Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
1. Existential Alienation (The Inability to "Dwell")
- The Marxist Angle: Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, wage labor strips people of their connection to their work, their products, and themselves. This creates deep alienation—making a person feel like they are never truly at home with themselves, only finding a false sense of comfort when they are satisfying basic animal needs. [1]
- The Adornian View: Critical theorist Theodor Adorno famously took this a step further in Minima Moralia, writing that "it is a matter of morality that a person no longer feels at home when he is at home." He argued that because modern society is built on economic inequality and property exploitation, feeling completely comfortable and "at home" in your private sanctuary requires a willful blindness to the suffering of the outside world. For Adorno, a moral life requires a permanent state of feeling "never at home." [2, 3]
2. Philosophy as "Homesickness" (The Romantic Pursuit)
- The German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis famously wrote, "Philosophy is really homesickness—the urge to be at home everywhere."
- On a Reddit philosophy forum, users agreed that this perspective treats humans as existentially displaced creatures. We study philosophy, look for meaning, and build frameworks because we feel fundamentally separated from the universe. We are "never at home," so we use thought to try and turn the cold, external world into a place of familiar understanding. [4, 5]
3. The Illusion of the Present Moment (Consciousness and Time)
- The human mind is rarely anchored in the immediate reality of the present. Instead, it fluctuates between reliving the past or anxiously planning for the future.
- In this sense, the ego is never "at home" in the present moment—which is the only place existence actually happens. [6]
Literary Context Note
- GoogleAI
Chekhov gave her a charming look and amiable smile, and then said " I like marmalade best. Do you like it ? ". " Very much " cried the lady vivaciously, and the three of them then started chattering enthusiastically, displaying their considerable knowledge about marmalade, and their profound erudition on the subject. It was obvious that they were delighted not to have to make any further mental effort and pretend to be seriously interested in the Turks and Greeks, about whose affairs they had never bothered before this.
https://x.com/mkatju/status/2114372323969225192
There is nothing you can do except blame Indians. Hardly any Indian stands for justice or morality, or has any virtues. India deserves what it gets. In fact, what India gets after Modi will be worse.
https://x.com/JayantBhandari5/status/2114250129486340508
“Celebrities are no doubt connected with what they have done. They are also defined by the way in which they are seen and what they are made into by their audiences.” fivebooks.com/best-books/fre…
https://x.com/five_books/status/2114401866587005121
These days, people everywhere talk about mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism as the ultimate way to find inner peace. But if we dig into the actual historical roots we find a complicated truth. Read more... Buddhist nuns and women’s bodies mid-day.com//news/opinion/…
https://x.com/devduttmyth/status/2114318557949415689
"My writing life has been rich and full. That said, I’d agree that it can be isolating. There is isolation in all creative endeavours, be it writing, painting, or building a chair," Bharti Kirchner tells Anu Kumar. Read the full interview:
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114477103252901918
Upper-caste elites struggled to santise the undertones of female sexuality and desire in these tunes, which women continue to sing during monsoon and Holi. scroll.in/article/108983… Chandranshu Yadav & Pratyay Nath writes
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114446905518514409
It is perhaps the sharply identity-driven politics of totalitarian central Europe that pushes Hungarian writers like Krasznahorkai and Szalay to imagine a world where anonymity, uncertainty and vagrancy become political resistance. scroll.in/article/108976… Saikat Majumdar
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114431803687887222
Kozhikode’s mandate is clear: fraternity is a habit cultivated in the mundane architecture of everyday life. It is the politics of the shared street, the common meal, the neighboring house of worship and the collective story. scroll.in/article/109007… John Kurien writes
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114382727873253476
The Namantar Aandolan brought about a metamorphosis in Dalit literature, which rejected liberalism as orthodox piety, employed strong yet raw language, and served as the agency of historical documentation. scroll.in/article/109011… Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule writes
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114360078803292441
Folk culture in the way that the Kumauni people have inherited it, lies at the heart of this festival. ALF aims to make a sincere effort to bring every such story to the centre stage. scroll.in/article/109657… Vasudha Pant & Tanuja Bahuguna write that it belongs to everyone who can think, create and enlighten the spirit of the masses, as well as their own.
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114303455544369322
#Hindi today is not a unified tradition but a site of unresolved tensions. Preserving this character of Hindi is essential to preserving democracy in this country. Moreover, this cannot be achieved through elite anger, impulse, or resentment. scroll.in/article/108158… Charu Singh
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2113922193419891121
It is said that Hindi is inclusionary while English excludes the vast majority. scroll.in/article/109013… But, leaving aside non-Hindi speakers, even most Hindi speakers – here, speakers of “dialects” – find it difficult to make sense of official documents replete with Sanskritised phraseology. By Suraj Gunwant
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2113941167268405264
The paradox of knowing who you are and what you want – beloved Italian storyteller Cristina Campo on fairy tales and the meaning of maturity
https://x.com/brainpickings/status/2114397841216958866
"If a writer is too faithful to history, then he’s not a fiction writer or a novelist. He’s a historian," MG Vassanji told Saurabh Sharma Read the interview:
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114292130612928733
Hyper-nationalism, communal mobilisation, digital propaganda, personality cults, and media capture have shifted politics away from livelihoods toward emotional and civilisational anxieties. scroll.in/article/109310… Economic suffering no longer automatically produces political accountability. By Anand Teltumbde
https://x.com/scroll_in/status/2114005240798220773
I feel Baudrillard raises a fundamental anthropological question (very relevant today) towards the end of this piece about technology: “Am I a man or a machine?” By this way, he argues that man builds intelligent machines, since he fails to believe in his own intelligence or wants to escape the burden of it. Thinking by virtual means offers only “the spectacle of thought”. Baudrillard doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence deserves its name. In his prism, artificial intelligence lacks intelligence because it lacks artifice. No illusions, ellipses, passion, all of these qualities we live with. All these machines can do is calculate and combine things according to models. “Artificial Intelligence is a celibate machine”. Machines don’t get the same pleasure from functioning that humans do. Therefore, there is a profound melancholy to computers. Perhaps when computer viruses break out, machines seem to feel a certain pleasure in producing perverse effects. By producing these effects, the machine might be staging a parody of its own intelligence. Another question I find very essential++
https://x.com/praxiss/status/2114292289002721298
As one grows older, relationships change. Many are lost through death; others through an understanding of their true nature, which has little in it that is good.
https://x.com/roshendalal/status/2114299534415446295
Can you grieve if you can’t feel for yourself? Psychopaths are known for lacking empathy towards others, but philosopher Michael Cholbi argues they also lack it towards themselves, and that’s why they struggle to grieve. He contends that empathy isn’t only about other people, but also means connecting with our past and future selves, and that self-empathy is at the heart of grief. Camus’s The Stranger captures this in Meursault’s strange detachment from his own mother’s death. Tap the link for Cholbi’s full article. iai.tv/articles/psych…
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2114326143058805061
Is thinking something that happens only in our heads, or does it exist elsewhere? Leading psychologist Barbara Tversky argues that thinking is fundamentally spatial and embodied. Spatial cognition takes up half our cortex and evolved long before language. Even abstract concepts like justice are rooted in visceral, bodily responses that precede words entirely. Tap here to watch Tversky’s studio interview on how the body shapes the mind. iai.tv/video/thinking…
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2114046268322283819
History is not a collection of facts. Historians writing about, say, the French Revolution inevitably make it into a story, creating meaning and projecting their prejudices. These stories, argues Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, are neither true nor false: they are more like artworks, composed of meanings, morals and metaphors. But then why should we prefer one story over another? Must we just pick whichever seems most beautiful, or best accords with our prejudices?
Kuukanen argues that we can do better: we can pick between stories in a rational way, once we accept that rationality doesn’t require truth. Tap the link now to read the full article: iai.tv/articles/histo…
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2114424763267338428
Historian Romila Thapar, 96, on Sunday (October 25, 2026) argued that colonial historians fundamentally shaped the way Indian history came to be understood, reducing complex social and political processes to simplified religious narratives that continue to influence historical interpretations today and propagate the Hindutva reading of Indian history. @SobhanaNair thehindu.com/news/national/…
https://x.com/the_hindu/status/2114397073336644012
In 1970, before I was born, anthropologist Agehananda Bharati tellingly used a food metaphor to articulate his critique of modern Indian tradition. He observed a “process of re-enculturation” where Western concepts entered Indian culture, and referred to this process as the pizza-effect: ... For Bharati, the “Hindu Renaissance” of 19th-century India, which shaped contemporary understandings of Hinduism (including the coinage of the word “Hinduism” itself), followed the pattern of the pizza-effect: perhaps most significantly in the prominence it gave to the Bhagavad Gītā... Bharati was right that modern Hinduism was something very different from the traditions that preceded it. But the question Bharati never seemed to ask was: so must that be a bad thing?
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2026/10/the-significance-of-general-tsos-chicken-and-pizza/
The early 17th century, the time of Galileo, was a golden age for astronomy. One of its leading figures was the German Johannes Kepler, who made successful mathematical models of the planets’ orbit around the sun. Kepler also reacted strongly against something we now take for granted: the idea that the universe is infinite, with many solar systems rather than everything orbitting the sun. Kepler thought that the evidence didn’t support an infinite universe, and he was very grateful for that. By Amod Lele on 25 October 2026
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2026/10/the-tragedy-of-johannes-kepler/
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