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Happiness Ideas

Government as a logistical ally

A recent NYT article about a young American couple living in Finland provides some interesting observations. Here’re some highlights.

When capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe and when all citizens have a stake in high-quality public institutions, it’s amazing how well government can get things done.

Nordic nations as a whole, including a majority of their business elites, have arrived at a simple formula: Capitalism works better if employees get paid decent wages and are supported by high-quality, democratically accountable public services that enable everyone to live healthy, dignified lives and to enjoy real equality of opportunity for themselves and their children. For us, that has meant an increase in our personal freedoms and our political rights — not the other way around.

Nordic capitalists are not dumb. They know that they will still earn very handsome financial returns even after paying their taxes. They keep enough of their profits to live in luxury, wield influence and acquire social status. There are several dozen Nordic billionaires. Nordic citizens are not dumb, either. If you’re a member of the robust middle class in Finland, you generally get a better overall deal for your combined taxes and personal expenditures, as well as higher-quality outcomes, than your American counterparts — and with far less hassle.

Why would the wealthy in Nordic countries go along with this? Some Nordic capitalists actually believe in equality of opportunity and recognize the value of a society that invests in all of its people. But there is a more prosaic reason, too: Paying taxes is a convenient way for capitalists to outsource to the government the work of keeping workers healthy and educated, liberating businesses to focus on what they do best: business.

Even well-positioned Americans now struggle under debilitating pressures, and a majority inhabit a treacherous Wild West where poverty, homelessness, medical bankruptcy, addiction and incarceration can be just a bit of bad luck away. Americans are told that this is freedom and that it is the most heroic way to live.

Again, when capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe, life gets better for everyone. Fins report extraordinarily high levels of life satisfaction. And for the second year in a row, Finland is ranked as the happiest country on earth.

 

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Happiness Health Ideas

Secondhand Therapy

Someone on twitter asked people in therapy to chime in with a piece of advice from therapy they found helpful. Here’re a bunch of different ideas in no real order.

Take care of your body during times of crisis and it will take care of you.

He may not always love me the way I want him to, but he’s loving me the best he knows how.

When you say “I feel that this action was inconsiderate” the other person can’t say you don’t feel that way.

Society doesn’t need to be the one setting your schedule. Eat breakfast at 11, go to bed at 1am. There’s no correct mold to fit, just find whatever works best for you.

The problem is you’re thinking rationally when dealing with somebody who’s irrational.

You’re not responsible for how anyone feels or reacts when you’ve done the right thing and are acting in kindness. The pain is on their shoulders.

You’re responsible for your actions, not others’ reactions.

Every time you resist feeling an emotion it goes down to the basement to lift weights.

Other people having it worse does not make your pain any less real, someone else’s broken ankle doesn’t mean yours isn’t sprained.

If you can imagine the worst thing, you can imagine the best thing. Both things are imaginary. Say out loud the positive outcome, repeat until it feels more real.

Honesty without tact is cruelty.

When you have a negative thought think…
Is it true?
Is it helpful?
Is it inspiring?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?

Don’t attempt to understand why a dysfunctional person does what they do. Dysfunction has no logic behind it.

Relationships are as subject to the sunk cost fallacy as anything else. They shouldn’t be held onto at all costs simply because they’re long standing. No matter how good it once was or for how long, if it’s not serving you any more (or has become toxic) it’s okay to end it.

Never compare yourself to other people and even more importantly never compare yourself to fantasy versions of how your life would’ve turned out had you made a different choice. That’s the most dangerous mind game of all.

Thoughts aren’t facts.

Stop trying to make people happy who clearly prefer to be miserable.

Best response to bullies/teasing is to just shrug and honestly say “I’m sorry you feel that way.” And just keep on going.

You’re not responsible for the version of you that they created in their mind.

Tell people when they upset you instead of hoping they will notice your changed behavior towards them

Every child in a family has a different childhood.

Imagine Narcissists as a flower vase with no bottom. No matter how much water (praise) you fill it with, it’ll never be full. No matter how much you do or say, it’ll never be enough. You cannot fix them and they will just keep taking and never love you.

Listen to what people say but watch what they do.

The question that finally got me out of a toxic relationship: “Why do you have to be responsible for managing someone else’s disappointment?”

The only things I owe people are straightforwardness and kindness

You can’t spend all your time thinking of things in the far future. When you drive a car you have to be mindful of the destination but focus on what’s in front of you. If you look too far ahead, you’ll rear end someone.

For intrusive thoughts and rumination: schedule a short daily time to allow it, and when the thought comes into your head just put it off until that time. Eventually you may forget to do your daily ruminating and it just passes.

Pre-verbal trauma cannot be healed with talk therapy. Touch is the way to work with the parts of your nervous system that are traumatized and that are also too young to have narrative memory or words.

When people are abused by someone they love, they don’t stop loving that person. They stop loving themselves.

Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.

Stop asking the question “Why” when you can’t understand someone’s motivation. There’s no answer. Stop expecting something someone does not have to give.

My big one was my therapist telling me “you’re not a little kid anymore.”  I have control.

If the person you love most in the world (best friend, child, parent, etc) was in this situation, what would you want for them? That thought has helped me to start treating myself a lot better.

Sometimes the only closure will be accepting that you will not get closure.

‘Get up, dress up, show up’. These were the magic words when my anxiety tried to talk me out of having a social life. There’re a million reasons not to go, but if you do, you often end up enjoying yourself. Don’t overthink, just do it.

You’re unhappy because you’re making yourself do a lot of things you don’t want to do.

Be curious about why people do and say things. Ask them instead of assuming you know why. You never know what someone is thinking until you ask them. Save yourself the effort of mindreading (misreading) and ask.

I don’t go to therapy because when I find something that’s toxic, I get rid of it. Period.

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Ideas

Skipping stones and AI

Imagine a small group of people skipping stones at the water’s edge. Are they trying to fill the sea? Are they trying to empty the beach of stones? What else could they be doing?

They were having fun, taking turns, competing a bit, and testing themselves against the others. Then the stone skipping stops at a random point when everyone moves on to another activity.

How would artificial intelligence process this the first time it encountered people skipping stones? Once AI has passed the point of seeming humanlike how deep will AI’s human-ness be?

The “Turing test” is used to determine if AI can think intelligently like human. AI would be considered intelligent if it’s conversation couldn’t be easily distinguished from a human’s.

The test uses two humans and one computer, one human is isolated from other two players. All communication is text only on a computer keyboard and screen.

The interrogator’s job is figuring out which one is human and which one is an AI by asking questions from both of them. The computer would try to be as indistinguishable from a human as it could. The computer could lie or dumb itself down.

Once an AI passes a Turing test, how long will it be before AI really understands human behaviors such as skipping stones, making art, or trying to meet people simply because everyone carries a piece of the puzzle of life. There’re things we do that don’t appear important at the time but may be later. I don’t know if AI will be able to understand them even if it can predict them.

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Happiness Ideas

The taboo of enlightenment

I’m not sure what enlightenment really means. But it does seem fascinating.

Some people have probably attained it. But most people don’t really talk about it directly because they think it’s taboo. But why is that?

A guy in this 2004 article  who says he’s enlightened does talk about it directly and has some interesting takes on it based on his direct experience.

I do find it a little weird that an American named Steve Gray decided to change his name to Adyashanti. He says he had an awakening at 31 and  decided to teach about it.

I think changing your name to Adyshanti would only add to the unusualness of an unusual subject that he wants to normalize. It’s a minor point though and he’s decidedly not woo woo. I just extracted the parts of the article I found interesting. Go ahead Steve.

When I looked around at the Buddhist tradition, I realized that the success rate was terrible. People were in it for enlightenment, but very few were actually getting enlightened. If this were a business, I thought, we’d be bankrupt.

I didn’t reject anything. I just stopped blindly adhering to the traditional approach, and the energy bound up in following the traditional approach transferred to looking deeply into what’s really true.

Enlightenment is awakening from the dream of being a separate me to being the universal reality. It’s not an experience or a perception that occurs to a separate person as the result of spiritual practice or cultivated awareness. It doesn’t come and go, and you don’t need to do anything to maintain it. It’s not about being centered or blissful or peaceful or any other experience. In fact, enlightenment is a permanent nonexperience that happens to nobody. The separate person is seen through, and you realize that only the supreme, universal reality exists, and that you are that.

The tradition of talking about certain experiences only in private with your teacher keeps enlightenment a secret activity reserved for special people.

We sit around casually and talk about it. What’s happening on the inside for people isn’t kept secret or hidden. This way, people get beyond the sense that they’re the only ones who are having this or that experience. They come out of their shell, which actually makes them more available to a deeper spiritual process. When everything remains open to inquiry, then even the ego’s tendency to claim enlightenment for itself becomes obvious in the penetrating light of public discourse.

In the long run, both ways have their strengths and weaknesses. I’ve found that having students ask their questions in public breaks down the isolation many spiritual people feel—the sense that nobody else could possibly understand what they’re going through, or that they’re so rotten at their practice, or that nobody could be struggling like they are.

When people have breakthroughs and talk about them in public, awakening loses its mystique. Everyone else can see that it’s not just special people who have deep awakenings, it’s their neighbor or their best friend.

The very notion that anybody attains enlightenment is a taboo. We’re all going after this, but God forbid somebody says they’ve realized it.

People are chasing an awakening they don’t believe could happen to them. That’s a barrier, and the biggest one. People want liberation, but they are also terrified of it.

I didn’t leave Buddhism. I just woke up out of the identity of being a Buddhist, as anyone who wakes up will. I’m not teaching to transmit a tradition or carry on a lineage; I’m teaching to awaken whoever may be interested in awakening.

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Happiness Health Ideas

Cautiously Optimistic

There’s lots of seemingly bad news every day.

But there’s always been bad news.

And now with more bandwidth available, I think we’re just taking taking in more info. Then combine that wit the human bias toward the negative that comes baked in to help with survival during our millennia spent in the wild as hunter gatherers.

The world’s population will begin trending downward sometime in the next decades.

Most people are unaware of the positive changes in our world. Read Hans Roling’s book “Factfulness” and you’ll see that even the folks who should know about positive trends don’t know about them. You’ll be surprised.

Educating women leads to women having less children.

Cities are more efficient than country living and so are effectively “greener.”

Most poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration rather than  redistribution or philanthropy.

Think about this rapid change. In 1949, 75% of Chinese women were illiterate. But today China has one of the lowest rates of female illiteracy in the world — as well as the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires.

There’re lots of positive things happening, but they’re generally overshadowed by the negative news we constantly get.

 

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Ideas

Did humans self-domesticate?

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that humans became increasingly docile and less reactively aggressive around the time of becoming Homo sapiens, a process that started about 300,000 years ago.

There are certain changes that appear in human fossils that also appear in domesticated animals.

There’re four bone characteristics of domesticated animals. They tend to have smaller bodies than their wild ancestors. Their faces tend to be shorter. Differences between males and females are less. And they tend to have smaller brain cavities (and brains). Our brain size increased steadily over the last two million years, until about 30,000 years ago, when our brains started becoming smaller.

As language became sufficiently sophisticated, our ancestors’ increased communication ability led not only to a more peaceful species but also to new kinds of hierarchy. The physical force of an individual was no longer the prerequisite for ruling human groups. Once capital punishment came along, then anyone aspiring to control the group by force couldn’t get away with just being a killer. He had to be a politician, too.

The result of such selective pressure over generations means that maybe human beings are an animal species that’s been domesticated — like dogs, horses or chickens.

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Happiness Ideas

Stop going to the circus

When is time to stop going to the circus?

If you started seeing reports about a large number of clowns molesting young children at  circuses, would you continue going to the circus? Probably not, especially if you have kids.

Why should the Catholic church get a pass (over and over) for priests who are child rapists? What about the continued cover ups and the slap-on-the-wrist punishments for the offenders ?

Revelations in the Catholic church’s decades-long child-rape and sex abuse scandals revealed “a repulsive institution — or at least one permeated by repulsive human beings who reward one another for repulsive acts, all the while deigning to lecture the world about its sin.” That was situation described by a Catholic as the straw that broke the camel’s back, compelling him to finally leave the church. 

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Happiness Ideas

Notes from not giving a f*ck

These are some book notes and takeaways from Dereck Sivers he came away with from Mark Manson’s book, “THE SUBLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK.”

The key to a good life is giving a fuck about less, and giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important. Learn how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively – how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.

Say “fuck it” to everything unimportant in life.

The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

What most pampered people consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.

Suffering is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.

Happiness comes from solving problems. To be happy we need something to solve.

Nobody who’s actually happy stands in front of a mirror and tells himself that he’s happy.

If you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. Negative emotions are a call to action and positive emotions are rewards for taking the proper action.

Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it’s bad. Emotions are merely signposts or suggestions. Make a habit of questioning them.

People over-identify with their emotions. Emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, sucks.

I was in love with the result, but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. The common cultural narratives would tell me that I gave up on my dream. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

The easier and more problem-free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.

Technology has solved old economic problems and given us new psychological problems.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so because they’re obsessed with improvement, which stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s anti-entitlement.

The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay. Accepting your mundane existence will free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

If what we value is poorly chosen, then everything will be out of whack.

Good values are
1) reality-based
2) socially constructive
3) immediate and controllable.

Bad values are
1) superstitious
2) socially destructive
3) not immediate or controllable.

If you’re miserable in your current situation, it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control – it’s a problem you have no ability to solve, or a problem that was thrust upon you without your choosing.

William James conducted a little experiment. Spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he’d do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. James would later refer to his little experiment as his “rebirth,” and would credit it with everything that he later accomplished in his life.

We are responsible for everything in our lives. We always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

Change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else. It really is that simple. It’s just not easy.

An educated mind can entertain a thought without accepting it.

If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.

To build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly.

The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person.

Travel shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function.

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Ideas

Bless my phone

Pope Francis blesses a photo of a child displayed on a mobile phone at the end of a special audience

Here’re some ironic and some strange recent headlines and sentences I’ve noted:

– A 19-year-old anti-violence volunteer was fatally shot in Chicago.

-There Are Bowhead Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written.

-Even the most effective police departments solve only about three-quarters of homicides. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these are repeat killers.

-Coastal Labs Studying Increased Flooding Consider Moving Because Of Increased Flooding

-As housing prices rise in an area, dog breeds tend to skew smaller and more expensive.

-Beneath Yellowstone National Park lies a supervolcano far more powerful than your average volcano. It could expel more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material at once – 2,500 times more than Mount St. Helens expelled in 1980, which killed 57 people. That could blanket most of the United States in a thick layer of ash and even plunge the Earth into a volcanic winter.

-Most prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unremarkable on paper. They don’t, by and large, sustain their genius into adulthood.

-When men see a doctor about fertility problems, they often provide semen samples collected while masturbating to porn. Since it features novel women, “the ejaculates produced in fertility clinics may be of higher quality than usual, which may conceal any potential fertility problems experienced in the bedroom.”

-In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk .

-Supposedly, three and a half feet of debris will keep a person warm above thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Four and a half feet is good to zero degrees. And six feet of dry, dead debris will keep someone alive at forty below zero.

 

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Ideas

Bringing astronomy home

I don’t know how many kids check these out, but these videos really give you an appreciation of objects in space. They’re great for adults too.

Here’s a cool NYT video about a kilonova.

If the Moon was replaced with other planets in our solar system shows how the other planets in our solar system would look to us if they were as close as our moon normally is.

If the Space Station was replaced by the Moon video shows what the moon would look like up close – when it’s only the distance of a satellite from the earth.