Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Why we grow happier as we grow older

"One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy."

George Eliot died 140 years ago today, leaving us some tremendous literature and her lived lesson in why we grow happier as we grow older: https://t.co/WfRKMgNwUs
(https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1341452643466678273?s=02)

Friday, December 18, 2020

What Is Death?

How the pandemic is changing our understanding of mortality.

Beyond fear and isolation, maybe this is what the pandemic holds for us: the understanding that living in the face of death can set off a cascade of realization and appreciation. Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks. Reveling in love is one sure way to see through and beyond yourself to the wider world, where immortality lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/coronavirus-death.html?smid=em-share

Monday, December 14, 2020

Spinoza's path

A new book suggests that modern readers can still follow the path of reason that Spinoza traced to true well-being, but they might not want to. https://t.co/gaUheugfdw
(https://twitter.com/BostonReview/status/1338672639343292416?s=02)

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Buddshit

From "How to Live a Good Life" (Pigliucci & Cleary)-

"Every spiritual tradition is prone to bullshit on its own behalf. "Buddshit" is simply distinctively Buddhist bullshit. The claim that Buddhism was the path to happiness was Buddshit..." Owen Flanagan

Library Books: A Small Antidote to a Life of Perpetual Dissatisfaction

A little realism goes a long way in a world where the next book purchase, the next apartment, the next significant other promise to finally deliver the goods.

"Library-induced realism is a great thing, one that can do much to increase your happiness. Because the world in which you are perpetually under the impression that the next book purchase, the next apartment, the next significant other will be the one that finally delivers the goods is not a life of happiness. It is a life of perpetual dissatisfaction, a life of thin and sugary highs followed by long and unenlightening lows. The library is, with its careworn and temporary offerings, as lovely and as poignant a reminder of our actual human condition as the tides or a forest in fall. To quote Penelope Fitzgerald (whose books are well worth owning): “Our lives are only lent to us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/magazine/public-libraries.html?smid=em-share

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Happiness returns to the MTSU campus (on ground!) August 24 2021, TTh 2:40, Peck Hall 206.

TEXTS:

Also recommended:

Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
The Art of Happiness, by Epicurus
How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well
Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction
The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell
William James, tba

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment." George Santayana

“If one can’t be happy, one must be amused, don’t you agree?” Nancy Mitford

But, beware "amusing ourselves to death"...

Previous announcements posted at the bottom of this page.

Natural happiness

“It is a scientific fact that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character, particularly if this contemplation occurs in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and change of habits, is favorable to the health and vigor of men and especially to the health and vigor of their intellect beyond any other conditions which can be offered them, that it not only gives pleasure for the time being but increases the subsequent capacity for happiness and the means of securing happiness.” Frederick Law Olmsted

Happy Quotes

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.” ― Aristotle

They are fools who live without enjoyment of life
- Democritus

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work." -Soren Kierkegaard

"To pessimism and despair, the healthy-minded respond: 'stuff and nonsense, get out into the open air!'" -William James

"If we were to ask the question: 'What is human life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure." William James

	Albert Einstein (@SaidByEinstein)
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? #Einstein

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” ― Albert Camus

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.” -Dr. Seuss (Or Vin Scully, or...)

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment." George Santayana

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." - Buddha

Happiness: A History

“Like Rousseau, Hegel appreciated quite early on that in modern commercial societies, individuals' desires and needs were generated by the desires and needs of others. Implanted by advertising, dictated by fashion, and determined by style, individual desire was always socially determined, shaped by the particular contexts in which we live. [..] Hence the need for greater comfort does not exactly arise within you directly; it is suggested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation.”

“No one could work harder to be happy," Tocqueville observes of Americans, marveling at the ceaseless, restless energy they expand in search of a better life. Rushing from one thing tho the next, an American will travel hundreds of miles in a day. He will build a house in which to pass his old age and then sell it before the roof is on. He will continually change paths "for fear of missing the shortest cut leading to happiness.”

“What if virtue, work, all our striving and sweat was simply not enough to make the animal man a happy creature?”

Darrin M. McMahon

"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." Aristotle

"There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity... The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you." Montaigne

"Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." Nietzsche

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Camus

"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." Christopher Hitchens

The Meaning of Life

"The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place." William James

“The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.” Douglas Adams

"Well, it's nothing very special. Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations." M. Python

I can't stand it

Though the ULTIMATE state of the universe may be its extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE state might be a happy and virtuous consciousness...

In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer."

William James

There are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism...(continues)

whanging & skimming

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about

you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos.

Jefferson the Stoic-Epicurean

"Before he attained domestic happiness he had probably worked out his enduring philosophy of life; it was marked by cheerfulness not gloom, and he afterwards described it as Epicurean, though he hastened to say that the term was much misunderstood. He came to believe that happiness was the end of life, but, as has been said, he was engaged by the "peculiar conjunction of duty with happiness"; and his working philosophy was a sort of blend of Epicureanism and Stoicism, in which the goal of happiness was attained by self-discipline."

Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian

The Philosophy of Happiness

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