Category: Happiness

People’s worries are endless. “My mother didn’t love me.” “I try to do too much.” “My husband isn’t attracted to me.”  “I’m a success but I’m still alone.” “I can’t leave my house.” “So and so at work avoids me.”

Jerry Seinfeld and a comedian pal were riffing about what happens during most psychotherapy sessions. They speculated on the best  advice the therapist could offer, concluding the best response a therapist should usually give at the end of a session was, “Snap out of it!”

Andy Warhol supposedly said that sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what?”

The vast majority of most lives will be boring and not noteworthy. It’s normal and it’s okay. So “Snap out of it.” might be good advice. Or maybe try similar ideas like: move on, so what, or just drop it.

Marcus Aurelius said that you have power over your mind but not external events. If you can abide by that,  you’ll be able to go through life less perturbed.

Not everyone has the privilege of saying “Snap out of it, move on, or so what?” in every situation, but changing your perception about things you have little control over is a powerful tool.

There’s a NYT article called “The Tyranny of Convenience” by Tim Wu which I’ve conveniently shortened here.

Convenience seems to decide for us, overriding  what we imagine are our true preferences. It’s like saying, “I prefer brewing my coffee, but Starbucks instant coffee is so convenient that I hardly ever do what I prefer.”

Americans say they prize competition, lots of choices, and the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience. Through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit, the easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes – and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon.

Making things easier isn’t wicked and it makes our lives less arduous. But given the growth of convenience as a way of life, it’s worth asking what it’s doing to us and to our country.

Created to free us, convenience can become a constraint by erasing the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it?

The invention of “convenience foods,”  the electric clothes-washing machines, cleaning products, and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven could be considered convenience milestones.

Sometimes our humanity is expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Maybe that’s why there’ve always been those who resist it, resisting out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves and to live with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables. But such things were seen to have value.

Now in the second wave of convenience technologies, convenience is about personal preference with no effort. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election seems irritating. Convenient has even trumped free – the iTunes store made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it.

We can’t deny making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It’s also about how we face up to situations thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks, the struggles that help make us who we are.

What happens to human experience when so many obstacles, requirements, and preparations have been removed?

Convenience is all destination and no journey. Not always, but we need to  embrace the inconvenient more. Because struggle isn’t always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as that. We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or a runner pushing through pain. Such activities take time.

We shouldn’t forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy.

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.

A long time ago I read about how to refer to a woman who hadn’t experienced an orgasm. She wasn’t “non-orgasmic,”  she was merely  “pre-orgasmic.”

The implication being that the pre-orgasmic woman can, at some point, have one through practice and the right setting.

Sex and meditation are different, but are there any overlaps? Through meditation some people experience heightened sensory states while others just experience an awareness of their thoughts and feelings. So I starting wondering if the second group of meditators might be thought of as meditative version of a pre-orgasmic woman? Maybe with enough time and practice will the big wow, altered states happen?

In meditation, I don’t know if the euphoric sensations are vital, because reaching beneficial altered traits is lasting and more important the temporary altered states.

If a pre-orgasmic woman never had an orgasm before she died but she actually enjoyed sex and felt bonded with her partner, would she have had an unfulfilled life? What’s more important, headlines or trend lines?

Meditation is more often underwhelming because, for me, it’s mostly a sub-perceptual result, but one that accumulates.

You’ll rarely know what states a meditator reaches because the outcome is  internal and personal.

Over the past 2,500 years, Buddhists and others have charted many common mile markers for the inner lives of meditators. But the only real way to verify these altered states and traits is by monitoring a meditator’s brainwaves in a lab.

I don’t know what Steve Jobs level of meditative attainment was, but he said this, “If you just sit and observe, you’ll see how restless your mind is… over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.”

Someone once said, “The task isn’t so much to see what no one has seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, concerning that which everybody sees.”

Think about this, you could do Richard Branson’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s just doing stuff most people could do at work.

His real job is seeing new opportunities, making good decisions, and understanding connections between his audience, his brand, and his ventures.

You could do Warren Buffett’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s just reading in his modest office in Omaha. He doesn’t take a lot of meetings or micro-manage his managers.

Once in a while though, he pushes a huge pile of chips across the table  making mostly successful investments in opportunities he sees.

You could do Dave Chappelle’s job, most of the time. Most of the time he’s hanging out in Ohio observing life.

But now and then, he walks out on a stage in front of hundreds of people and has to be funny.

How many more of these folks are out there but haven’t been able to realize there potential because of racism, sexism, and disproportional wealth distribution? Unfortunately, creativity is more broadly distributed than the opportunity to put it to use.

What’s great about this country is that America became the place where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. A Coke is a Coke. You can’t get you a better Coke, all Cokes are the same. Beyonce knows it, the President knows it, the bum on the corner knows it, and you know it.

But what are the tapeworms of the American system? What’s stifling economic competitiveness and impeding a better sense of  American well-being? Workers struggling to make ends meet are a drag on the economy is one. So are opportunities to advance missed because you’re the wrong color, sex, or you’re too poor.

I just saw Dave Chappelle in a routine talking about the problem in the spotlight now – men abusing their power over women (and girls). Dave pointed out that the real problem is systemic not necessarily just bad people.

One point Dave made was, what about rewarding people who come forward to report a wrong or take a stance against something wrong instead of often punishing them? Not everyone has the fortitude or status to come forward, but if more people did and were rewarded for it, the problems wouldn’t be able to fester and hurt more people.

One example Dave gave was how a new South Africa tried to resolve the problem of apartheid by having folks from both sides of the old system come forward and recount their stories. The aim was showing that the system was deeply flawed and the people in it were acting in ways that were promoted by that system.

It comes down to this, if you knew everything about a system and you’d be willing to join in a random place then it’s a fair system. I know it’s not realistic to think 300 and something million hairless monkeys can create a system that fair, but we can do better. Action expresses priorities.

Try to keep things simple. For example, find out what you aren’t good at and don’t do that. Or, from Warren Buffett, “Rule #1: Never lose money. Rule #2: Never forget rule #1.”

It boils down to trying to see the situation clearly and not making mistakes.

Believing that people use reasoning when making important decisions sometimes leads to disappointment. Here’s situation I read somewhere:

“If you play a slot machine long enough, eventually you’ll…what?” The whole group yelled out “WIN!” Well actually, everyone’s a loser in the long run, except for the casino.

They confused the benefits of persistence with the actual odds of succeeding.

It’s the same thing for folks playing the lottery, it’s a loser’s game made for people who’re bad at math.

Try to figure out if the game is rigged, and if you’re good, or not, at playing that game.