Prose

Narrative writings: essays, reviews, polemics, short stories, etc

Review: Capitalism by Jürgen Kocka
This is the first of some short book reviews here on creativechoice. I love reading and will share my thoughts about the books that I are think are worth my readers' while. The short book Capitalism: A Short History begins with a concise discussion of the most important figures in the history of the concept ...
Not what you do professionally but what can entertain you defines who you are.
Meditation on humor
Breathe in. Think of the ridiculousness of life, the absurdity of existence, mortal or otherwise, the laughable preoccupations of breathing animals, the inane schemes devised by homo sapiens to cope with all that, and finally the splendid endeavour to derive from it the source of mere funnyness. We are asking if humor is our best ...
Meditation on purpose
We sit still with our eyes closed. In the distance, across the fields, are green hills. Alright, this is my concrete situation perhaps not yours. Never mind. The why-question or more precisely the what are we here for question is personally daunting. So much so, that we assume we can hardly help each other finding ...
The devil writes my business plan He’s into details and a persuasive man Brilliant in math i make him cfo if i can I wonder tough how he got his tan
The be-who-thy-be new age bullshit
I watched a well-intended speech today for fifteen year old level A students. The gist was that life happens according to your own internal clock, not according to the timetable imposed on us by society. It's okay not to be married at 30 or graduating after 25 or getting your first job at 27. Did ...
Conversation and Correspondence
It has been said - I heard the physicist Freeman Dyson relating it - that the human urge to converse is akin to the termite's instinct to build castles. Perhaps the truth of this becomes most clear in the edge case of the hermit who converses or corresponds with an imaginary interlocutor. Henry David Thoreau ...
Clickbait: A thought about Jordan Peterson
Recently, I fell for the hype and listened to some interviews with the Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson. I don't find him controversial and his appeal to a healthy debate bypassing the left-right dichotomy sounds healthy. In the videos I watched, he often stressed scientific and statistical rigor, and I like that. Jordan likes ...
Meditation on Beauty
Begin with breathing, as usual. Today we think about beauty. Let us be aware of all the preconceptions and just look at them in our mind. Symmetrical patterns. Some sort of similarity with things we expect to give us pleasure. An evolutionary side effect like a peacock feathers that for the female peacock are not ...