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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 231 (Feb 22, 2026) — Simplicity, Weird Thinking, Questioning Purpose, & More
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💭 The weirdness of thinking
Have you ever thought about how weird thinking actually is? We say things like, “I’m thinking,” but how accurate is that? Is thinking really an action? Consider the way we describe thinking with words such as: I realized, I noticed, I remembered, it hit me, it struck me, it came to me, it occurred to me, it dawned on me, it crossed my mind, etc. If you pay attention to your thinking, you quickly realize it actually just happens. The following highlights come from Real Materialism by Galen Strawson:
- “If we consider things plainly, we find…that most of our thoughts—our thought contents—just happen. In this sense they are spontaneous…not actions at all. Contents occur, spring up—the process is largely automatic … The fundamental point: human minds are powerfully governed by deep, natural, non-agentive principles of operation.”
- “No ordinary thinking of a particular thought-content, conscious or otherwise, is ever an action. No actual natural thinking of a thought, no actual having of a particular thought-content, is ever itself an action. Mental action in thinking is restricted to the fostering of conditions hospitable to contents’ coming to mind. The coming to mind itself—the actual occurrence of thoughts, conscious or nonconscious—is not a matter of action.”
- “Call what goes on mental spontaneity if you like, allow the arising of contents to be a matter of spontaneity; but admit, then, that spontaneity has nothing particularly to do with action or will, and nothing at all to do with freedom of choice … All in all, it seems to me that most of deciding what to do is best seen as something that just happens.”
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🌲 Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity
I’m revisiting Walden by Thoreau (Book Summary) for some simple living inspiration:
- “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail … Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.”
And some of his classic one-liners:
- “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
- “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
- “My greatest skill has been to want but little.”
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🤔 Uncommon questions to find purpose
- “What pain or injustice or unhappiness have you witnessed that you just can’t live with? Is there anything that touches you so deeply that it drives you?” — Tchiki Davis
- “What subject could I read 500 books about without getting bored?” — Rebecca Burn-Callander
- “What could I do for five years straight without getting paid?” — Rebecca Burn-Callander
- “What kind of ‘shower ideas’ do you get?” — Joi Foley
- “What makes you forget to eat and poop?” — Mark Manson
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🧠 The self & freedom from the self
The previous newsletter introduced the book I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics by Daniel Kolak (Archive.org). Here are some highlights from the book about the self and freedom:
- Psychological attachment: To the degree that I am identified as a particular personality (psychologically bound/attached to my ‘self’), I am attached to what is conditioned and virtually unconscious—and that is the degree to which I have no free will.
- Liberation: The goal is the liberation of the subject from psychological identification with, not as, the self—liberating the subject (consciousness) from our ‘selves’ (our identifications). What is essentially unconditioned and therefore free (I, consciousness, the unidentified subject of experience) is liberated from what is essentially conditioned and therefore not free. The liberation of (‘return to’) the subject from the self.
- Important note: You don’t get rid of what you can’t get rid of (the personality that is your ‘self’), you get rid of what you can get rid of (your psychological attachment to your self). Being liberated in our selves does not mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘self’, becoming ‘no one’, or being devoid of personality. Liberation is getting rid of psychological attachment—to critically distance the subject from identification as a particular personality and thereby liberate us not so much from our ‘selves’ as from our attachment to our ‘selves’.
- Free will: Freedom means liberating you from your ‘self’. I have free will to the degree that I (the subject) am ‘liberated’ from my ‘self’. We have ‘free will’ only in so far as we are ‘liberated’ in (or, in extreme cases, from) our ‘selves’.
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☯️ Advaita Vedanta’s three stages to seeing the freedom beyond will
Most of the spiritual tradition of Advaita Vedanta deeply resonates with my own realizations about free will. I recently stumbled upon this essay and video by Swami Medhananda (aka Ayon Maharaj) where he summarizes Sri Ramakrishna’s three stages of seeing free will—which align perfectly with three stages I previously identified (🔒):
- Stage 1 (ajñānī): The ajñānī is the unenlightened person who ignorantly identifies with the body-mind and has the illusion of free will. You cannot help but believe and feel that you are free and therefore morally responsible for your actions.
- Stage 2 (jīvanmukta): The jīvanmukta (‘one who is liberated while living’) has a realization that God alone is the doer and that one is merely God’s instrument (the truth of theological determinism).
- Stage 3 (vijñānī): Vijnāna is the realization that God alone has become all this (the universe and all living beings). Since the vijñānī knows that they are not different from God, God’s freedom becomes their own. You are free as a vijñānī because you are one with God.
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A couple more highlights from Real Materialism by Galen Strawson:
- “It’s false to say: I think. One ought to say ‘it thinks (in) me … I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it.” — Rimbaud
- “A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes and not when ‘I’ wish.” — Nietzsche
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
