Here’s the 8th of 8 posts this September highlighting five random pointers or ideas I’ve come across over the years.
They’re from print or are things I’ve overheard. Each one stands alone and they aren’t in any order of importance. I feel that without attributions, each pointer is more impactful and useful. Because they ring true, they don’t need a known name for validation, plus I’ve often modified the wording to make it more clear to me.
– Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well being. You don’t see many impatient poor people.
– What does the resistance to different stuff generated by our lizard brain feel like? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless. Now, we live in a consumer culture acutely aware of this unhappiness and uses its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it, by selling us a product, a drug, a distraction.
– You can determine how your life plays out by deciding where you live.
– The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society. In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake.
– What upsets people is not things themselves, it’s their judgments about things. For example, take the insults from others. Treat them like the barks of a dog. When a dog barks, you make a mental note that the dog appears to dislike you, but you’d be a fool to get upset by it.