Every time I find
the meaning of life,
they change it.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I just saw something advertised under that title, and I clicked the link and was disappointed that the page did not come up.  I could use some help regaining mine.  I'm glad that there's been a shake up, hopefully it will get people talking across some lines again.  I'm aggravated by the ascendancy of self righteous ignorance.  What do you call it when you don't even know how much you don't know?  Unconscious Imcompetence.  Like the guy who told an MD/PhD infectious disease researcher "you should study microbes" because antibiotic resistance is no big deal.  I'll take conscious incompetence any time, or even better conscious competence.

I've come to a bit of am impasse with my medical practice, writings, even studies.  I'm losing interest.  It seems so fruitless.  I learn all this stuff and then nobody cares what I have to teach them.  If they want it they think it should be free like what they get from wikipedia.  Dr Google will be the death of me.

The more I read and study I am affronted by the tendency of humans to believe.  We want to believe.  We look for excuses to believe.  It saves us a whole lot of trouble just to believe in something, that way we can ignore all evidence to the contrary and enshrine every tidbit that supports our belief, and voila, the world is meaningful and live is worth living.  Just because we were believers.

Atheists and agnostics really have a hard row to how.  How do you create meaning in life, how do you form a community or tribe, without a belief-based grouping?  Can there be such a thing?  I have seen skepticism elevated to dogma.  Anything can be dogma.  If you think you are not dogmatic, look again.  Everyone is a hypocrite.

In the end, only three things matter:
how much you loved, how gently you lived,
and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

--attributed to the Buddha,
and paraphrased by many

I think everybody
should get rich and famous
and do everything they ever dreamed of
so they can see
that it's not the answer.
--Jim Carrey as quoted in Forbes.com

We are all, to some extent, crazy. If you come to know any human being well enough, you eventually gain access to the basement where the traumas and wounds and deprivations are stored; rummage in there for a while, and you begin to understand the neuroses and fixations that shape his or her personality. The successful, reasonably happy people I've known are nuts in a way that works for them. Those who struggle and suffer fail to turn their preoccupations to some meaningful use. Next week, the American Psychiatric Association release the latest version of its bible of mental illnesses, the DSM-5, which catalogs about 300 categories of crazy. Critics of all kinds have lined up to assail this dictionary of disorders as subjective and lacking in scientific validity--assembled primarily to justify the prescribing of pills of dubious value.

About 50 percent of the population, the APA admits, will have one of its listed disorders at some point in their lives. Shy, like Emily Dickinson? You have "avoidant personality disorder." Obsessed with abstractions and numbers? You have "autistic spectrum disorder," like Isaac Newton. Suffer form "narcissistic personality disorder," with some hypersexuality thrown in? You must be a politician. To be skeptical of these neat categories isn't to deny that minds get broken, stuck, or lost, and need help finding their way out of misery. But psychotherapy remains an art, not a science; there is no bright line between nuts or not. If you're an old lady who lives amid piles of newspapers and personal treasures, you have "hoarding disorder." If you're a CEO who exploits sweatshop labor to pile up countless billions, you're on the cover of Forbes.

--William Faulk (editor-in-chief) in The Week, May 24, 2013 issue.

The same stream of life
that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world
and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life
that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves
of leaves and flowers.
― Rabindranath Tagore

The Pentagon began tracking active duty military suicides in 2001. They begin rising in 2006, soared in 2009 then leveled. Military suicides hit a record high in 2012. Exceeded combat deaths in Afghanistan in 2012. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls it an epidemic. All branches are suffering.