35.

Despite writing here instead of studying yesterday, my exam still went well! I didn't nail everything, but I had an answer for every question and I think I screwed up quite little. I really liked that I could use not just my knowledge from the course I was taking the exam from (ethics), but also from other courses and even from my own life! There was one particular question that I knew the answer to because I had listened to a podcast with Peter Singer a week earlier. I had no idea that subject was in the ethics course, but I was pleasantly surprised to know the answer. It's such a pleasure to apply knowledge from different places like that. That also means that the things I'm learning at my uni (and even outside of it) are coming together quite nicely, which is very important to me. Studying shouldn't just be gathering pieces of information. It should be a process of building a structure, a building of some kind. Especially in philosophy this is absolutely necessary, because every part influences everything else. And if you take philosophy seriously like I do, you need to think about the implications of what you learn for your own life, your political views, how you see the world, et cetera. And I think that very little can change the way you see the world quite like a philosophy study, because in it, you question all the concepts that you and other people use to make sense of the world. If you say that freedom is important, a philosopher will ask "oh yeah? what is freedom?" and you'll either have a great discussion or you'll walk away annoyed. As for myself, I already ask myself these questions constantly, so studying philosophy is not any more exhausting for me as regular life is. And I think it's important to question the concepts that you use to build the world around you. It's important to seriously consider what a good life is, what the point of politics is, what free will means, what science can tell us, what responsibilities we have to other people, because one way or another, you answer these questions anyways. Every single person answers these questions by thinking and acting in a certain way. In philosophy, you make these questions tangible and tackle them as best you can.

Whew, I've been writing an awful lot about philosophy lately. Let's try something else. Uhm. Food. Maybe not. Oh yeah, my girlfriend and I found out about a vegetables subscription service today, and I think we might go for it. You pay to get a weekly (or bi-weekly) crate of veggies which you pick up, and they also include a recipe in case you have no idea how to use the things you got. I like it, because the price is good, the veggies are local if possible, and they're always fairtrade and biological. I don't really like buying from supermarket chains anyways, even though I'll admit that Lidl generally does have good and well-priced fruits and vegetables. But there's something icky about funneling money to a guy who already has so much that he doesn't know what to do with it. These kinds of chains and these kinds of people don't need my money. They want it, sure. But I don't know them. I don't think that they care about me, or my experience in their shops. What they care about, is my money. So I try not to care about them or their shops. That's why I prefer to buy from a small-ish shop called Pit Stop. I don't actually know much about it, other than that it caters mostly to muslims, but I generally like their produce. They offer a lot of stuff in bulk that other shops don't (like olives!), and they have huge packages for a lot of stuff (beans, rice, sambal (!)), which means less waste. Still, I'd prefer to get my veggies from the subscription service, since it means local and biological produce.

... Maybe writing about something other than philosophy was a mistake after all. Vegetables, really?