Andre1332

Hello, and thanks for your time reading this. I am an 24 old male Brazilian, having my first work experience creating an gamification project for a call center. My hobbies are acquiring new knowledge, gaming, Japanese comics (I wouldn't say i am an otaku however). I did martial arts for a while but sadly I am in a hiatus now, planning to resume it. Some time ago, I woke up and realized that I knew nothing, that all my life I was living on the automatic mode and that I dint have the knowledge or the experiences necessary to be a happy person or to create any sort of value to anyone. Scared and pretty much alone, I started to study philosophy and other knowledge to build a self. Now I not at the point I want to be, but at least I have built some self value and believe I have found a direction to keep walking. There is much I still don't know and I still struggle with bad habits, such as procrastination, but I fell I am getting somewhere. Its a lengthy process, but well worth it. Now I can see a beautiful world. Taking the quote "Reason equals virtue equals Happiness", I'd say that I have brought reason to my life, now I beginning to understand virtue, and i am positive that one day I shall find happiness. I hope I can find some friends here, I miss having intellectual discussions of any sort. A bit of my history. First my family I grew in Brazil, a country with very poor education and strong left tendencies. My parents where what we call here the caviar leftists, sheltered people that for some reason or another defended communism and what not, and they never took life very seriously, my mother because her grandfather left an very big heritage and he mother never knew what it was to produce any value all her life, her father was a journalist and wasn't home much. My father's father was the very example of the self made man, he went from zero to one of best physicians of my country, however, he didn't had a very lovingly family and as result he is very good at his trade but has a closed mind for other things. The biggest problem is my father's mother, i don't know how she was educated but her and all her sisters have built "troublesome families" with cases of drug abuse. My father had a severe case of drug abuse and he and his brother have some trouble with social occasions. How was growing up in this kind of environment? Well, first of all, I didn't suffer any physical violence, which is nice, when I was a child my father had a bit of a temper, my parents often argued loudly and it used to scare me as a child, but he only threatened me once, and i can only remember 2 times where he would complain with me. As a result, even as I still live with him today, we talk less than 15 minutes a week and I have no emotional attachment to him. My father figure was my grand father, he was a man i could respect, but as mentioned i didn't receive much love or education for him, for he only knew how to work. On these lines, I didn't receive much education at all, I remember when i was very young, and i couldn't spell a word that was not written phonetically, and the teacher laughed at me, instead of teaching me how to do it, note here that all my life i attended to expensive private schools, even so, i didn't receive any real education from parents or school. My relationships were very shallow, no one in my family had any idea of values, plus no one could teach me or be a model for social interaction, so I had trouble building any kind of relationship. My deepest bounds were made with my cats 7. I had some casual friends, but after a while I would lose contact. Plus, the meta on my country for the youth is cheap beer, cheap sex, cheap music, which are things that don't attract me. I was able to automatically "live" my life without much problems until the year before college, where the amount of dedication required to meet the desired outcome by my grandmother (in this point in time and forward, it was my father parents which provided for my household), and I wasn't very dedicated to studying. Grades started to fall, I started lying, my mother's suggestion. The education my mother gave me was basically that if i faced a hardship, i could lie or skip it or pretend it didn't happen. I threw always several things on my life thanks to this lack of responsibility, which now i regret doing. I was able to enter in a college, once again I failed lots of classes, had a hard time with my family, lied to everyone became a severe procrastinator, didn't knew what to do which my life. Two things made change however, I took classes on entrepreneurship and started listening to philosophy. After a while I noticed that time passed but I didn't build much, I noticed how empty I was, how I didn't really knew nothing, not even the most basic knowledge. I started building myself up, trying to fill up the knowledge i feel i should have but i didn't.

Good evening gents. Recently I had some contact with a director of the firm I work into, and his ways of arguing and questioning remminded me of socrates. I asked him if he had studied philosofy before telling him of the similarities, he said he had not, but would be interested into it, so I said I would send him a video of the subject. Does anyone have a good video to suggest? I believe he would be more insterested into a video that has "advanced material" about dialetic or logic. Thanks in advance.

We are childhood friends and we didnt meet much for a while but now we are planning to do business together. I dont think that i am responsible for his happiness, but i care for the happiness of my friends, i dont want to impose an advice but he is about to enter into a very difficult situation, i just want him to find the best way out of it and to know if and how can he be helped.

I have this friend, lets call him Mr.J, who is in what i believe to be an unhealthy relationship with a girl, lets call her Ms.A, which i found to be weird and now i believe its going into a dangerous direction, note that i am not close enough to him to know the specifics of their intimate relation, but i will try to describe it in the most objective way with the information i possess. They met through facebook. They had common friends and Ms.A entered his profile, took interest into him, they meet and began dating. Ms.A and Mr.J don't have much in common, as far as i can tell. As hobbies go, Mr.J love movies and video games and often do these activities without Ms.A. Their morals are completely opposite, Mr.J, while does not have a definite ideology, its clearly against state and religion. Ms.A in other hand works in a multi-layer marketing business, which is know for making its members obsessed with sales of the product, is increasingly more religious, again, thanks to the work, she is has an "alienate left activism" political standing, is a die hard feminist. She also has an obsessive side, she floods her time line in vace book with photos of the couple, she has trouble accepting that Mr.J starts his business with some friends because one of them is know to be an womanizer and when mentioned that they would need a secretary (In my country almost all secretaries are women) she became upset saying that she became their secretary instead. I didn't meet her more than twice, i don't know her deeply, but most of what was said came from Mr.J himself showing concern with their relationship. I don't know what drives them to stay together, besides their different personalities, they also live in opposite borders of the city and to meet it would take at least 2 hours by car. He brought the topic saying that she was starting to talk about marriage, and he said he is against to, but shortly after they changed their status to engaged. Well, i hope i could make a clear case. I want my friend to be happy, but i think that where this relationship is going, he will have lots of problems. I wanted to ask your opinion about how should i discuss this topic with him. How can i help him determinate if this is a healthy relationship? If not, is there a way to save it? If not, how to convince him to end the relationship.