Alright, I'm doing this.

Well, I've thought for some time that I needed to start a blog. With my tendency to spew rants on Facebook, and elsewhere, which can take me hours to compose and are read by maybe ten people, it makes sense to concentrate some of those rants into one place instead. I've dragged my feet on making this blog, mostly because I couldn't think of a name for it that suited me until now.

I've chosen "Step Back and Look Again..." because it summarizes what I've been doing for the past decade, the past three years in particular, that has led me to the place I am now. When I turned eighteen, some thirteen years ago, I had a very narrow view of things. A change in circumstances gave me the opportunity to change that and begin to expand my own awareness of the world around me. As I did so, I found many of the ideas I held to so confidently began to crumble as they were put to the test by others and by real world situations. I also discovered that I had a very bad weakness of letting others pressure and influence me, which made me very manipulable and caused me a great many problems.

However, internally I was asking many questions and probing the ideas others pushed on me from different perspectives. My doubts and frustrations reached critical mass about three years ago due to a situation involving some particularly overbearing individuals, and where my wife was dragged into the mess as well. She gave me the push I needed to put my foot down once and for all. Since then, I have very purposely been stepping back and reexamining everything I thought I knew, and on every subject matter.

I have found myself very dissatisfied with the answers most people give when posed with questions on philosophy, ethics, politics, economics, religion, and even many practical matters. There is often wisdom to be taken from their answers, yet I usually find them incomplete in their scope and perspective and contaminated with subjective interpretations. What I intend to do here is to take a step back and look at things with as much objectivity and as broad a perspective as I can manage with my own limited knowledge and capabilities. I don't want to tell people what to think, per se. There are plenty of people out there doing that already, and the last thing I want is for someone to blindly take me at my word. But if I can expand people's perspective, including my own, and get them to think for themselves instead of picking from the usual multiple-choice list of answers, I will be happy with that.

I am a random person with many irons in the fire, so my topics will likely change often, and don't expect an update schedule. I'm experimenting here to see how this goes. So, if I have caught your interest, check back now and then and see what happens...