While happiness might need reason, life doesn’t. I find that, in a way, we live in a probabilistic universe with enough attractors that allowed things to form. Among them were humans, now also building some things with/against the odds, and subsequent self-image/sense of importance.

You can still suspend thinking about the inevitability of death and inherent lack of meaning to feel or create something. It does require one to choose and get comfortable making choices that are beyond right and wrong (not in a moral sense), however.

I don’t know if there is one answer for why people can still feel happy despite it all, and I suspect there will be different reasons. One reason could be that they’ve just accepted the futility, focusing on what makes them happy. Or maybe they’ve accepted that pursuing universality/objectivism when it comes to subjective things is impossible. Or maybe even that no matter which option one takes to view life, one cannot escape delusions.

I wrote my MSc. thesis using Texmaker, and I’ve dabbled a bit with TeXstudio. I’m partial to Texmaker simply because of how easy it was to integrate bibliography and dictionaries, spin up code snippets/templates, customize build flows, debug errors, and embed different image types.

You can experiment with a few editors if you like. Ultimately, it’s the one that you feel most comfortable that will work best because the code is the same.

Happy writing!

WPS Office is the closest to the MS suite, and I believe now it’s available on both Windows and Mac.

If you’re interested in technical academic writing that supports math and robust formatting in particular, LaTeX is still the top of the line. It has a bit of a learning curve, but better for documents that require more control on formatting involving equations, images/figures, advanced paragraph forms, etc.