Opinions, advices & reflections on them.

Opinions, everybody got them. But how we display them is as differently as there are people in the world. It's always good to have opinions. We need to have them in order to survive. How else could we know if some kind of stereotype is usually someone we should be careful with, someone who might just hurt us in some manner. Or just something as simple as choosing what to have for dinner, if we didn't have any opinion whatsoever these simple tasks would seem nearly impossible.

What I'm intrigued about is how some people need their opinions heard all the time, the opinions lose their functionality. Rather than being something for helping us deal with daily based choosing it becomes a part of some greater “ego filling” behavior.

e.g. Some people might be quite good at giving advices, giving solid opinions when needed. When this type of behavior is being reinforced some people start doing this all day long. It's not a conversation between equals anymore, it's a conversation between a mentor and a student. Making everyone who talks to you feel like an idiot. This might be why great thinkers like Socrates took the path of making the ones he spoke to think themselves rather than giving them advices and opinions.

This behavior is something I sometimes have trouble avoiding myself. I guess it's important to just remember that everyone of us are human beings, and if the reason why one is giving advice is to help the greater good. One also has to realize that giving to much advice might be counter-productive.

So if one ever is to give advice or opinions it should always be for helping the greater good, and not for a ego boost which I think many people get from giving their opinions and advices.

Timeless music

This weekend I was talkin' about music with a friend. He said there werent being made any "eternal" songs these days. Well I disagree. These are my timeless songs that I will probably play for my children (If I ever get some).

Elliott Smith - No Name #3

Elliott Smith - Say Yes


Jeff Buckley - Lover You Should've Come Over


M. Ward - Poison Cup


Knife (and José González) - Heartbeats


Wilco - Jesus etc.


Sufjan Stevens - For the Widows In Paradise


Kings Of Convenience - I Don't Know What I Can Save You From (röyksopp remix)


Elsiane - Mend (To fix, To Repair)

Pictures

Pictures taken in Norway, Fauske on the cemetery about this time last year.

Creativity & self-reflective thoughts.

As an assignment for one of my courses at school I had to write a review of an empirical journal. I was free of choice to pick whatever I wanted, and therefore had a great opportunity to write about something I find interesting.

The journal was about the links between depression, self-reflective rumination and creativity.

There were some great points about how and what self-reflective thoughts(introspection) etc actually are. E.g it's usual in most science literature about psychology that rumination is something bad linked to depression, and there's alot quite alot of studies trying to figure out if there's a valid link between being depressed and being creative.

The main arguments for creativity and depression having nothing in common is that the sympoms of depression aren very fruitful for creativity. It's pretty common knowledge that someone who's tired all the time, doesnt care about anything etc would produce a whole lot. But still there's some correlation between creativity and depression. - Hence creativity and depression has to have something in common most of the times. The hypothesis as said in this journal is that it's selfreflective rumination. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/emo52226.pdf

As Nolen-Hoeksema (1991) says, self-reflective rumination might not be characterized as a symptom of depression, but rather as a style of thought.

What this means is that you can have a self-reflective style of thought, and still not be negatively focused. I think many people might get professional help, or read self-help books where there's quite alot about the self-reflective rumination (There's different words for the same thing, e.g some people may describe it as self-worrying, overly worrying. etc.)

Anyways, instead of maybe tryin' to exclude this kind of thinking, it might be better to just alter it, focusing in a slightly more positive way, rather than trying to terminate the whole behavior.
After all, if it's the key for creativity; Why'd you wanna lose it?