7 Philosophical Questions to Help You Journal 

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🖋️📓Parker, you’re filling a huge gap on RU-vid. You created the channel I wish I had started! You’re like the little brother I never had. Amazing. Never stop!

🤔 Hey, ParkNotes, newbie to the journaling/pen and paper hobby here. I want to express how timely me discovering your videos has been. I lost my wife to metastatic breast cancer two weeks ago; and keeping a diary, commonplace book, journal, and reading log have really helped me through this time. Instead of easing the pain through doom-scrolling on social media or Netflix, I've decided to get really uncomfortable and face the tragedies of life head on by writing all of it down. Nothing will change the pain of losing my love, but the way of pen and paper has provided an outlet for me to grieve well. Thank you for your videos and the passion behind them!

You are making great changes in others' lives. Keep em comin. I would love if you could make a single dedicated video on just reading logs.

1. Is there a God? What is God? 2. What is truth? 3. Where did the universe come from and where is it going if anywhere? 4. What is the status of all of human nature? Are we special? 5. What's the meaning of life? Is there one? 6. What does it mean to live a good life? 7. What's wrong with the world and is there any hope?

📓🖋️ I've been writing some kind of "logs" for the last 5 years, what happened today, what I ate, some word I heard or songs, things like that. Excellent video as always!

Babe, wake up, a new ParkNotes video just dropped 📔

📓🖋🤔 I have had so many false starts over the years regarding 'journaling' of any sort, but I keep returning to it out of an inherent drive for analog recording and processing. It awakens something creative in me that is so alluring. Your videos have been really inspiring as I've started to cultivate a more robust and satisfactory journaling experience- thank you for sharing all this with us ❤

I've been watching you for over a year, genuinely one of my favourite youtubers. Keep making videos!

📓✒️I started back in early 2019 (because of Arthur Morgan) as a basic diary. It keep evolving and now has a calendar at the front, a to do at the back, a full permanent FYI section attached as a thin a5 supplement and there's a full set of index, futures based off Ryder's bullet system, Maurice move's project management system, as more of a flowchart, a separate monthly stat tracker based of Elsa Rhae's system, and basic formats of reflection and highlights. It's turned into my most important tool. I think that's the point. Just start slow and slowly start modifying your system based off what you need it to be

The video i was waiting/looking for so long!!

📓 just started journaling 3 weeks ago but I am really enjoying it. I’m trying to learn to reengage my brain actively, and your ParkNotes has been invaluable! Love your well thought out videos!

these questions are profound and so impactful, thank you for the video!!

📓 🖋️. Journaler here. I diary each day, usually before bed, to unpack my day and quiet my thoughts. I have a box full of Field Notes books and use them to parse out various life focuses. I ditched the digital variants and have found returning to paper and pen much better and much more focused. Plus I get to use my fountain pens more. I’ve journaled off and on ever the years but have gotten more focused with it in the last couple of years. Time to get the philosophical side of things more organized and these are great prompts. I fall more in the eastern philosophy/religion view of things but have never put these views in a cohesive, singular format. That starts today.

I journal and creative journal daily, but sometimes the day's exhaustion puts a block on what flows from pen to paper. Thanks for this! Adding it to my intentions list for July to help me navigate those blockages.

i don't (or can't keep) journal consistently, but i use it as a catharsis journal

🖋 Great video! Love your content. The set up with the outline right infront of you is so neat and clean. Your ability to help trigger people's creativity and learning growth is awesome. Thank you for what you do.

🖋 So the question I'm most interested in exploring is #4 on human nature. I've been reading a bit of St Augustine and his discussion of the state of nature and its inherent goodness that is then corrupted, and its something that resonated with me, so it's something I'll probably expound upon. I've really been spending more time doing this kind of thinking and your videos have helped a lot with that, I look forward to more, and will be implementing a lot of these things just to help me clear and center my mind, as these kind of deep thoughts help me refine my faith and the things I believe far better than any random teacher might. Thanks again!

📔 I did more journaling than writing a dairy, but now i try to do both, and your channel was major motivation for that. Keep up the good work!

Outstanding video @ParkerNotes! thanks. Grettings from Chile

🖋 Great video. I enjoy watching for more ideas on the journals I have.

🖋Journaler here, I usually use notebooks for different purposes, for example one for poetry and stuff like that, other one as a collection on some thoughts about things that occur to me, and a journal for everything like research, what i think about some stuff, a bit like using twitter

I would love to see you do a video on using a journaling Bible! It’ll be very fun to see how you think philosophically and theologically with the text of scripture

Thank you for the great prompts! 📓🖋️🤓

🖋 Definitely going to get my fountain pen primed and think through some of these questions. Great video idea!

FWIW, in the UK, a diary is just a planner/calendar.

📔 I somewhat fuse diary and journal. There are days when I'm just working with thoughts, then there are days where I write about events, then that takes me into thoughts and exploration. I have a couple different notebooks with different purposes to try and keep things from getting too mixed up or bogged down, but my pocket notebook catches a ton of stuff that is humorous to look back on. I'll have a note about serial killers for a story idea I have, then immediately after is my note about better phrasing for my thesis statement., for example. Otherwise, the larger notebooks have specific purposes. One notebook per class, for example. I also have a "drop in journal," which is basically the desk version of my pocket notebook. 🖋

📓 Very timely. I just started a fresh A5 notebook today with the intent on using it as a place for soliloquies, collected exegesis on various texts as they relate to my developing/evolving worldview, and meditations on how to approach epistemology in regards to it all. I've been trying to clarify what exactly I want to expound upon and the 7 questions gave me some great ideas. Perhaps that sounds like a lot, but to me those methods make sense as how I've attempted to tackle these questions haha.

Oh man I love your Chanel thanks for your content ❤📓📓📓

📓🖋 Love this video! Looking forward to re-watching and working my way through some (all!) of these prompts More like this please, especially with recommendations of stuff to read around each prompt. Thanks!

Great video. It got me thinking a bit more deeply about my faith. 🖋️

🤔🖋 I really like these prompts. Gonna use them as part of my routine.

Love this video. 🖋️

🖋 great content, thank you

GREAT VID!!!! 🖌

🤔 looking forward to the journey

🤔🤔🤔 I started my journal path thanks to your content 🤓

Thank you for this video. .🖊

📓🖋 Great content keep up the good work! Probably the one I will be pondering about more is "What is truth" - especially in the time of AI this is something fundamental we should reflect on.

🖊️ 📔 thanks! Your video today helped me finish my current commonplace book and gave me ideas to start my new journal.

📕Haven't made an entry since February but I guess I'm making one now. Started with logging workout sessions and then moved on to answering questions. Come to think of it, this journal has been used intermittently for a while now; I have entries dating back to 2015 and minimum 2 or 3 entries a year, with a few more some years than others. 🖋

Love the prompts! And just to be annoying (and maybe a little bit helpful).... I take it someone already brought this up, but following etymology, a 'journal' is a daily recount of events. The Daily News is called Journal in French and Journaal in Dutch. It comes from the French word Jour, which just means Day.

Thanks!

📓Have been experimenting a lot with both keeping a diary and writing a journal for the past year or so. I'm currently keeping a daily diary, a weekly journal/diary combo, and a separate journal for just random thought output without a set schedule. My dilemma is trying to balance them all, because I feel they all have a place in my life, but also can become a tad daunting to keep up with.

I'm still trying to get the hang of it and I've been journaling for about 3 years on and off so i need some tips😅📓

🤔 it’s been a few months but still learning!

Park is that pen that was just above your journal a fountain pen? Mont Blanc? Great video as always. You got me back into Philosophy after years of graduating with a collegr degree in Philosophy.

Great video parker Please make a video on book recommendations of year 2024 plzzz love from india

🖋Thanks Parker! I feel like majority of my world is framed by Thomistic metaphysics, so these are good questions to ask.

What pen is that above your notebook? I’m a bit of a pen geek so I like to know what others use.

Been journaling for almost two years 📓

The link to the book links to Cal Newport's Slow Productivity. Would appreciate if you could correct that! Planning to order the book via your link 😊. Huge fan from Thailand 🇹🇭!!

Great video! What notebook are you using? 🖋️

YES

I'm probably gonna be the weirdest one here, but I've been trying to find some pens that write well on certain textured paper, but I have been struggling to find the ones that I like. Not having a good pen makes me not want to write

The problem I have with most of these kinds of questions is that they are too vague for me to find any foundation for answering in any clear way. "What is truth" for example has no concrete context. Truth about what? "What is wrong with the world" Wrong according to what/who? What defines wrong objectively in this sense? And the question of free will is inherently and defeatedly paradoxical, because by its very concept each side begats the other mutually if you think about it (if you step outside your frame of individual perspective).

📓 Always got a notebook when watching these videos

My favorite prompt is Whst is truth?

📓✒️ My favorite question to answer is probably going to #1!

📓🖋📓🖋📓🖋... I guess you can say that I "journal". I've been writing down stuff. in college ruled spiral notebooks (*not* the pre-perforated kind) for 40+(?) years. I usually fill one up in 10-12 months or so. Mine are sort of a combination of 95% thoughts, ideas, questions, problems (and sometimes (proposed) solutions), "insights", etc. and 5% sort of "diary" of occasional history and/or overview and/or summary of memorable events/milestones/situations in my life and/or my family's I want to make a record of. I almost always pretty much only write stuff down in the morning during my "quiet time" with the Lord, reading my Bible, etc. ... Frequency is sometimes 5 or 6 pages at a time... sometimes 7-10+ days between entries, etc., etc. ... it's just however "fertile" and active my brain happens to be, etc. ....although sometimes if I have an idea, thought, insight, etc., etc. in the middle of the night, I have a legal pad in my bedside table I will write it down on. It is sometimes a struggle in the middle of the night because I don't want to wake myself up too much. The temptation is to tell myself I'll just go back to sleep, because I'll remember it in the morning.... but when I fail to write it down 99% of the time I have totally forgotten what it was the next morning, except that I had had a thought I failed to write down and have now forgotten possibly forever 😊 One of my big shortfalls is that I rarely go back and read what I wrote in my journals. Reading back over them (especially the more recent ones) is on a sort of mental to-do list... but I hardly ever get around to it. Those are very interesting questions... not sure which is my favorite... but in short... since I'm a Believer from the "reformed" tradition, I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that the answer to all these questions are found there... centering on Lord Jesus Christ and the Gospel. But you have piqued my interest, challenging me to articulate in detail exactly what I think about each question and why! Thanks for this and all your videos!

📓 + 🤔. I never feel like I am doing it right, and more scared of someone getting access to what I write

But does the mustache have a journal?

I am a passionate diary writer and i See the Same differences. A diary IS about what Happens in Life, what i feel and think, about people in Life and so on. I write diary now since 1992 when i was ten years and was able to write whole sentences 😂 But Journal IS Not Journal. Fir me the Most Channels about journaling are about making your own calendar. They Paint nice books with monthly weekly and daily fiews, habbits trackers and other stuff. That has nothing in Common with what you do.

🖋️great prompts

📓oh yeah!

🤔 I just dont know where to start. I feel like I am stuck in a loophole of people telling me how to journal on youtube. I keep klicking video after video, telling me how it works but it confuses me way more then it helps me actually ...

Wrong with the world? Depends on what you mean by wrong, which also depends on what you mean by right, or if right and wrong even exists.🤔 I tend to start with the philosophy of Nagajuna. While using evolutionary psychology and Quantum field theory as a filter.

🖋🤔 we're gonna organize this mind of mine

3 and 4 are not really mainly philosophical questions but just physics and anthropology (this is more complex Kuhn, ik). Where did the universe come from is an empirical phenomenon that can be studied. One could have a view about it, but that's futile given how the universe exists and works regardless of anyone's opinion (this is more complex Kant, ik). You cannot just meditate where the universe is going while there are methods to reliably find out. Leibnitz's question is indeed a valid one in philosophy, as opposed to "whare does the universe come from and where does it go". And instead of being answered by plain physics (which in part it does), it's mainly an epistemological topic. And on human nature, I guess outside of academia that question may sound valid, but then again, there are scientific answers and methods. Good and bad are historically constructed ideologies, not useful in analysis. The current status of anthropology and biology has a decent description of human ethology, altho not every scientist is up to date with the most accurate research. People could , and to be fair, people DO have a worldview on material topics, but pondering about reality is infantile when those answers can be systematically researched. Reality exists and works regardless of how humans think of it (this is more complex, ik Descartes). That being said, these questions are not a bad start point to question one's worldview if one has just started to question about things and study. But they are surpassed pretty quickly. PD: read Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy.

What does it mean to live a good life? Am I making a positive effort to live that life? ✒️

Lately I've been exploring the futility of thought and why it's ultimately pointless.

🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️ very helpful video, I'm rating it 5/5 Monteblanc pens.

Fountain pen emoji

A diary is what happens to me everyday when I eat dairy and I get diarrhea

As for the distinction between journal and diary, the definition for journal literally uses the word diary - "a daily record of news and events of a personal nature; a diary." Plus a journalist would be someone whose job more aligns with your given definition of diary, although in a news capacity rather than personal. But maybe I disagree with your distinction between the two for the reason you brought up. Diary does have the connotation of being something for teenage girls. Maybe I should journal about this and get to the bottom of it...

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📒🤔 🖋️ Somewhere in between

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As a note on the first question, you mention several options of views on "God", but not once did you seem to entertain the possibility of there being more than one God. The very way the question is formulated presupposes monotheism and it's offshoots of pantheism, panentheism, deism, as well as atheism. But not polytheïsm. So here's some follow-up questions for you, Parker, and anyone else watching this video, to follow the first question up with: - Is there *only one* God? Why or why not? - If there is not just one but many Gods, how does/would that impact the rest of my worldview?

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we don’t have any books 📚 or library 📚 in Libya 🇱🇾 😢😢😢😢

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