Questions

Read all 100 selected postcards and our philosophers' replies.

Process - we select 100 postcards

Hello my name is Aureja, thats pronounced o-ray-ya not orayja, orayua or aurora, as many assume. Well, they guess, but fail. Anyway, how are you? That’s probably my question since I’m not good at forming questions on the spot. How do you feel? How do you know exactly what that feeling is? Yes we title for emotions like joy and sadness, but how do we know our joy is the same to someone else’s joy? How did people explain those feelings when agreeing on what to call it? Are there emotions we have yet to discover? How would we know that it is indeed an emotion with no title instead of just a variation of something already existing? I don’t know if that makes any sense but hey, I tried. Thank you for reading, I hope it was legible.

August 7, 2020

Dear Iris, I’ve just returned from a wonderful month of holidays. I lived slowly and spontaneously, paying close attention to the people and the world around me. Now I dread returning to my everyday life, which is lived by to-do lists. It seems less of a good life. It seems less true too; it seems we fool ourselves when we treat life and ourselves as if they submit to planning, to management, to our wills essentially. Yet I wouldn’t be able to fulfil my responsibilities and still thrive without to-do lists and the like. Dear Iris, I know receptivity and attention are important to you and also that you lead a productive life. Enlighten me: can receptivity and productivity be reconciled, or only lived in turns? all the best to you, Annemarie

August 6, 2020