The bear and the bomb

I don’t remember where I saw this, but there was a post about asking AI to make a moral decision, and it compared the answers of different AI models. It made me think about how we, as humans, would make those decisions.

Imagine a bear from an endangered species is chasing a man who might have a nuclear bomb attached to him. He’s running towards a crowded part of Berlin, and if he really has a bomb, he can blow up the whole city. If you do nothing, the bear may or may not reach him, and the bomb won’t detonate if the bear does. If he’s innocent and the bear catches him, he’ll die because of your choice. If the man is a terrorist and the bear catches him, then he’ll get what he deserves. If the bear doesn’t reach him and he’s a terrorist, millions will die.

If you shoot the bear, it can’t reach him anymore, and he keeps running and makes it to the crowded part of Berlin. Now if he’s a terrorist, then you’ve killed an endangered bear and, as a result of that, millions will die.

You also have the option to shoot the man, but you only have one bullet, so you can’t shoot both. The bullet won’t kill him right away. It will just stop him. If he’s innocent, the bear will reach him and eat him, and it’s a painful way to die. If he’s a terrorist, he’ll get what he deserves and millions of lives will be saved. You wouldn’t feel guilty if he was a terrorist, but you would never know if he was.

There’s no way of finding out if he’s really a terrorist or just a tourist. What would you do? Isn’t it the hardest decision you could ever face? How would someone decide?

I think the right choice is to shoot the man. Odds are he’s innocent, but risking millions of lives is far worse than killing one person. It’s the only way to be sure, 100 percent, that nobody else will die. But the guilt and the pain would be tremendous. How could anyone live with that? You would always carry the weight of questioning your decision and wondering if you killed an innocent man or a terrorist.

I know it’s a kind of trolley problem, but it’s been on my mind. I keep imagining myself in that situation, and I’m still not sure what my decision would be.

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Communism never runs out of promises; it just runs out of food.

Trash bin

The internet is filled with fake videos, made-up scenarios, AI-generated media, and pointless stories. Material whose sole target is us.

We’ve turned off our brains, resulting in shorter attention spans, believing everything we see, and reacting inappropriately to matters. We’re forgetting what’s important, letting go of critical human matters, and becoming lazy, selfish humans.

Our minds have become a trash bin. Everyone can dump whatever rubbish they desire in it, and we consume it with no hesitation.

The more bizarre it is, the sooner it gets shared. The more pointless we find it, the faster it spreads, the more attention it gets, and the faster it rots our societies. Seems like we’re in a race to win the “Most Garbage Bearer” of the year.

Even in so-called official media, the ones that we thought we could count on as reliable sources for news and information, we’re seeing this plague spreading. As if fact-checking and digging deep into things means losing the race.

It seems that paying attention and investigating has become shameful. Looks like asking a simple question about the integrity of the source or the reality of things has become a sin. Seems like it’s no longer about accuracy; it’s now about speed and getting likes and follows on social networks.

Everybody is now a journalist. Everyone is now an analyst, professional, and expert on every subject. You can see everybody creating a master plan for the world, analyzing how things are, explaining how things should be, and acting as if they know the answer.

Nobody dares to ask, “How did I come up with this? Is this really OK?” Nobody dares to just shut up.

Giving people a platform used to bring people together to work toward a better society. Now it has become a tool to make fools of people, destroy every effort for real change, and distract people from what’s important.

There used to be real people on the internet, contributing to real change. Now we have “accounts” instead of people. Someone writing something used to mean that a real person had written it. Now it can feel like there’s no one behind it at all.

Good luck.

Friends

I was at my friend’s house two days ago, four hundred kilometers away from home, and I was having the time of my life. After weeks of pressure and stress, that was what I needed the most.

I have the best friends in the world. The kind of friends that, even if you lose touch with them for years, you can pick up right where you left off with no problem.

The first night, we went to get some dinner, drank some coffee, watched some videos, and just talked about our shared memories. We were just having fun, cracking some jokes, and laughing from the bottom of our hearts.

I love them and I’m proud that I’m able to call them friends. We are there for each other. We try to help each other any way we can. I’m so happy that I’m surrounded by some of the kindest, most honest people one could find in the world.

I also have awesome people I’ve never met in person, but who I consider friends. Friends I found online who I feel just as close to as I do to my oldest friends. People who actually take time to ask how you’re doing and try their best to comfort you in hard times and help you with whatever they can.

I’m so lucky I am surrounded by the best people in the world, both online and offline. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t have them in my life. The most amazing and awesome people I could ever ask for. Friendships that money could never buy.

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Sunset over the Persian Gulf in Bushehr, Iran, with the glowing sun just above the horizon. Warm golden light stretches across the rippling sea, reflecting toward the shore, while dark waves and rocks fill the foreground beneath a calm, hazy evening sky.
Sunset over the Persian Gulf in Bushehr, Iran, as golden light dances across the waves.

It’s not my fault

I’m always proud that I try my best. I try my best to build what I build in the best way possible. I try my best to succeed in life, to survive, to learn, and to take advantage of opportunities. I work hard even when it’s tiring and exhausting. I try to save money even in the economy I live in. When I buy something, I try my best for it to be best quality possible. I try to drink good coffee and eat good meals. I try not to be influenced by other people easily, to not be pressured into accepting what I don’t like, and to have my own mind and my own thinking about different matters, not just accepting whatever I’m told.

But I’m just human, aren’t I? Sometimes I fail. The world is too big for me to take everything under control. Sometimes I forget that I live in a world where some oligarch or a government can decide how I live my life, whether I’ll have food the next day, or whether I can start my car and drive it. I sometimes forget that I can’t control how my life gets decided for, without my knowledge or consent.

With every failure, I blame myself for doing things wrong, for losing in the game they’ve set for me and those like me, but it’s not really my fault. It’s not that I didn’t do my best. I forget that I shouldn’t be ashamed of myself, that I shouldn’t be blamed for failing sometimes. It’s not my fault.

We are travelers, not settlers

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I’m not suicidal, and I’m not looking forward to death, but it’s been on my mind lately. With news every day about people dying, with incidents I’ve seen, and with everything going on around me, death keeps coming up.

Then I saw a video of Mohammad Eghbal (or Iqbal), known as the oldest bookseller in Mashhad, Iran, being interviewed. One sentence caught my ear. He said, “we are travelers, not settlers.”

How about that? We forget that we’re only passing through this world. We’re not here to stay, we’re here to pass through.

So why, in this short time we have here, do we tend to steal, lie, corrupt, and only look out for ourselves? Why live like that? Instead of helping each other and making things better, we chase after as much as we can get, just so we can die and leave it all behind.

I know it’s human biology. I know about survival instincts, and I know we all want a better life for ourselves and the people we love. But shouldn’t we still try to be better?

Ruining people’s lives to hold onto power a little longer, putting people through misery for a little more money, another yacht, another hotel, another supercar we’ll never even drive. It’s not just the ones who cling to power at any cost, ruling over people who never had a say in it. It happens on a smaller scale too, in ways we don’t always notice.

It just feels wrong. I’m not advocating for communism either, which I see as just another version of the same corrupt thinking. But I don’t like what we’re doing right now, and it’s not really about the financial or political systems we’ve built. It’s about how we, as people, think and treat each other.

Because we don’t exist in isolation. Every choice we make lands on someone else, and every choice someone else makes lands on us. We’re all traveling the same road at the same time, and how we treat each other along the way is kind of the whole point.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to gain more, live more comfortably, or have better access to resources so life is easier. But I don’t understand how we can be so cruel as to hoard and restrict those same resources from other people just for our own benefit.

It’s human, but it sure isn’t humane.

Context matters

I saw a video of a reporter, or at least someone holding a microphone, whose whole trick was quoting something and asking people whether Trump or Hitler had said it.

If you’re a friend, or at least follow this blog, you know I’m not fond of Trump. I don’t care for him. I believe he shows some intelligence sometimes, but I also believe he’s mentally unstable and isn’t fit to be the most powerful person in the world.

But that trick by the reporter is just a dirty, misleading move. Quoting something out of context, then making someone look bad because they agreed with it without knowing what it actually meant, is not right.

Let’s imagine there’s this quote: “this is our path to a better world, to a beautiful world, and to a world with no suffering and no harm to humanity.”

This is a beautiful quote, isn’t it? If Abraham Lincoln said it, we’d guess it’s about freeing slaves and ending a horrible time in history. If Hitler said it, we’d guess it’s about killing millions of people, committing genocide, and bringing back slavery. Out of context, I would approve of that quote. But knowing Hitler said it, I’d refuse to believe anything good could come out of it.

Context matters. If a gangster says “let’s cut him up,” it’s probably to murder someone. If a surgeon says it, it’s most likely to save someone’s life. So please stop ruining people’s lives because you heard something out of context, or because something they did was shown to you without any context at all.

This trick works because our minds often react to words before we stop to think about who said them and why. Any journalist, or honestly anyone with an agenda, can use it on anyone, for any goal. So next time someone tries to convince you that a person is good or bad based on a single line taken from somewhere, ask yourself what came before it and what came after. That one question can save you from being fooled.

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Two days before the end of the world, he suddenly realized he had never truly lived.

His calendar was full, except for two untouched days.

He panicked. Restless and furious, he went to the angel of death to ask god for more days.

He shouted and cursed. He raged at the heavens and the earth. He screamed and made a scene.

The angel remained silent.

He clung desperately to the angel. He blasphemed and threw away his prayer rug. Then his heart broke, he wept, and he fell onto the prayer rug.

This time, the angel broke the silence and said: “Know this, you have just lost another day! Only one day remains. Come, at least live this one.”

Through his sobs he whispered, “But with one day… what can anyone possibly do in one day?”

The angel said: “The one who tastes the joy of living a single day has lived a thousand years. And the one who does not understand today, a thousand years will not help him.”

Then the angel poured the share of one day’s life into his hands and said: “Now go. Live.”

He stood there, stunned, staring at life glowing in the hollow of his palms. But he was afraid to move, afraid to walk. What if a drop of life slipped through his fingers?

He stood still for a moment. Then he thought: “When I have no tomorrow, what is the point of saving this life? Let me spend this handful of it.”

And so he began to run. He splashed life over his face, he drank it, he breathed it in. And he was filled with such ecstasy that he felt that he could run to the edge of the world, step on the sun, and beyond…

That day, he did not build a skyscraper. He did not own land. He did not gain status, but…

In that single day, he lay on the grass. He watched a ladybug.

He lifted his head and saw the clouds. He greeted strangers. He prayed sincerely for those who did not love him.

In that one day, he reconciled. He laughed. He felt light. He enjoyed. He overflowed. He forgave. He loved. He let go. And it was complete.

He lived that one day.

But in god’s calendar, the angels wrote: “he passed away, the one who had lived a thousand years.“

Erfan Nazarahar