A Notebook to Save You from Infinite Scrolling & Boredom

a bored man is a dangerous man we've heard this quote before and we know it's intuitively true when you're bored you eat too much you get into trouble you message that person you probably shouldn't be messaging and more often than not unless you have some system in place being bored brings you back to the infinite scroll but I found a way to replace these bad habits brought on by boredom with a positive one that is my pocket notebook for contemplation hey welcome to park notes I'm Parker setticase I'm a philosopher and the loan and this

is a channel where I help you study and think more deeply in this video I'm going to help you master boredom so that you can use it in order to contemplate deep ideas instead of developing bad habits like turning to your phone for that infinite scroll so in this video I'll show you how to keep a pocket notebook for contemplation I call this my contempla I use the Latin because I'm pretentious and it motivates me to take it more seriously so in order to get the full concept of a contempla or a pocket notebook for

contemplation first I'm going to talk about the pros and cons of boredom and why I think you should be bored sometimes then I'll get into the concept of a pocket notebook for contemplation I'll give you guys some examples from my own pocket notebook and then I'll finish by going over some of my favorite pocket notebook Brands we got a lot to cover so let's Jump Right In so as we get into my method for staving off boredom by reflecting and contemplating on deep ideas I want to say first and foremost boredom in and of itself

is not a bad thing sure it can lead to some destructive behaviors but boredom can actually be a really helpful tool for self-knowledge getting to know who you are what you are why you believe what you believe why you desire what you desire and why you act the way that you act and boredom can also lead to deep thinking and a development of your own ideas so not just why do I believe what I believe but should I believe what I believe so I actually recommend you schedule boredom into your day go for a walk

without your phone or put your phone on silent or put your phone on airplane mode and go out and let that stream of Consciousness flow let your ideas come to you think about things look at that bird what do you think about it consider your life consider your station where are you who are you what are you think about these things boredom is a beautiful tool for self- knowledge and deep thinking after you're done with your walk come back and write down some of those ideas or bring a pocket notebook with you like these field

notes wallets which have memo books in them I always have one of these with me but I also make a living by my ideas my thoughts so I have to collect them all the time this is actually what I've been using for my wallet lately there are all my cards and money and stuff but here's a field notes memo book 48 pages and this is like my backup look if I have a good idea I need to write it down so I like to bring these memo books with me my audience actually gets 10% off

I love being able to go out and find you guys discounts so that you can get a discount on the stuff that I enjoy myself so check these out Link in the description now I've also done videos on deep thinking philosophy journals and books of soliloquies this is getting to know yourself more deeply this is thinking about your ideas and your thoughts more deeply coming to conclusions on what you believe and why you believe it thinking through new ideas and figuring out what you know and don't know I don't want you guys to think this

current video is an attack on boredom simplic and boredom in general no boredom is a good tool it can be a very good tool for generating self- knowledge through soliloquies or generating new ideas through a deep thinking philosophy Journal if you guys want to find out more about keeping your own book of soliloquies then check this video up here and if you want to find out about keeping a deep thinking philosophy notebook then hopefully it's up here as well if not check the description for those videos but you can't be bored all the time you

can't always be writing soliloquies or going for boredom walks or working in your deep thinking philosophy journal what about those situations where we don't have time to sit down and write how do we Stave off the boredom then that brings us to pocket commonplace books and pocket contemplation notebooks now I've already done a video on this pocket commonplace book this is my pocket commonplace Book of Proverbs my sententia gome my book of sententious maxims my Flores philosophum it's a book of pocket Proverbs so I collect my favorite gnomic statements my favorite Proverbs I put them

in here and then I bring this with me so that when I'm bored and I'm tempted to pull up my phone and fire up that infinite scroll once more I can pull out some of the deepest wisdom from the greatest Minds in human history I'll read through 1 2 3 4 of these and then I'll reflect on them and that helps me Stave off that boredom or those awkward situations where I just want to be lost in my phone so if you guys want to learn more about keeping your own book of pocket Proverbs check

out this video linked up here but let's dive in deeper to a pocket notebook for contemplation or a contempla now I like the Latin because it's kind of fun I need to give myself a reason to be using this and this motivates me using Latin is fun I don't know it kind of sounds like Harry Potter or something but a lot of my favorite philosophers and theologians use a Latin so I feel good when I use Latin or Greek or Hebrew now this notebook is a cross between a commonplace book and a compendium I've been

working on these distinctions throughout my videos so they they've changed over time but what's common between the two is they're both notebooks and they're both collections a commonplace book is usually a collection of quotes and you can have either printed commonplace books where you just collect the quotes or like a manuscript commonplace book where you collect the quotes and your own ideas about those quotes whereas a compendium is a collection of detailed information on a particular topic which is systematically presented for others they're meant to be more comprehensive in scope so think of like a

handbook on North American Turtles that's going to be a compendium it's a collection of detailed information on all the turtles in North America it's presented systematically probably alphabetically or regionally and it's meant to be comprehensive in scope all the turtles in North America so my contempla is kind of a cross between the two I put ideas in here I don't always put quotes I usually just abstract the ideas out of the quotes and I present them systematically but this is not meant to be comprehensive in scope it's not based on on One Singular idea but

it's ideas I want to reflect on ideas thoughts Concepts I'd rather be chewing on thinking through rather than firing up that infinite scroll and scrolling my life away so I will put quotes in here but as I'm thinking through the definitions of commonplace books and compendiums I'm not sure where it falls it's somewhere in between the two it's really important for me to get clear on the concepts I don't know why if you guys don't care then don't even worry about it just get your own pocket notebook for contemplation so that's the idea it's really

simple get yourself a pocket notebook and fill it with ideas that you want to think about read books read articles listen to podcasts abstract out those ideas and put them on a page or two of your contemp latio bring it with you everywhere you go and when you're tempted to pull out that phone to check for your alerts to scroll and scroll and scroll don't do it instead bring this out and think back on those ideas that you find important that you find meaningful that you find worthwhile going from compulsively scrolling to intentionally reflecting on

ideas that you find worth watching meaningful desirable impactful that's a huge swing it's the first step in utilizing boredom to your own Advantage I'm bored but I'm not going to go to some shallow Amusement instead I'm going to go to Amusement I'm going to think I'm going to Muse and chew on ideas that's awesome so that's it it's a really simple idea and it's a really simple method get yourself a pocket notebook fill it up with some of your favorite ideas you can put quotes in here or you can do the hard work of abstracting

out the ideas from the quotes and see how short you can get it one page two page three pages but some of you guys really like when I give examples from my own notebooks so I want to walk through a couple of those and then I'll leave you guys with some of my favorite pocket notebooks that you can use for your own contempla so here's the first entry in this pocket notebook for contemplation this contempla and it's one of my own ideas about pythagoreanism and stoicism it's kind of surprising to me that stoicism is having

such a moment right now everyone wants to talk about stoicism everyone thinks it's super awesome and it's pretty cool but there I think there's a lot of problems with stoicism and so I'm wondering why stoicism has found such a audience today but pythagoreanism hasn't sure maybe Pythagoras was a little bit of a Cults leader kind of weird but pythagoreanism as a whole is is a pretty awesome philosophy they were substance Duelists they thought that the mind was an immaterial thing some people categorize them as being part of the orphic Greek religions and Pythagoras taught that

the rigors of mathematical thought is an activity that purifies the soul I'm not a huge math guy but that's pretty fantastic deep abst ract thinking actually purifies your soul the pythagoreans heavily influen Plato and Plato is the biggest figure in all of Western philosophy I think that stoicism is committed to fatalism hard determinism and physicalism and so I'm not sure there's actually room to control your emotions in the way that the stoics suggest the pythagoreans on the other hand hold to an immaterial mind which may not be subject to the laws of physics so there

might be more room to harness your own emotions to have control over them if that's the case then I think pythagoreanism should be preferred over stoicism now that's an idea I need to think through a lot more but when I'm bored and tempted to pull out my phone this is an idea I want to think about I've been thinking a lot about cartisian minds and transcendental egos that's the philosophy of Emanuel Kant versus the philosophy of Renee dayart and their theories of personal identity and the self the ego I had Luciano fidi on my podcast

Parker's penes you can find a link to that somewhere up here but I've been thinking a lot about the life cycle of information especially because I run this channel which is like notebook philosophy so what is information how do we capture it how do we reuse it how do we process it those things are very important for me to get clear on I also have been developing my own history of AI and I've been pulling from folks like Andy Clark and his history of cognitive science along with Margaret bowden's history of AI and Melanie Mitchells

so really briefly you know some people will find everything tracing back to Plato but I found that dayart might be the father of artificial intelligence in that he's the one of the first to talk about it in his philosophy Dart specifically was talking about Androids and how we might be able to tell a difference between a human and a humanoid robot something that visually looks just like a human but inside is a machine deart basically argued that in order to pass a touring test the Android would have to be artificially generally intelligent and that's practically

impossible so that's one way that we'd be able to tell an Android from a human I recently wrote a substack piece on this where I analyze decart's arguments and his reasoning and I think that ultimately they fail but decart's a genius and he was talking about this in 1637 which is crazy you can find the link to my substack article in the description here nits also talked about artificial intelligence in 1646 with his Mill argument and he actually argues against the idea of a machine being able to think or perceive things so the rationalists of

the 1600s were arguing against the possibility of artificial intelligence but the first positive movement looks like it started with Lady Ava love lace in the 1840s and her friend Charles babage who tried to invent an AI with his analytic engine though it looks like that gears and Cog wheel device was unsuccessful fast forward all the way to 1936 with alen turing's formalization of computation which was a huge stepping stone for progress in Ai and then a short step to the 1940s with the invention of digital computers by people like John Von noyman and Alan Turing

1956 artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy at the Dartmouth workshop on AI and then I've thought through some more ideas like the fight between the good oldfashioned AI folks and the connectionists all the way up until the Transformer neuronet Revolution that started in 2017 with the Google paper attention is all you need that brings us to November 30th 2022 when open AI released its chat GPT model gpt3 which set the whole world on fire so I want to be an expert in the philosophy of artificial intelligence I'm not claiming to be anywhere near an

expert today but I want to be so when I'm bored I'd rather pull out my contempla and think through the history of AI then become a victim of AI on social media platforms which want to lure me onto their platform and keep me there as long as possible so for all my Theologian friends I have the neoplatonic Trinity the neoplatonist also had a view of the Trinity they they appropriated the one which is kind of like the platonic God or or Plato's good they appropriated the mind or noose from Aristotle's intellect that's like Aristotle's God

and they appropriated the world soul from the stoics the logos so some have called this the plotinian Triad from plotinus these are the kind of things I want to turn to when I'm bored so again the concept is super duper simple get yourself a pocket notebook and fill it with your favorite ideas that you want to reflect on so as I finish up here I want to leave you guys with some of my favorite pocket notebooks so you can get started with your own contempla this is a Midori MD notebook it's their pocket size and

I have this in a leather cover this is from stride Ridge on Etsy I'll leave a link in the description but you don't need a leather cover madori also has paper covers so you can find these again links in the description for all these products if you use my links then that will help support my work so I appreciate that I showed you guys the field notes wallets with the memo books in them I really really like these and these come with a 10% off discount with the promo code Parker notes so that's super cool

filled notes also sent me some other really cool ones like their foiled again notebooks their limited edition Birch notebooks and these Chicago notebooks I love these ones so much so you can grab one of these and fill it up with your favorite ideas and turn them into contemp Latios also if you like mol skin notebooks I've been using these ones for years and years and years for pocket notebooks as catchall systems I personally love these but if you use a fountain pen perhaps you won't like them because I think it does bleed through just a

little bit but if you wanted a leather cover for your mole skin mydy creatives are the best he's got this really cool system of leather clasps and a Parker Pen ties everything all together here that's pretty sweet and you can put your mole skin right in here this is another one of my sponsors so they're offering 10% off your entire order with my promo code Parker notes at checkout anytime I can get you guys a discount I'm going to try try and do that so check out myy creative check out field notes lastly a lot

of you guys have recommended that I check out stogy stalogy I'm not really sure how to pronounce it but it's another really great company and these things are super thick I love the grid notebook here I haven't used this one but I used a larger one for deep thinking philosophy Journal so that's another one that you may want to try all right guys so that's it it's a really simple concept I hope that you found it helpful I hope that you all start your own pocket notebooks for contemplation your own contempla if you guys have

made it this far in the video you're awesome leave me a thinking Emoji in the comments I want to know who the real ones are and let me know what you like about the concept whether you think you'll use it yourself or maybe some things that you think should be changed about it I always love hearing from you guys and we can all learn together in the comment section so leave me a comment if you haven't subscribed to this channel make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future tips and tricks for

studying and thinking deeply but that's it for this video I'll catch you guys next time