Good Life Odyssey
Do you ever wonder what you're doing with your life? Do you question why you're working long hours? Perhaps, like me, you didn't think too much about your goals when you were younger. But as you've aged, you've started to ask deeper questions.
Being a parent and running a company have led me to contemplate how I want to live, my beliefs about how the world works, and how I know what I know. My exploration of these topics is guided principally by reading classics, incorporating new ideas from my education in physics, biomedical engineering, software, and AI.
This website is a collection of writings as I explore these topics and try to find answers for myself. Join me on my journey to find the good life.
Essays
- Language and Math Model Reality
- Types of Definitions
- Justification via Other People’s Beliefs
- Mystical Arguments
- Beauty and Truth
- Universal Historical Laws
- Meaning and Purpose
- A Definition of Faith
- Faith and Reason
- Why Do We Fear Death?
- Has Humanity Made Ethical Progress?
- Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself is Extreme
- The Universe is Empty Yet Ultimately Real
- How to Think Clearly with Dialogue: Others, Self, and AI
- Why Technological Progress Won’t Solve Everything
- All Decisions Are Ethical
Dialogues
- Socratic Dialogues and Real-World Choices
- Reasoning About Justice from Analogy
- Socrates Underestimated Writing
- Would You Want to Live Forever?
- Nothing Inherently Exists
- Socrates Would Dislike Science
- Is it Better to Read or Watch the News?
Meditations
- “Nine Stories” by J. D. Salinger
- Raising Children and “The Way of All Flesh”
- How Literary Allusions can Help Prompt AI
- Why Bother with Boromir’s Body?
- “Things Fall Apart” and Judging Another Culture
- The End of Coffee
- Francis Macomber and Courage
- The Two Gentleman of Verona
- Noticing the Invisible Man
- Homer Teaches Us to Die
- Dante on the Problem of Hell
- “Ravelstein”
- Censoring Children
- Socrates Treats Language like Math
- Justice for its Own Sake
- Direct Perception and Dialectic
- What Causes Generation Gaps
- Duty to Others and Plato’s “Apology”
- Can We Understand “Antigone” in Context?
- “Euthyphro” and a Universal Morality
- Initial Impression of “Euthyphro”
- Sophocles’ Ode to Man
- Critique of “As a Driven Leaf”
Poems
Notes, Quotes, and Commentary
Classics
- “The Epic of Gilgamesh”
- Hesiod
- The “Iliad”
- The “Odyssey”
- The Pentateuch
- The Historical Books of the Bible
- Sophocles’ Theban Plays
- “The Homeric Hymns”
- Notes on “Euthyphro”
- Notes on “Apology”
- “The Histories” by Herodotus
- The “Aeneid”
- Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”
- Seneca
- Dante’s “Divine Comedy”
- “The Master and Margarita”
- “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift
- Mrs. Dalloway