15 May

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just inferior subsets of understanding. All of these proxies for true understanding - for joy - eventually collapse into misery, without understanding. I realised about halfway through my working life that this is why I never wanted any sort of career, a petty, pathetic trajectory of personal goals. In everything I do, in all of my life and work, all that interests me is understanding. A job that gives me no room to understand things is one I leave. I took a massive demotion in these autumn years of my working life just to be able to focus more on understanding things. Travel bores me, most music now bores me, most of what is sold as fun bores me. All captured by human status games, hiding true understanding. When I retire, it won’t be a retreat from work. It will be to take this progression even further, into even more understanding. To be free to do that all day, every day. No empty global tours, taking in the meaningless ‘sights’, like a permanent adolescent gap year from reality. Mostly a quiet life of reflection, creating the only true joy, and the only true freedom.