[ Travelling | Projects | Goncharenko centre, events by Wouter and Vlad

Talks/discussions at the Goncharenko centre, Kremenchuk (UA)

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My original goal was to only have 1 talk/discussion about my "list of life", especially about not worrying, not being afraid, not being angry and using negative emotions as signals to change your thinking, and to get feedback on whether explaining how it works, works. The feedback on the topic was positive and people were interested in more meetings about various topics (also non-psychological). The first meeting was co-organised with Vlad (in particular creating questionnaires for the interactive part), he created and organised the 2nd half of meeting 2 (2025-3-23) about suggesting places to visit in Ukraine, translates where needed.

Even if you did not attend the past meetings, you can read through the talks and post-event notes and possibly use the insights/discussions to understand people, understand life and perhaps change something in your life. In essence these talks/discussions are a self-help course...

Keep in mind in your life

Each time you worry, have regrets or see something as a 'problem', think back to the statements below, and after some time you start to change your mindset, and you will not worry any more and you will not see 'problems' as being negative:

For more details see talk 1 (2025-3-16).

List of events:

Events to come:

In the Goncharenko centre in Lviv (address: вул. Шевська, 12 (ТЦ Vernissage Lviv Mall, третій поверх))

Events that were organised (note that comments in blue are added after the meeting as an addition or clarification):

Goncharenko centre 2025-3-16 Goncharenko centre 2025-3-23

Possible future topics, suggestions?

I will take input, suggestions on any topic, but first have a look at these, are these of interest?

  1. finalising a discussion on AI, philosophical aspects such as whether it is needed, what jobs it could replace and the similarity with discussions about automation in factories from the 1980s.
  2. 2nd part of discussing "Man's search for meaning" (1946) the part of after the release from the camp + the play at the end of the book with Kant, Socrates, Spinoza
  3. Discussing the book "Essentialism", Greg McKeown I think we dealt with this enough in 2 meetings, it is not interesting enough.
  4. Discussing the book: "A guide to the good life", William Irvine, about "Stoic philosophy" This book is so stupid, it is waste of time to discuss it, just read my review (see the link in the notes about the meeting of 2025-9-28).
  5. Discussing Antoine de St.Exupery's book "The little prince" which is a book that puts into question many things that grown ups do not question. In that sense it is not a children's book...
  6. A suggestion: scams in religion/churches + people begging for money, do they really need money or is it for them a 'job'? We talked a bit about this in the meeting of 2025-9-28.

  7. A discussion/analysis of articles or youtube videos: to analyse whether the reasoning makes sense in the articles/videos and the comments. This can be about any topic, attendees can suggest articles or videos to analyse, such as about the relationships between men and women, or about behaviour of people in society, analysis of crime videos, and so on. Example: I read an article about a psychopath called 'Patric Gagne', which to me was clearly a justification for being anti-social (similar to how Ayn Rand's books, and the films based upon them, "Fountainhead" and "Atlas shrugged" are justifications for anti-social behaviour). I could only laugh and be disgusted at the same time about this attempt at ego-boosting/wanting to be accepted, of that woman. I can give the full reasoning for how I deduce what doesn't make sense and how I understand what she is trying to do. This type of analysis will help you to analyse and understand yourself why people say certain things, and what of it is true.

  8. Cycling related topics:

  9. The essence and the point of religion: Useful, useless? Atheists do not understand the value and importance of religion, and religious people don't understand the essence of religion. Further what should be known is about groups that do meditation, cults, that often their influence is negative despite idealistic views. Why is this? What about Jehova's witnesses, or the Amish (farm communities who live mostly without technology) in the USA?

  10. How to deal with jealousy.

  11. Why self-help book authors and groups doing meditation, do not, or cannot properly explain the 'living in the now' and not worrying/not seeing problems as problems.

  12. Healthy food. Done 2025-4-13.

  13. I talked about this in some topics but more detail: The method to become more self-aware, thinking about your thinking.

  14. Travelling without making plans. I did this since 2013. My first trip to Ukraine in 2012 was a bit of a mess, I had to make changes, and decided to cut the trip short and fly back to NL after about 10 days instead of a longer original reservation. Then in 2013 I just decided to only book a trip to Kiev, and reserve an apartment for 4 days. The rest of the trip, all decisions on where to go and which hotels to stay, I did on my trip (I only used booking.com at that time), which meant thinking each day about whether to stay or continue in a city, I asked people working in hotels and hostels for suggestions of places, cities to visit, etc. This was in a way already not worrying (about whether hotels would have free rooms etc.)...

  15. Something very different: Why I use FreeBSD, not windows, not Linux, on my PCs. Advantages and disadvantages of using a unix type operating system on your computer. Possibly also about computer games , emulation of old systems using Dosbox, or even virtual systems running different operating systems.

  16. Suggestion by Nina: These fit well with my 1st talk and I deal with parts of these topics in my expanded list of life (version 2).

  17. Applying the "list of life", so how to live life meaningfully, but now applied to relationships: Friendships, family, dating, people in your work place, etc. -> This was the topic of the talk/discussion on 2025-3-30

Does anyone have other ideas for interesting topics?

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Copyright W.H.Scholten, 2025. To contact me you can email or send a message via telegram (via phone +31648816383), or via vk.com (https://vk.com/w.h.scholten, which I don't really use but I will get notified of messages from there).

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