Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, May 9, 2016

Next: Stoics and Skeptics

"How the Stoics can help us tackle anxiety, fury and loss of perspective - and realize that very little is needed to make a happy life."

Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius... 




"Pessimism is generally equated with a grumpy and immature kind of mood. But it is in fact at the origin of wisdom – and can even leave us feeling surprisingly cheerful."


"Arthur Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Buddhist thought and is in many ways the West’s answer to it: he too tells us to reign in our desires and adopt a consolingly pessimistic attitude to our struggles."


"Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, appreciated the many ways in which our minds are troubled and anxious. It isn't us in particular: it's the human condition."


Schopenhauer, Freud, Ehrenreich, Eric Wilson...


Friday, May 6, 2016


Frude and his discontents

It's Sigmund Freud's birthday. He'll get a mention in Happiness as one of the skeptics who doubt our capacity for genuine subjective well-being, we discontented partial products of civilization. But he doesn't doubt our universal hunger for happiness. “What do [people] demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so.” The trouble is, our heritable nature teems with unexpressed and socially unapproved uncivilized desires whose satisfaction, hence our happiness, cannot be sanctioned.

Maybe. But as he also notes, we have it in ourselves to reconstruct those desires. We can find tremendous satisfaction in our work, for instance.

And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems. Civilization and its DiscontentsHe wasn't speaking for himself, apparently. He took great satisfaction in his work. Many of us do. True, we've conditioned ourselves to an aversion to the word and some of its socially constructed connotations. But that's just a bad habit.

We need to habituate ourselves to a different attitude, and perhaps a different language. "Work" may be an un-redeemable four-letter-word. Why not just call what we do for fun and satisfactionliving? The problem, of course, is that too many people don't derive fun and satisfaction from what they do for money.

Barney Fife was wrong. "Frude" did not quite have it all figured out.

Action for Happiness (@actionhappiness)
Happy people are less influenced by social comparisons and more likely to be at peace with themselves as they are greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/h…

Specfic Quotes (@SpecficQuotes)
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if 1 only remembers 2 turn on the light.”
—Dumbledore, #HarryPotter & …Pris.ofAzkaban

Gretchen Rubin (@gretchenrubin)
The fun part doesn't come later; now is the fun part.

Agree, disagree?
#SecretsOfAdulthood pic.twitter.com/L11WC3IhQ5


Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

“I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”

“What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.”

“In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.”

“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view.”==
“Surely some of you have felt the same way that I do. You have turned sullenly from those thousands of glowing, perfect teeth lighting the American landscape and slouched to the darkness—the half-lighted room, the twilight forest, the empty cafĂ©. There you have sat and settled into the bare, hard fact that the world is terrible in its beauty, indifferent much of the time, incoherent and nervous and resplendent when on certain evenings, when the clouds are right, a furious owl swooshes luridly from the horizon. You feel that sweet pressure behind your eyes, as if you would at any minute explode into hot tears. You long to languish in this unnamed sadness, this vague sense that everything is precious because it is dying, because you can never hold it, because it exists for only an instant.”

“To desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic.”

“Creating doesn't make us unhappy, unhappiness makes us creative. To create is to live, and in living, we want only to creat more, to set our foundations depper and reach higher toward the sky. If sadness is what makes us creative, then sadness is nothing else but life.”

“Do not perceive through overly judgmental eyes, prone to damnation. If you do, you are constrained to witness nothing but your notion of perfection, either fulfilled or violated. Gaze at life rather as though you were always blessing it, consecrating it, humbly, as holy, and then your biases will be relaxed and your curiosity will be aroused and surprise; there, in your peripheral, a glimmer after which you go, and it is gone, but its absence gleams.”― Eric G. WilsonAgainst Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

“The point is, you are most you, at your best, when you create the roles that make you feel most alive: witty, lyrical, speculative, loving, but also, and here’s the rub, cynical, sarcastic, angry, muddled, sad—for negative states can be just as vital as positive ones. Fullness is the goal, myriad-mindedness (a happy phrase Coleridge conjured to describe Shakespeare): to be as varied and capacious as the cosmos. With this bigness, containing the most sublime and the low at once, you can hope that generosity will win out over the meanness, that you will foster the democratic, merciful embrace of what is as well as what ought to be. The best actor, Hamlet asserts, uses all gently.”
― Eric G. WilsonKeep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life
==
Stoics @dawn... Skeptics @dawn... Against Happiness (10.13.09)...Vital Living (more on Eric Wilson, 10.15.09)... Reubenesque Reunion (vs. Oliver Burkeman's Stoic pessimism)... The cynical solution... Diogenes @dawn... Epicurus @dawn... Seneca @dawn... Stoic @dawn... Carpe vitam (on JMHecht, 10.22.09)... Hecht @home @dawn... The bright-sided secret of happiness (9.13.11)

2 comments:

  1. Nobody's playing the scorecard game this week?

    Maybe it's because you don't want to go first... Remember, happy people take initiative!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the quote" Creating doesn't make us unhappy, unhappiness makes us create." I think that is true. When we are unhappy about a situation or product or station in life it makes us put our thinking caps on and "create" ways to remedy the unhappiness. Be it make more money, move to a different location, buy a different car, get a different job. I think the good that comes out of unhappiness is change either internally or externally. But then there are those who just like to complain.

    ReplyDelete

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