Beat a bunch of people in tennis. The owner of the indoor courts 6-3, 6-4.. That high school kid while his dad filmed the match 6-2, 6-3. More I don't remember. Against the high school kid (#1 in region) I tried a new grip on both forehand and backhand for the first time ever. A double semi western. No grip switch. The backhand is very close to just being a left handed forehand. Really worked. I'm more facing the court/ball. Should be easier on my neck too on the two hand forehand. Also tried to remember to be like a baseball pitcher on the serve, not a centerfielder.

Read Ready Player One and Armada by Ernest Cline. The former is extreme nostalgia for the 80's. Primarily videogames. The latter is also heavy on the video games and was much better than the majority of the reviews suggested. The former was better though. Just OK though. Beyond the nostalgia, not a big deal.

Was ruminating really bad on Monday and Tuesday when coming back from having a week off. Don't even want to write about it.

Well, the one thing I should write about is trying to remember that how you look plays a huge and mostly unfair part in how you're treated. I'm not treated all that well it seems to me by most people. Instead of seeing it as proof that humankind is trash I should try to see it as just some absurd thing. People are controlled like machines practically by relatively meaningless random absurdities. And that is so so so much better a thing to think than the alternative.

It's better to do what you like as opposed to what you're good at. And better to be around ethical people ("nice" people) you have nothing in common with than around people you seemingly have something in common with whom aren't particularly ethical ("nice").

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Every moment of everything you do is an ethical decision.

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Ethics is the extent to which we go beyond our own short term self interest and instead start thinking with compassion, start thinking altruistically or at least with an extreme long term self interest that goes into the mystical (life after death).

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It's not what you say you rationally believe, it's what you show by your actions that you actually believe. The thing is, the two are rarely the same. We rarely understand what's going on in our nonconscious and how it determines our actions.

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If you're bothering to do anything at all, you're acting as if you believe in a life after death.

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If you believe in a life after death (sans christian hell absurdity or muslim, etc), why would you support capital punishment?

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We enjoy music to the extent that we "anthropomorphosize" the sounds. That is to say, turn those violins into ghostly angels, etc. When every bit of noise represents the expression of some sentient creature, you are truly feeling the music.

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Playing the cello is a particularly mystical instrument. Which is to say that, it's so hard to make it sound good. It takes so much time, so many hours that could be instead spent on better ensuring your mere survival, such that it's living as if you're going to exist for a lot longer than a few mere decades. The same of course can be said of many hobbies. Spending a large chunk of your life on any particular thing, (that takes work on your part as opposed to watching TV), that is largely unrelated to mere survival and thus can be considered a silly waste of time, means that you're a highly mystical person. (No matter if you claim to be an atheist of whatever.)

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We all basically have two levels of ethics. There is the "just do the right thing" level where we're simply following the absolute ethical laws. (Kantian or whatever.) But, these ethical laws are laws that we've each made up, (hopefully) in large part based on utilitarian thinking. Most good over some time period.

The less thinking we are, the less we put into the utilitarianism and instead default to tradition to determine our "absolute" ethical laws. Relatedly, the lazier we are, the more we attempt to follow our absolute ethical system in unusual cases for which our ethical system doesn't really say what to do. (Here selfishness or masochism is often the deciding factor.)

So we're all really utilitarians to some degree, but many of us our too oblivious of our nonconsciousness to realize it. And the greatest deciding factor in the "absolute" ethical laws we decide upon using utilitarianism, is how long we expect to exist. The more mystical (life after death) you actually are (no matter your claims of atheism), the longer the term you're looking at. And the more seemingly altruistic your actions appear.

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If you actually defeated your nonconscious, it'd be awful. It would mean perfect nihilism. I suppose you'd quit bothering to breath and die within a few minutes.