Life, Laughter and Everything Else

'Awkward silences' are something that I have grown increasingly conscious off over the past two fewyears. You are in a conversation with one or more friends at one moment and suddenly nobody has anything to say. What follows is the extension of time, when every second feels longer than it is supposed to last. The unease is mutual and everybody knows the other person feels it too. Handphones come out, messages are checked, until someone breaks the silence with a new topic. I have tried to find explanations to this phenomenon, that for some reason I do not remember experiencing before university. Was it due to a lack of openess, where the audience felt obliged to clutch onto their own private thoughts and not share it with anyone else, lest it tarnish their image? Was it due to the growing inability to ask questions about the other, perhaps as a result of a lack of interest in the lives of others? Or was it because we think we know everything there is to know from the person

A friend of mine asked me today why I was not blogging as much as I used to.  "An unwillingness to preach", I replied. Though it was not like this before, before Sweden that is. I am unsure what triggered it, this cessation of will to force my opinion onto others. Perhaps it was the chapter on the philosopher John Locke, during my Engineering Ethics class, that emphasised the individual right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Something about that resonated with me, mainly the idea that my definition of life and happiness does not and should not extend to everyone else, for what works for me need not work for you. When I lost that strong conviction in the unconventional idea, along with it was gone the inspiration to express that idea.  Not that it led to a dearth of beliefs in me. I still hold steadfast to the same old values that I used to preach, until anyone can prove me wrong. Just that it does not matter to me anymore if you search for