Stoicism and Happiness

Irvine makes a convincing case that the ancient Stoics, far from being humorless individuals who silently suffered a life of privation and discomfort, were actually curious scholars and experimenters who sought to optimize their appreciation of life. Not only that, says Irvine, there’s a lot that we moderns can learn from the Stoics about living a joyful life.

To achieve such a life the Stoics developed, in the words of historian Paul Veyne, a “paradoxical recipe for happiness,” that included the practice of “negative visualization.” By frequently and vividly imagining worst-case scenarios — the death of a child, financial catastrophe, ruined health — the Stoics believed you would learn to appreciate what you have, and curb your insatiable appetite for more material goods, social status, and other objects of desire.

Irvine’s explanations of how the early Stoics dealt with insults, grief, lust, jealousy, anger, the desire for fame and fortune, aging, and death show that these problems are timeless, and the Stoics’s methods for dealing with them are equally timeless.

How To Be Alone

Why Money Makes You Unhappy

Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savoring ability to be impaired—simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/happiness-and-money-2/#ixzz0udfd1u9i

One Big Brain

Not many people tend to elaborate on this aspect when considering the impact of technology on modern life. Nice to see someone focus on the big picture:

To begin with, note that the new technologies, though derided by some of these skeptics for eroding the simple social bonds of yesteryear, are creating new social bonds. We’re not just being lured away from kin and next-door neighbors by machines; we’re being lured away by other people — people on Facebook, people in our inbox, people who write columns about giant superorganisms.

On balance, technology is letting people link up with more and more people who share a vocational or avocational interest. And it’s at this level, the social level, that the new efficiencies reside. The fact that we don’t feel efficient — that we feel, as Carr puts it, like “chronic scatterbrains” — is in a sense the source of the new efficiencies; the scattering of attention among lots of tasks is what allows us to add value to lots of social endeavors. The incoherence of the individual mind lends coherence to group minds.

When you first realize you are a geek

And still, I went. We got there at 9:15 and joined a growing mass of like-minded nerds. Some of us skipped out on proms, others escaped from bedrooms, while others still were dodging house arrest. But we waited the three hours until showtime as unified as the Mongol hordes. Given that I didn’t hit a comic book convention proper until decades later, this was the first time I’d felt the kinship of a geek crowd. Sure, the public at large would see Batman over the course of that opening weekend, or the balance of the summer…but we few, we happy few, we came because we wanted to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.

I’d found my band of brothers and never looked back.

Why I’m Not Busy Anymore

Great post from Stephen at The Rat Race Trap.

Imagine an office.  Compare and contrast two employees.

One of them has a to-do list of hundreds of tasks.  She is constantly on the go with phone calls, emails, instant messages, and meetings.  She moves at 100 mph, barely stopping to breathe.  She comes in early, works through lunch, and leaves late.  She’s always connected  and working issues when out of the office.  She is definitely “busy”.

The other employee casually and calmly walks in around 9:00 AM.  He spends a bit of time chatting with some of his co-workers.  Then he quietly sits down and concentrates on some work.  He doesn’t go to any meetings.  At 11:45 AM he opens his email and spends a few minutes answering them and makes a few notes.  At 12:00 PM he wraps up for the day and leaves.  He doesn’t seem to be “busy”.

In a modern corporation the second person would probably be fired while the first would be considered an extremely valuable employee.  Most people knowing nothing else would probably strongly prefer the first over the second as she demonstrates hard work and extraordinary dedication.  In my former days I would have done the same.

Now I think differently about all this.  Nowadays, knowing nothing else I would choose the second.  The first employee may be “busy”, but that doesn’t mean she’s doing valuable or important work.  In fact her busyness may be disrupting other people and preventing them from doing important work.  The second employee may be a game changer.  The fact that somebody works 15 hours a day means nothing.  What matters is what they create, not how many things they do.  One good idea is worth more than 1,000 trivial completed tasks.

A Problem of Excess and Distribution

Just like the global level hunger is largely a problem of distribution rather than production (we currently have enough food available to feed the world’s population), the problem of economic and psychological malaise many of our communities are experiencing may be a problem of distribution rather than supply. If we pulled together available resources at the local level, particularly leveraging surplus currently available within our organizations, we could do a lot to improve our local economies. We can also improve psychological well being in our communities by turning up levels of giving and by increasing connectedness within our communities. And this, according to Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis”, is one of the main contributors to happiness. Haidt points out that, “We are, like bees: our lives only make full sense as members of a larger hive, or as cells in a larger body. Yet in our modern way of living we’ve busted out of the hive and flown out on our own, each one of us free to live as we please. Most of us need to be part of a hive in some way, ideally a hive that has a clearly noble purpose.”

Serpico

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

It is, ultimately, a story of healing. He wandered in Europe and across North America, he said, because “I wanted to find my life.”

“I had gone through a near-death experience,” he explained, “and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what’s important.”

After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

Controlled Serendipity

I like the neologism.  This was one of the primary reasons I started this blog.

Late Night Television’s Real Underlying Problem

Consuming media in alternative ways seems to be the elephant in the room.  I imagine that Conan must have been especially affected, since the majority of his audience is young, tech-savvy and comfortable with consuming media via nontraditional outlets, such as Hulu.  When corporate executives are evaluating their performers, do they take this into consideration?  Comparing Leno to Conan is like comparing apples to oranges.  As traditional media’s influence continues to wane, perhaps we need to reconsider our definition of success.