In a certain period of his life, Nietzsche walked one hour in the morning and three in the afternoon. As a good German, every day, the same route.

I am walking a lot, through the forest, and having tremendous conversations with myself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A similar habit was cultivated by other famous thinkers.

Nietzsche had the privilege of having the time to do so, and he recognized that. Regular people struggle to find the time to rest, to free the mind from daily obligations and never-ending stress.

An hour-long walk would bring great benefits in many senses, but the always-emergency mode suits those who prefer other minds uninspired.

You have no time. Inspiration is dangerous.

To desire, even more.

An extended set of photos can be found at Your Thoughts… Naked (YTN).
Go there check it out

ps: If you want access to create your own gallery of thoughts, let me know in the comments or send me a private message.

Since I’ve started Naked Nude, I’ve never had strong ideas about what to do. I just started. People got interested. I got more stimulated to continue and motivated enough to build what’s below:

I’m calling it Your Thoughts… Naked, or YTN.

What YTN is about

Think of this as a daily journal. One text per day, with no rules attached, no fixed structure, no required format. You shape it however you like.

The system captures the core feelings, recurring subjects, and key words that define your voice. It then helps you filter and select the photos that truly resonate, so you can build a Thought Gallery that feels personal, yours.

I won’t waste more time explaining what you can grasp by accessing it.
Just go there

I confess I’m a horrible seller. I hope what was built speaks for itself.

If you feel it’s interesting, if it helps you put out ideas in some format, if it stimulates you to be a bit more creative day by day—then that’s what matters.

All that comes from these inner feelings should be good things, I do believe.

YTN is a work in progress. Be patient if something breaks… I’m doing my best to make it easy and fast. You can leave comments here: feedback, suggestions, feature requests, etc. New things can appear based on your inputs.

So that’s the news.

By the way, that’s my Thought Gallery of the day at YTN.

I hope I caught your attention.

^{PS: If you already received the invitation, don't forget to activate and try things out there. The invitation link has a one-week expiration period. If you need more time, just let me know.}

Some of you may remember that I was working on something, a tool that all of you coul…

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But what really matters is:

^{— Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle's idea}

Greeks had a quite pragmatic view of the virtuous person. For Aristotle, this is not something innate, nor a matter of chance. Actually, very few things are innate. A person pursuing virtue is like someone learning how to play an instrument. It is discipline, repetition, patience, consistency. You need to practice, fail, try again. Over time you get good at it.

That’s a good metaphor. As we all know, for some, playing an instrument comes easily; it flows naturally. For others, it's brutally hard, if not impossible.

It is not rare to have a disconnection between a self-belief and real practice. This harms a lot, not only individually. The dissonance haunts forever.

There’s a brilliant text from Franz Kafka about his father:

^{— Franz Kafka, “Letter to His Father,” 1919}

The same dissonance that Kafka saw in his father also applies to nations.

Myths are very commonly used to straight national identity. Often they are bullshit. A historical moment, a key figure … all this can and will be reshaped to fit. History manipulation is common. The so-called ‘narratives.’

But facts can be verified with concrete evidence, omissions spotted, and nonsense interpretations challenged rationally. History is a science.

You can convince some that a lie is true, but only for some time.

Truth is like a punch in the face. Myths can’t stand long. Too fragile.

Nothing beats the truth.

^{— Joe Louis, 1946, answering a journalist: “If he runs, will you chase him?”}

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Maybe one of the most famous religious relics is the Holy Lance, the Spear of Destiny. That’s the weapon that technically killed Jesus Christ.

Napoleon wanted it; Hitler considered it the ultimate Wunderwaffe.
The interesting thing is that it really exists. Yes, there are many actually. You can go to Rome’s St. Peter Basilica or to Vienna's Hofburg Palace.

You pick it.

This intro raises a question: Do things have “soul”? An object is more than an object? Marx called this commodity fetishism. Objects are perceived as having a "brain" and “ideas,” effectively stealing the cognitive and creative attributes of the worker.

The car is sexy. The table is elegant.

It’s us imprinting soul into bullshit.

The current stage is that an object gives a sense of belonging. You are part of a community; you have peers and you share the privilege of having it.

The marketing department’s dream.

Final thought on that:

Johnny Marr, The Smiths‘ guitarist, has a book where he talks about some of his guitars and how they inspired him to find a certain sound, that magical chord progression, unlocking what was before unseen. Some of these guitars are for sale in an auction happening next September.

One can buy it.

Of course, they are overpriced being Johnny “fucking” Marr’s guitars, but don’t be fooled.

His soul was not transmuted to a piece of wood and wires.
That’s what you gonna get.

That’s all money can buy.

But this is not so uncommon, not so special, right?
Every period of time has had these figures with similar backlash. So, it is safe to say that they are here now, and the mob is again against them.

Can we spot them in the crowd?
Are you and I part of the mob?

Hard to say.
Too many variables that depend on who’s in charge.

Those that will be celebrated in the future are the ones aligned with the ruling of that moment. Even more, the past can be reconfigured when a myth is useful.

Maybe what you firmly believe as “right” today and accept as such by the majority can be considered “wrong” in the future.
Then you are part of the mob.

Such a mess.

We all can be considered monsters from time to time.

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In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys were shipwrecked on the island of ‘Ata for over a year. By the “Lord of the Flies” novel, they should have turned into savages.

But they didn’t.

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I tried to watch a full season of House of Cards. I couldn’t. But I remember a couple of episodes where a decent, honest education secretary is represented as a naive idiot. He tries to present a legitimate project. Frank Underwood sabotages it behind his back and wins. The message is clear: decency is stupidity. Ruthlessness is intelligence.

Let’s not deny reality, but the real problem is normalization. This behavior is presented as the only way, the only possible path to success. And succeeding is what matters. That’s how you’ll be judged and praised.

It’s like we are always in survival mode. No space for kindness. No space for honesty. Because if you show either, your “life” is at risk, and when we feel deeply insecure, we collapse into evil.

The Nazi bureaucrat on trial was not a monster. Not a sadist, but a normal man. A man who described genocide as administrative work, a day-job task. No big deal. Just another working day. Banal evil.

Less dramatic than justifying genocide, but similar in structure: politicians and economists use Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to justify greed as natural, as inevitable, as virtue. “Science proves it,” they said. “We are programmed to be selfish.” .

Dawkins himself never supported this view. He argued that genes operate selfishly—blindly, mechanically—but we humans, as a species, can rebel against our own programming. We have culture. We have choice. The whole point of civilization, he later wrote, is to escape the brutal logic of our genes.

And some people are still good even in deadly situations. Those are the special ones, and we shouldn’t rely solely on them. Heroes always die, but context matters. A lot.

In a free, safe, relief-filled space, people are good. Not because they’re saints. Because they can afford to be. Kindness is not weakness. It’s a luxury. And when a society makes that luxury abundant, generosity becomes normal. Cruelty becomes embarrassing.

That’s a better world. Not the one where everyone is Frank Underwood. The one where we stop praising predators’ characters and start writing them as people. Flawed. Capable of damage. Also capable of repair. Where Ted Lasso can win, where kindness is not a punchline. Where decency is not stupidity.

Maybe we’re tired of the evil.
No one needs permission to be good.

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But what is this? Is this art?

This is a urinal. No doubts about it.

And not only that. There's good evidence that the guy actually stole the idea from a woman—Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Actually, he stole many of her ideas, it seems. I think this is quite remarkable, in a bad way, I mean. A perfect summary of post-modernity. Money and fame — that’s what matters.

So, Mr. Duchamps did great. He achieved all. Total success.

This is a trend, a horrible one, more clear in the last 30 years but older, as this urinal from 1917 and a 1908 essay, Ornament and Crime, demonstrate. In it, Adolf Loos, a very influential European architect, declared ornament a crime.

Not just inefficient, but ethically wrong.

It’s like in the 1984 book, where language is being reduced, simplified, and stylized to the basics… astronaut food, just to keep you alive. Nothing more.
Beauty, good taste are superfluous.

That’s capitalist economics dictating all, including moral values.

Inefficiency is not tolerated.

Marriage? That’s like a business contract. Mitigate risks; your partner must "add", contribute to your financial prosperity. Your once beloved football/basketball teams are just franchises. They can move, change names, “rebranding” anytime. Profit reigns supreme.

People are pushed to not care. In an ultra-stimulated world, attention deficit skyrockets, which makes total sense. Almost a self-protection mechanism, but far from the best response.

What's interesting about art is that, in some way, it shows us who we are and leaves a message for the future. Like: 'See this? That's how those people processed life in their time.'

That said, we can do better than this, right? Some are.

Once more, none of this is new. But it will reach a peak—a bottom—someday. Sooner rather than later. Then collapse for good.

And beauty will reign supreme again.

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Cross the Gate …

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Perseverance with a backbone.

Black churches in the US weren't just meeting places. They carried the idea of justice, that tomorrow could be different if enough people believed it hard enough and worked long enough. Same in Poland with Solidarność. Same in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile under Pinochet. The Catholic Church, for all its horrors, provided sanctuary and organization when dictatorships ruled.

Faith was not about heaven. It was about not giving up.
So if faith can do that, what happens when a society loses it?

La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) gives the answer right in the title. Emmanuel Todd argues that Protestantism was not just about God. It was a moral operating system. Demanding. Disciplined. It told people: work hard, delay gratification, serve the community, don’t be a greedy bastard. That’s not a prayer. That’s a social contract. The values soaked into the culture, creating a social glue.

Without this glue, with no shared values, society is gone, defeated.

- Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas character in the 1987 film “Wall Street”

The logic is simple: if nothing is sacred, why not take everything?

That’s what faith—or something like it—can prevent. It says some things are not for sale. Some things are worth protecting even when they’re not profitable.

In indigenous traditions, nature is not a resource. It’s a relative. It is sacred.
A mountain is not a mineral deposit. It’s an ancestor.
A river is not water volume measured in cubic meters. It's a living entity. With this kind of sacred vision, there's no environmental collapse.

Treating a river as disposable would have been unthinkable.
The moral framework would have prevented the damage before it started.

Some things matter because we together believe they do.
In that sense, I’m a believer.

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Sergei Eisenstein was a Soviet filmmaker. That fact matters less than what he did with his craft. The “Odessa Steps” sequence alone in Battleship Potemkin (1925) has been studied, dissected, and imitated countless times: a baby carriage bouncing down a staircase, soldiers marching in rhythm, a mother’s face frozen in horror. Check Brian De Palma's brilliant homage in The Untouchables (1987).

But Eisenstein’s real genius wasn’t just what he filmed. It was how he cut it together. His theory of montage is deceptively simple. Take two images. Place them next to each other. The human brain, hungry for meaning, will create a connection that exists in neither image alone. That third thing, the one that appears only in the collision, is the real content of cinema.

Eisenstein called this “linkage.” But what he actually created was space. A gap. A moment of active participation where the viewer becomes a co-creator. He doesn’t tell you what to think. He arranges the pieces and trusts you to complete the puzzle yourself. An invitation to think.

In the same period, Leni Riefenstahl was a dancer and an actress who, in the early 1930s, had Adolf Hitler’s admiration. She admired him back. In 1934, she was commissioned to film the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The result was Triumph of the Will. Technically, the film is a marvel. Moving cranes, aerial shots, mass formations choreographed into living geometry. But be sure, there were no open gaps; she sealed them shut. The rhythm hypnotizes. The images overwhelm. You don’t leave the theater thinking. You leave saluting. The conclusion is built into the structure. No space for doubt. She, the director, has already decided for you.

Don’t think.

There are plenty of movie examples with both approaches.
Take 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar.

Kubrick gives you the monolith, the hallucination, the fetus floating above Earth. He gives you enough, but not all. The gap remains. You leave the theater still thinking, still arguing, uncomfortably still interpreting. He passed the ball.

Technically, Interstellar is also a marvel. But Nolan gives you an astronaut explaining a wormhole to another astronaut (wtf!). The explanation is obviously for us, the audience, because the film assumes we are too stupid to fill any gap, so it fills it before you notice it. No work required. No interpretation invited.

This is not about art versus propaganda. It’s about whether the director trusts the viewer or not. Eisenstein trusted you. Kubrick trusted you. Nolan doesn’t. He pushes his view as the only view. No generosity. No space for surprise. No room for your interpretation to compete with his. The conclusion is sealed.

The gap is closed.
Don’t think.

And that, more than any political system, is the real loss.

Thinking is an exercise.

It demands practice at every opportunity. That's how we get good at it—while listening to a song, reading a book, … watching the news.

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Fill the gaps …

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The place with the best indicators is where the colony goes to. Very rational.
27 years of research and meticulous observation. In 1973, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

But most people are very impatient… that's modern life. No time to waste, and the classic 'time is money,' they say. Well, time is a lot of things. Money isn't one of them.

I remember when it was common to see people full of certainty, very professorial, after reading a short Wikipedia article on a non-trivial subject. In recent years, it's gotten worse: unqualified YouTubers and AI shit 'educating' millions."

Idiots will take over the world;
not by capacity, but by quantity.
They are many.

- Nelson Rodrigues (1912–1980), a renowned Brazilian playwright, journalist, and novelist.

There’s nothing more confident than an idiot.

This urgency, a necessity of readiness that pushes people to be always on the surface, ignoring contradictions or different perspectives just to reinforce their own biases. Fast decision-makers. Disposable education.

This is not only affecting regular individuals but also big companies and nations. The next quarter is the long-term vision (next bonus time, the upcoming popularity poll). Optimization for speed rather than rationality, long-term thinking, common good.

Well, the crazy thing is that this is so obviously wrong. No news here. And yet most keep racing toward the meaningless land.

Time to slow this shit down … for a few minutes now. A bit more tomorrow.

Who knows how it will be in a week, in a month, in a couple of years …?

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Freud was really clever in many subjects (yes, not all the time, but who the fuck is?) . His book Civilization and Its Discontents from 1929 is superb. The main plot is: civilization makes people suffer. Yes, to be “civilized” means you have to let go of a lot of your own primal instincts: instant pleasure, desires, aggression impulses. That’s the super-ego controlling the id. We suffer, civilization prevails. This discontent very often manifests into neurosis.

He then extrapolated this idea. Civilization, as an entity, developed its own “cultural super-ego“ that is going to be so strict, so against people’s id (instincts), that civilization is destroyed by the discontents. That hooked me because, where are the discontents? All I see is apathy. Or this is a pre-stage that will feed the future discontents. That makes some sense.

There have always been discontent, and art was always a way to manifest it instead of burning the whole thing down. The id’s raw energy (libido, aggression, the forbidden) gets redirected into something culturally valuable. This is an escape valve. Without that, the pressure starts to get too high.

Culturally, we are now stuck in a dead end.

Want an example? Rock ‘n’ roll started in the early ‘50s. Go back twenty-five years from it, to the mid ‘20s, and compare what popular music was. That’s a fucking million- year jump. That’s young people , crazy to have fun, dance, have sex, drink. That’s the id at full throttle. Do the same now, go back to 2000.

Yes, there is nothing.

The valve is clogged.

So, if you are discontent, we are in this together. Let’s not passively listen to some shitty harmless Spotify playlist as background sound. Art is not background, art is us, our discontent.

I’ll let you go with the intro speech from a concert. That’s MC5 playing at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom on October 30–31, 1968.

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- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Not uncommonly, war wisdom fits peacetime too (or not-so-peaceful times like ours).

Nothing is done without thinking, even when we do bullshit, and nothing helps to do the right things right more than writing them down first.

There are different levels of reinforcement doing this.

You have to organize your thoughts to put them on paper, and we care more about what we write than what we read from others. That brings clarity and weight, resulting in a 40% higher chance of making those thoughts real.

And yes, paper is better than any digital media because it exercises another level. The physical act of writing by hand involves motor memory. Neurologically speaking, multiple neural pathways are activated. So many neurons fire during the task that the brain gets the message: this is important shit not to be forgotten.

The power of writing is also recognized as an important tool in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), specially, but not only, to mitigate high-anxiety episodes. Panic attacks.
A person in a perfectly safe situation thinks she/he’s about to die. Right then, in that moment. Of course, is not that you write things during these terrible situations, but right after. Using what is called Thought Record, the situation is described in a very structured way. Under the therapist guidance, these exercises slowly reshape the brain, exposing the nonsense of the automatic catastrophic expectation for what never comes.

We are not that good in forgetting stuff, especially the bad ones.
Writing your thoughts make you deal with them wiser.

Let’s flush the bullshit down …. and care more about what’s important to be cared.

Go for it.

Relax, more after this one …

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Well, that’s it. The last day of the year.
Gone in the blink of an eye, like all the others.

So, what’s about to come? God only knows, maybe not.

In any case, let’s not be fatalists. We can still shap…

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Hollywood’s first decades were the silent film era, from the early 1900s through the late 1920s. During this period, not only were the movie stars women, but so were many of the screenwriters, directors, and studio owners. The movie industry was just born, a green field with lot of experimentation and discoveries taking place.

It followed a predictable script: a new field emerges, marginalized groups rush in, but as money, prestige, and institutional power solidify, the old hierarchies reassert themselves. We see this same script play out at the Bauhaus school in Germany in almost the same period (founded 1919). Women were freely accepted and initially achieved great success..

In the words of Bauhaus director Walter Gropius:

“Any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters, will be admitted as far as space permits.”

Great, but false. Women participation was very restricted a couple of years after this statement.

In both cases, the conclusion was the same: Kick the ladies out of the important positions. This is too serious for them.

Gender prejudice is illogical. No only, but even more in art.
Virtue isn’t gender-related.

But there’s no guarantee that removing this bias, or reducing it considerably, necessarily improves anything. It’s all about the structures of power and how these structures filter and select individuals that will be on top of organizations and public institutions.

Greedy, Corrupt structures lead to the top greedy, corrupt people.

So, women, the world needs more of you.
You are wanted!

But not any of you. The special ones.
Brave enough, tough enough to not be broken, but to break.

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I don’t like the ‘Method’...
For me, the thing is to look outside, not inside.
The character is not inside me. I have to go and find it.

Meryl Streep, The New Yorker - 2006

But there’s a more radical approach. Instead of acting, just be yourself.

The Italian Neorealism movement from the 40s-50s marks one of the eternal peaks of the 7th art. It’s no accident that the “New Hollywood” directors (Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, etc.) all honor it deeply. Vittorio Di Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) is maybe the most iconic movie of this period. Lamberto Maggiorani, the film’s lead, wasn’t an actor but a factory worker cast by Di Sica because that’s what the story demanded. Someone from the working class that was really struggling in life and would know how to react when his only instrument of surviving is stolen.

More recently, a touching example is Abbas Kiarostami’s “Through the Olive Trees” (1994). A movie about filming a movie in a little Iranian village destroyed by an earthquake that happened for real in 1990. The main “actors” were from that very same village. They were there in 1990 and you can see this in the movie. It’s almost like a documentary. They were “acting” so naturally, truly realistic, human, sensible.

This is not about which approach is better or worse.
Art is not about competition, but finding ways of touching peoples’ soul.
Making them believe and feel.

It doesn’t need to be perfect or professional to feel real.
Real life doesn’t need these things.

Last shot from this post …

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Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was an actor and director who hated the artificial, exaggerated acting style common in the 19th century. The Muscovite developed the so called “Stanislavski System”, a structured method for actor training, preparation, and rehearsal.

Jumping to New York city, 1951. Lee Strasberg was the director of the Actor’s Studio. He knew about “Stanislavski System” and even had studied with Russians Stanislavski’s students. So, with this background, Strasberg developed what is famously known as “The Method”.

Stanislavski System has some key principles, and “The Method” has a heavy load in the Emotional Memory. There’s no lie. Actors had to reinvoke personal emotions from their own experiences and put them in service of the character they are living. Acting is not representing, It’s the art of experiencing.

This basically moved to a different level those with the talent and courage to revive their own painful emotions as a way of living.

Who was trained in the “The Method” by Strasberg? Long list: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Sally Field …

In the end, the raw question driving Stanislavski, Strasberg, and all the great Hollywood actors was: How to be real? It’s curious how the Russian pragmatism (“System“) got fertile soil in the not less pragmatic USA (“Method“).

One last curiosity about Lee Strasberg. I’m pretty sure you know him without realizing it. He was Hyman Roth, key figure in the whole plot of the masterpiece The Godfather Part II (1974). Al Pacino convinced Copolla to pick him.

In the pursuit of being “real”, there are different paths to be taken. Some are not that pragmatic, I would say, but I’ll let this to the next post. For now, practice your Emotional Memory.

Let it flow.
Revive life’s pleasurable moments.

More raw emotions to come.
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If we check the numbers, there’s a clear improvement in overall human life expectancy. In 1950, global life expectancy was 46.6 years. This increased to 71.7 in 2022.

I know, many will say how shitty are the public health system everywhere or how the private health system rip you off till you die with no assistance. You absolutely right, but even though, we are better than a century ago in this aspect, at least.

So, humans are living more, which means that life conditions improved. Great.

But there’s one aspect of our health that the improvements and scientific advances didn’t really improve anything. Actually, the numbers prove it got worse: Mental Illness.

There’s a kind of a bible in Psychiatry called DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The first edition from 1952 had 128 clinical categories. The last one, DSM-V from 2013, has 541. I mean, or psychiatry has evolve in a “frenesi” of discovers that no science has ever experienced, or there’s something wrong here. I pick the last option.

The first anti-depressive medicines are from the 50’s. You know what was the impact in the society at that time? None! Why? Lack of depressed people.

Some me argue that people in the past were actually never correctly diagnosed. But the past is not a century ago … no, is like 5 years or 3. It’s getting worse. People are more and more sick every year. Will DSM desperately add categories in every edition ?

Psychiatry itself is not to blame, but believing that it’s the answer for the causes, is deadly wrong. No pill gonna make it. It’s clearly a symptom of deep social-economical dynamic that, at time goes by, gets more extreme hurting more people.

It’s hard to individually vizualized a way out, so take care.

Be gentle to yourself.

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Pirahã is an indigenous group living quite isolated, deep in the Amazon forest. Linguistically, they are a curious case. They have no sense of recursion, the ability to embed a phrase inside another phrase of the same type. They also have only rudimentary notion of quantity (a little, some, many) and colours (light, dark). Yeah, weird stuff. Very limited Language, and language is probably the highest level ability that our brain mastered like no other.

The special aspect of language is that it is mostly a built-in capacity, innate. No, we aren’t born ‘speaking,’ but the wiring is there, waiting for the stimulus. Once they come, in a few years that little kid is able to use that language pretty well. Any language.

So why is the Pirahã language so limited, even compared to other indigenous groups? The wiring still there and is able to handle much more, but culturally they don’t need more. It’s all about stimulus.

Restrictions restrict, but we all have a language, no matter what.

side note:
Noam Chomsky formulate this idea (the innate nature of language) in 1957. Funny that most people love/hate Chomsky for his political and philosophical ideas, but the man was only 28 years old when he revolutionized an entire scientific field, the Linguistics. Not bad.

And what is not innate, we invented. Reading/Writing can be considered almost a brain-extension. If you push yourself to do it, you will get pretty good on decoding (reading the symbols) then your mind is free to do what matters, understanding. The more you read, the more easily you understand things.

You get smarter.

As said, all depends on the stimulus

So it’s no accident people worry that social media rots the brain. If the stimulus is for fast reactions and instant gratification, that’s what the brain gets good at, in the expense of critical thinking, deep reading, etc.

Balance is the key.

So, if you reached this points, you just did a couple of mind push-ups.
Well done.

Gratify yourself.

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