NARSYS - Practical philosophy for daily life

 Most people prepare for retirement the wrong way. They count the years left instead of the skills missing. They worry about rest, comfort, joints and cholesterol, but never about what they will actually do with their mind once the institutional road ends. The result is always the same: an excess of free time combined with a painful lack of purpose. I prefer another image. Not the retiree on a beach chair, not the retiree chasing hobbies like painkillers, but the 4×4 retiree. Not built for speed, built for terrain. A 4×4 is useless on a highway; any ordinary car can do that. Its value appears when the road disappears, and retirement is precisely that moment: when the road disappears. The 4×4 retiree prepares years in advance, not to escape work, but to change its nature. Eight years before retirement, while others scroll endlessly through social media, he learns—not to accumulate diplomas or titles, but to reduce future uselessness. Accounting, systems, automation, decision logic, ...

 Money is a strange object. Everyone needs it, everyone talks about it, and almost everyone feels uneasy around it. We chase it, fear losing it, imagine what life would look like with a little more of it, and quietly blame ourselves when it slips through our fingers. In business especially, money stops being just a tool. It becomes a mirror, a judge, sometimes even a verdict on our own worth. Psychoanalysis offers a useful lens here. In Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud explains that melancholy appears when a person loses an object that carried libidinal investment. Not just something owned, but something psychically charged. The loss is not merely external; it wounds the self. The libido, no longer able to attach itself to the lost object, turns inward, eroding self-esteem and vitality. Melancholy, in this sense, is not sadness alone, but a quiet collapse of meaning. Later, Karl Abraham, in his work on Mania and Melancholia, extends this idea and explicitly names money as on...

 Modern life suffers less from a lack of information than from an excess of confusion. Data flows constantly, opinions multiply, and decisions are expected faster than ever. Yet despite this abundance, judgment has become fragile. What is missing is not intelligence, but discipline. Long before dashboards, metrics, and algorithms, René Descartes identified the core requirement for sound judgment: clarity and distinction. For Descartes, an idea deserves assent only if it appears to the mind clearly and distinctly. Clarity means that the idea is immediately intelligible, present to the mind without obscurity. Distinction means that it is sharply separated from other ideas, without confusion or overlap. One may have clarity without distinction—an intuition that feels obvious but remains vague. One may have distinction without clarity—a technically precise concept that fails to illuminate. True understanding requires both. This principle was not designed for abstract speculation alone....

 Uncertainty has become the default condition of modern business. Interest rates shift, costs fluctuate, demand hesitates, and what seemed predictable only a few years ago now feels fragile. For small businesses, this environment is not merely uncomfortable—it is disorienting. In such moments, the problem is rarely the absence of data. Sales reports exist. Bank statements are available. Expenses are recorded. What is missing is something more subtle and more decisive: clarity. Not perfect foresight, not precise prediction, but a clear enough view to make reasonable decisions. Small business owners often sense this intuitively. Revenue may look acceptable, yet cash feels tight. Activity may be steady, yet anxiety increases. Decisions—hiring, investing, cutting costs—are postponed, not because they are impossible, but because their consequences are unclear. When uncertainty grows, hesitation follows. This is where financial clarity becomes essential. Financial clarity is not about ma...

 There is, in Arthur Schopenhauer, a discreet yet decisive intuition: human will is not a collection of interchangeable desires, nor a material that can be shaped at will. It is a direction. More precisely, it is a line. Each individual possesses their own line of will. Not a line chosen arbitrarily, but an inner trajectory shaped by temperament, sensitivity, limits, deep impulses, and silent necessities. This line is not always clear, but it is always singular. It resembles no other. Here is where the modern error begins. We live in an age that encourages imitation under the guise of rationality. We are urged to replicate what works, to model our projects after those who succeed, to adopt proven methods, as if success were a surface on which everyone could freely move. Yet to want what others want, or to do what others do, is not to broaden one’s path; it is to attempt to turn a line into a surface. But a line is not a surface. A surface implies extension, overlap, and the coexist...

 Philosophy has recently been pulled into the world of coaching, motivation, and self-improvement. It is often presented as something meant to encourage, reassure, or energize people who feel stuck. This approach misunderstands philosophy at its core. Philosophy was never designed to motivate the unwilling. It was never meant to push people into action. It presupposes something far more basic: the willingness to act already exists. There is a quiet truth that modern discourse tends to avoid. At a certain level, human beings divide into two broad categories. Those who work, and those who do not. The first group does not need encouragement. They do not wait for permission, slogans, or emotional boosts. They act because acting is how they inhabit the world. The second group responds poorly to encouragement, motivation, and exhortation. No amount of philosophical language or coaching rhetoric will turn reluctance into effort. Philosophy does not exist to bridge that gap. Classical phil...

  We live in a time where speed is mistaken for intelligence. The faster you reply, the faster you decide, the faster you move—supposedly, the better you perform. But everyday experience quietly tells another story. Many fast decisions lead nowhere. Many busy weeks end with a strange feeling of emptiness. Movement, yes. Direction, not always. Clarity is not slowness. It is orientation. It is the moment when scattered thoughts align just enough for action to make sense. Without that moment, speed becomes agitation. You move, but you do not advance. What most people lack is not motivation or discipline. It is a clear frame. When everything feels important, nothing truly is. The mind jumps from task to task, reacting instead of choosing. Over time, this constant reaction exhausts attention and drains meaning from action itself. Clarity begins when you accept a simple truth: you cannot focus on everything at once. Choosing one central objective is not a limitation—it is a form of re...

 Modern life has taught us how to move fast. We optimize, accelerate, compress time, stack tasks, and celebrate immediacy. Speed feels productive. It feels decisive. It feels like progress. And yet, despite all this motion, many of us sense a quiet dissonance. Not inefficiency—misalignment. The issue is rarely that we move too slowly. It is that we move without rhythm. Long before productivity became a virtue, Plato observed in the Protagoras that the whole of human life requires rhythm and harmony. Not urgency. Not intensity. Rhythm. Harmony. Words that suggest form, proportion, and timing rather than pressure. What Plato understood—and what we often forget—is that speed without form does not create excellence. It creates noise. Speed seduces because it imitates direction. Movement reassures us that something is happening. But speed detached from rhythm produces a particular fatigue: work that grows without shape, decisions taken too early or too late, effort that multiplies wi...

  There is a quiet illusion many of us live with: the belief that not looking at a problem somehow makes it lighter. We know, rationally, that this is false. And yet, when it comes to money, avoidance often feels easier than clarity, not because we are ignorant, but because clarity can be uncomfortable. The Flight from Reality Ancient philosophers defined wisdom in very simple terms: to see things as they are . Nothing more. Nothing less. But seeing things as they are requires courage— the courage to face numbers that do not always flatter our expectations. That is why many people choose to: guess instead of measure estimate instead of record hope instead of count Where vision is absent, the mind fills the gap with stories. And those stories are rarely accurate. Confusion Is Not a Lack of Intelligence This must be said clearly: financial confusion is not a sign of stupidity. Very often, it is the opposite. It is the mark of a mind that is overloaded, fr...

  Aristotle did not write about startups. He did not manage spreadsheets, track KPIs, or pitch investors. Yet, if he were alive today, running a small business would not have surprised him. Not because business is glamorous, but because it is practical , concrete , and deeply human . Business as a form of practical wisdom For Aristotle, the most important kind of intelligence was not theoretical brilliance, but phronesis — practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is not about knowing more. It is about choosing well , in real situations, with limited information. That is exactly what a small business demands: deciding what deserves attention, setting limits, choosing sustainability over excess, aligning action with values. A small business is not an abstract system. It is a daily exercise in judgment. Measure, but do not worship measurement Aristotle believed that virtue lies in the mean — not in excess, not in deficiency. Applied to business, this me...

 Audio article available here . We make decisions every day. Some are small and disappear by the evening. Others are discreet, almost invisible, yet they quietly shape years of our lives. Most of the time, when decisions go wrong, we assume a lack of intelligence, knowledge, or experience. This assumption is comforting. It suggests that the solution is to learn more , think harder , or try faster . But this is rarely the real problem. The Real Issue Is Noise Modern life produces noise continuously. Not only external noise — notifications, messages, opinions — but internal noise: unfinished thoughts, unspoken worries, postponed decisions, vague obligations. When everything stays in your head, nothing is truly clear. Thoughts overlap. Priorities blur. Small problems grow heavier simply because they are not placed anywhere. The mind was never designed to be a storage system. Why Clarity Disappears Mental overload does not come from complexity alone. It comes from acc...