dissonance. The inability to cope with doubt and contradiction.

Annoyingly, for my ego, I had to do a great deal of therapeutic work to free up my mind for critical thinking. Accepting that wanting something to be true and working hard to make sure that this truth is not interrupted by facts is not a healthy way to engage with the world. A stance somewhat complicated by epistemology having many conflicting branches and the schools of ontology not even agreeing on what is real.

I have gone full circle regarding how I relate my feelings to my beliefs and how I interpret the world and navigate my reality. When I took on various ideologies as a young man, I rejected the very idea of feelings as a basis for belief. Wholly unaware that most of what I thought was a result of unexamined emotions. Now, I know what I feel and I allow my ideologies to follow on from that. I know how the world works and what is needed to improve it. I also know I can only have the barest outline of how the world actually works and my ideas for improving it are unproven. I also know I may be entirely wrong. I dislike facts that contradict what I thought, but I now accept them and change what I think, but imperfectly. I want a magic pill that will help me lose weight and increase my lifespan, but I don’t want to engage my critical faculties to investigate whether this magic pill is real. I remain a work in progress.