My Top Ten Blog Posts of 2020

2020 has been quite the year. It’s been full of hardships and hurdles for all of us, and I have the feeling that it’s made us all a little crazy as a result. But one of the highlights of this year was my weekly blog. I like to think that my whimsical words brought something insightful and joyful every week.

But which are the best? That’s a tough question. I like all of my blog posts. However, looking back, few stand out above the rest. In this post, I’m going to highlight them. These are my top ten favorite blog posts I wrote in 2020.

10. Returning to Wholesomeness in Troubling Times

Judging by the number of comments, this post was certainly popular. However, I only meant it as a bit of commentary on an article written in a British tabloid. Though it was funny and insightful, I felt like I didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Much of the essay consists of me quoting the Guardian article!

But despite this, I can see why people liked this article. The beginning of the lockdowns was a trying time for many. They disrupted people’s lives. This blog post took something negative and put a positive spin on it. In this blog post, I managed to take something very negative and put a positive spin on it. The lockdowns might be inconvenient, but they could make something wholesome and uplifting.

9. What I Like About Teaching

One of the things I talk about on my blog is myself. Since we live in a society that emphasizes the personal, my blogs often carry an autobiographical quality to them. Or, in plain English, I talk about myself a lot on this blog. That said, I’d rather talk about the things that I’m interested in besides myself. But there are ways of doing both. For instance, when I talk about my aspirations.

Teaching is one of the things I aspire to do for a living. It’s a job that requires a great deal of empathy and patience, but the results are rewarding. As a teacher, you get to build young minds. To teach someone and have them go on to succeed in life warms the heart. “I did that,” you think. “I helped that person succeed.” Having that level of influence on someone is a reward in itself. Doing something like that by monologuing about the things you’ve learned is a dream come true. Sign me up!

Someday, I’ll become a teacher, though it seems like a far-off goal now. Given the current state of things, I’d rather establish some financial stability first. But I’m moving closer toward it every time I get together with my younger cousin to help him with his math homework.

8. Why I Love Writing

If teaching is my aspiration, then writing is my favorite hobby and passion. I write a lot of essays and stories on my computer, but most of them will never see the light of day. As such, I had to include this essay as one of my top ten blog posts of 2020.

Few people think of writing as an art, but it is. The written word (especially the hand-written word) is a thing of beauty. You can tell a beautiful essay from an ugly one by its technical quality, how it flows, the word choice, the style. But besides these technical details, the entire point of writing is to convey ideas. In fictional works, you convey a story that has a plot and characters. In non-fiction works, you either describe or argue for something. Either one requires a grasp of ideas that cannot be described as anything but artful.

7. Reflections on 9/11, Nineteen Years Later

This essay summarized my feelings about America and patriotism. To me, being patriotic to your country is like loving your family – it doesn’t matter if your country is “the best” by objective measurement. Would you trade your mother for some other woman proven to be “the best mom”? Nobody with a loving family would. I feel the same about America. Though being patriotic might be a contentious position in our day and age, it’s something I stand by.

This essay also contains the kind of social critique that I use in my blog from time-to-time. While I dislike politics, I like talking about social issues and suggesting alternatives to what we have now. Bin Laden, too, was a social critic, if an evil one. To refute his ideas, we must spill ink, not blood. That’s another reason why I wrote this essay six days after September 11, 2020.

6. You Are Your Body

Philosophy may not be my major, but it’s certainly one of the things I’m passionate about. I’ve read a lot of it because it helps me to understand the world. I’ve learned many things about it, but one of the most salient things I learned was the reality of hylemorphism – the belief that the form of an object existed in the object itself rather than in a Platonic “third realm.” Aristotelians believed that the soul relates to the body this way, so the soul and the body are one substance.

This is the kind of thing I like to do. I love to take complicated issues in philosophy, break them down, and apply them to real-life circumstances. I suppose part of this is the teacher in me. But another part is the sheer exercise of it. An intelligent person should be able to break down hard ideas and explain them to a layman. There is no greater test of intellect.

5. Shoe on the Other Foot

History is another one of my passions, one that I studied in school. The fun thing about history is that it provides new perspectives on problems in the here and now. By reading the writings of someone who lived 100 or 200 or even 2,000 years ago, you can better understand the mindset of people who lived in that period.

History is the greatest tool for someone who wants to think outside the box. Whenever some notion or idea seems impossible to do without, history can expand the limits on our imaginations. The human mind is often constrained by the particular time and places it inhabits. This makes outside perspectives all the more important. The voices of the past are the most reliable in this regard; they made the mistakes so that we don’t have to.

4. “It’s a Social Thing”

This article was one that I wanted to write from the very beginning. Autism has shaped my experiences of the world for a long time, for better or for worse. I’ve always seen the world differently than others do for that reason. That is why I drift into social criticism. While the average person picks up customs, mores, and habits through instinct, the autist must learn them through painstaking effort.

As an analytically-minded boy, I found myself scrutinizing every aspect of ordinary life. How does this “society” thing work? What’s the logic behind it? What I found is that society has its own, internal logic, a “social logic” if you will. This social logic is pre-rational, so “reasoning” according to it will not win you points in an Oxford debate. Yet this is the way societies tend to operate. Any social critic must understand social logic, else his social criticism will fall flat.

3. Thank You for Your Service!

Judging by the comment section, this blog post was perhaps my most popular one, and it’s easy to see why. To celebrate Veteran’s Day, I poured my energy into writing this essay defending the virtues of soldiery. Virtue ethics is my guiding philosophy of life, so for me at least, the soldier is admirable. The virtue that I yearn for more is discipline, a virtue any good soldier has in spades. Emulating the soldier in this way would improve the lives of many young people.

Besides this, I wanted to honor all the soldiers that served in times past, including family members of mine that served in the military. It’s part of my patriotism, I suppose. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to take them for granted.

2, Five Ways Gratitude Has Made Me a Better Person

For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine life without gratitude. Even acknowledging someone with a “thank you” can make his day. More to the point, gratitude allows us to recognize that much of our life relies on other people. How can we love our fellow man if we don’t recognize his contributions to society?

It is this gratitude that inspires me to do kind things for others. I offer my parents help with housework out of gratitude for raising me. I offer my friends help out of gratitude for their friendship and loyalty. I’m convinced that the world would be a lot better place if everyone were grateful for the things and people that make life worth living.

1. For Love of Nanny

This is my most heartfelt piece. I wrote this essay from the heart, as it were. It’s especially poignant given the context. Though I mentioned in the piece that she was sick, what I didn’t mention there was that what she had was fatal. Nanny died a few months ago, something that deeply saddened my entire family. This year was the first Christmas I ever had without her.

This blog post was my dedication to her. Even if she wasn’t going to be in this world for long, her memory will live on in my heart and the hearts of my readers. I wanted to share my best memories of her with the world. Rereading that old post lifts my spirits, and I hope it does for you all as well.

I hope that this year, 2021, will be a great year for my blog and all its dear readers. Thank you all for your kind comments and support.