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)

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

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)

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

Happy reading

After the First World War, traumatized soldiers were often prescribed a course of reading. https://t.co/6r842Cv79y
(https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1332452586138578948?s=02)

Danish Hygge Is So Last Year. Say Hello to Swedish Mys.

The essence of mys is the feeling of warmth. And the best city to stock up on mys-making supplies is Stockholm. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/style/stockholm-shopping-mys-nytorget.html?smid=em-share

Happiness Won’t Save You

Philip Brickman was an expert in the psychology of happiness, but he couldn’t make his own pain go away.

"...So what do you do, as a clinician or loved one, when faced with such suffering? How do you see them through?

You help them generate thoughts about the future in concrete, specific detail.

You point out, using specific numbers, how many years they lived without thoughts of suicide, versus the number of years they have had such thoughts.

You help them find therapy, ideally cognitive behavioral therapy, and drag them to sessions if you have to.

You take away their ability to kill themselves.

You try to keep them safe..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/happiness-depression-suicide-psychology.html?smid=em-share

Why Finland And Denmark Are Happier Than The U.S

https://youtu.be/6Pm0Mn0-jYU

The World's First Happiness Museum Opens in Denmark

Is it any coincidence that one of the world's happiest places is also one of its most environmentally "woke"?

Amid a time of heightened global anxiety, the Copenhagen-based Happiness Research Institute has opened the world's first museum dedicated to that now-fleeting feeling. Fittingly, the museum is located in Denmark, which currently holds the title of second-happiest country on the planet.

"We all seem to be looking for happiness—but perhaps we are looking in the wrong places. We have gotten richer as societies but often failed to become happier," says the Happiness Museum in a statement. "Therefore, the Happiness Research Institute decided to create a museum where we can bring happiness to life." (continues)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-first-happiness-museum-opens-denmark-180975960/

Tweet from Aeon+Psyche (@aeonmag)

Aeon+Psyche (@aeonmag) tweeted at 5:00 AM on Tue, Aug 18, 2020: Renowned for his pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer was nonetheless a conoisseur of very distinctive kinds of happiness https://t.co/dX66iqNRd9 @dbatherwoods (https://twitter.com/aeonmag/status/1295661875796025344?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Tweet from Maria Popova (@brainpicker)

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 6:20 PM on Sun, Jul 12, 2020: "There can be no really black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has still his senses." On Thoreau's birthday, his (and other great writers') wisdom on nature as a salve for depression: https://t.co/h9OoSWX9rm https://t.co/DaEejC28qP (https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1282454900127993865?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Tweet by Jim Palmer on Twitter

	Jim Palmer ⁦‪@jimpalmer‬⁩ There is a fundamental misknowledge about true happiness and how one finds it. apnews.com/0f6b9be04fa0d3…   6/18/20, 6:29 AM

Download the Twitter app

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Anne Frank's "best remedy"

On this day in 1942, about a month before she and her family went into hiding, 13-year-old Anne Frank (books by this author) began to keep her diary. The family was betrayed by Dutch informants and taken away to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1944; Anne and her sister Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus. Friends retrieved the diary after the Frank family's capture, and they gave it to Otto Frank, Anne's father and the only surviving member of the family, on his release in 1945. At first, Anne had kept the diary for herself alone, but later decided it was important as an eyewitness account, and she planned to publish it after the war. Since she didn't survive, her father published it for her in 1947, calling it The Diary of a Young Girl; it's been translated into more than 65 languages, and it made Anne one of the best-known victims of the Holocaust.

She wrote: "The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."

And, "I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments."

And, "How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway. ... And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!"

And, "It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." WA

Tweet from Brain Pickings (@brainpickings)

Brain Pickings (@brainpickings) tweeted at 9:45 PM on Mon, Jun 08, 2020: Frankenstein author Mary Shelley on nature and the meaning of happiness https://t.co/kXi3kOtvF3 https://t.co/7wHFv9sxaf (https://twitter.com/brainpickings/status/1270185100538449920?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Tweet from TPM Philosophy Quote (@tpmquote)

TPM Philosophy Quote (@tpmquote) tweeted at 6:00 PM on Wed, Jun 10, 2020: Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.--George Santayana (https://twitter.com/tpmquote/status/1270853260795092992?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

We Need a Trick to Feel Our Joys as Deep as Our Griefs

From The New York Times:

We Need a Trick to Feel Our Joys as Deep as Our Griefs

A true story.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/opinion/pets-death-grief.html?smid=em-share

Read Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson on GoComics.com | June 07, 2020

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2020/06/07

Weathered happiness

Fleur Adcock's poetic tribute to the comfortable self-acceptance that maturity can bring includes lines I'll be sure to share, next time Happiness class convenes.

"...now that I am in love with a place/which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,/happy is how I look, and that’s all..."

A place can be geographic, like her and Wordsworth's beloved English Lake District, and it can also be a graceful arrival in the autumn of life. It's so good, having weathered many storms, finally to be "indifferent to mirrors." You get what you see, and you see it's good enough.

Thanks to David Whyte, again, for mentioning the "erotic librarian" from New Zealand.

Maria Popova has a nice appreciation, and the poet's rendition, here.

Ernest Hemingway’s Grandson on an Unpublished Story from the Author’s Archive

... "Pursuit as Happiness" was the last and climactic section of the book. Hemingway adapted his fourth section title from a famous phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence: "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I think it is a very apt title for this unpublished story, because it is not just about catching and losing a large marlin—in the same way that "The Old Man and the Sea" is not just about catching and losing a large marlin to sharks. It is about the joy of fishing and the happiness that it brings.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/ernest-hemingway-06-08-20?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

David Whyte, philosopher/poet of happiness

Whyte relates an anecdote about an "articulate Irishman" who, writing under an adopted Chinese nom de plume and style of mystic sagacity, asked and answered Why are you unhappy? -"Because 98.98% of everything you do is for yourself, but there isn't one."

And, from Wallace Stevens: "Sometimes the truth depends on a walk around a lake."

And:

...All of us have had the experience of looking back over our lives, where our younger self did something that our future self is very thankful for. You look back at that moment. Had you not gone out the door, had you not made the phone call, had you not made that promise, you would have a very different life now. You can go back — that person was the ancestor of your present future happiness. The great question for this weekend is, how could you be the ancestor of your own future happiness? What conversation could you begin? What promise could you make? What promise, even, could you break, that would make you the ancestor of your future happiness, that you could come back to yourself, this weekend, and thank yourself for having stepped out on that path into a future which has made both a better world for yourself and the world in which you have given your gifts? On Being, The Gathering 2018 (opening remarks)

David Whyte - What to Remember When Waking: Shaping A Resilient Self Through Poetry from SU School of Theology & Ministry on Vimeo... Whyte on YouTube

What to remember... What else... (U@d2) 

Stephen Law:Philosophy of Happiness - a short introduction

"Feeling good" is overrated, though Bobby McGee may have felt otherwise.

Blog: Stephen Law
Post: Philosophy of Happiness - a short introduction
Link: https://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2020/05/philosophy-of-happiness-short.html

Thanks, Dean.
--
Powered by Blogger
https://www.blogger.com/

"Grandfather Philosophy"

Aka Ed, a distinguished alum of this course. You can follow him on Twitter (but of course, as Brian Cohen said, you don't have to follow anyone)...

Tweet by Phil Oliver on Twitter

	Phil Oliver ⁦‪@OSOPHER‬⁩ Finding the derecho's silver lining. "This is happiness"...   5/11/20, 8:36 AM

Download the Twitter app

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Britons want quality of life indicators to take priority over economy | Health | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/10/britons-want-quality-of-life-indicators-priority-over-economy-coronavirus

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Humane Danes

For 19 cents p/$1 more in taxes Danes get free health care & education, low poverty, homelessness, crime , inequality. They live two years longer than Americans. And they're the happiest people in the world. https://t.co/TBI1jr70J5

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 8, 2020

The Danes have created a humane culture that could serve as our model, if we could just learn to stop reflexiviely villifying "socialism"... 

"Denmark lowered new infections so successfully that last month it reopened elementary schools and day care centers as well as barber shops and physical therapy centers. In the coming days, it will announce further steps to reopen the economy.

Moreover, Danes kept their jobs. The trauma of massive numbers of people losing jobs and health insurance, of long lines at food banks — that is the American experience, but it’s not what’s happening in Denmark. America’s unemployment rate last month was 14.7 percent, but Denmark’s is hovering in the range of 4 percent to 5 percent.

“Our aim was that businesses wouldn’t fire workers,” Labor Minister Peter Hummelgaard told me. Denmark’s approach is simple: Along with some other European countries, it paid companies to keep employees on the payroll, reimbursing up to 90 percent of wages of workers who otherwise would have been laid off...

Danes pay an extra 19 cents of every dollar in taxes, compared with Americans, but for that they get free health care, free education from kindergarten through college, subsidized high-quality preschool, a very strong social safety net and very low levels of poverty, homelessness, crime and inequality. On average, Danes live two years longer than Americans...

Indeed, polls find that Danes are among the world’s happiest people, along with Finns; Denmark is sometimes called “the happiest country.”

You can agree or disagree that the trade-offs are worth it, but as you sit at a cafe in Copenhagen, sipping coffee and enjoying a Danish (called Viennese bread), Denmark hardly seems like a socialist nightmare...

At a time when a pandemic lays bare longstanding inequities in the United States, maybe we should approach the Nordic countries with a bit more curiosity and humility. Hummelgaard, the labor minister, is the son of a porter and a cleaner but received an excellent free education and spoke to me in perfect English. He admires the United States but is sometimes baffled by it.

“Danes love America,” Hummelgaard told me. “But there’s no admiration for the level of inequality in America, for the lack of job security, for the lack of health security, for all those things that normally can create a good society.”

Be happy now...

It's the time of your life.



More short films from Humanists U.K., and a Humanist Manifesto...

Savoring

"If rushing makes people feel like they lack time for things they want to do, then conscious deliberation can feel like a treat." https://t.co/UI39aFZgNs

— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) April 12, 2020

The Science of Happiness-podcast

New Podcast The Science of Happiness:  A Conversation with Laurie Santos Listen Now

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Laurie Santos about the scientific study of happiness. Their conversation includes: people’s expectations about happiness the experiencing self vs. the remembered self framing effects the importance of social connections the effect of focusing on the happiness of others introversion and extroversion the influence of technology on social life our relationship to time the connection between happiness and ethics hedonic adaptation the power of mindfulness resilience the often illusory significance of reaching goals and other topics Laurie Santos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. She hosts the popular podcast The Happiness Lab and she teaches the most popular course offered at Yale to date, titled The Science of Well-Being. Laurie is also the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. She received her A.B. in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003.

Be happy (and notice)

🖤 KURT VONNEGUT
Died on this day, in 2007

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy” pic.twitter.com/bG8IbkQCwU

— Paul Holdengraber (@holdengraber) April 11, 2020

Report 1 (Philosophy)

Happy Finns

Smile? The Results From the 2020 World Happiness Report Are In
The Finns, known for downplaying their emotions, are the happiest people in the world. Do they have something to teach us about how to respond to the pandemic?It might seem an odd time to release a report ranking which countries are happiest.

After all, who can really be happy during a global pandemic?

But according to the authors of the 2020 World Happiness Report, an annual survey of how satisfied people worldwide are with their lives, this is precisely the right moment to consider why Finland has once again made the top of the list.

The Finns, who so pride themselves on their stoicism that they have a word for their national grit (sisu), have been named the happiest people in the world for the third year in a row.

The distinction has confused the Finns themselves, but it turns out that happiness, at least as it’s defined in this report, is not a function of how well you express your emotions... (continues)

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias

As so-called intentional communities proliferate across the country, a subset of Americans is discovering the value of opting out of contemporary society.

THE EAST WIND COMMUNITY is hidden deep in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, less than 10 miles from the Arkansas border, surrounded by jagged hills and tawny fields. Getting there requires traversing country roads that rise, dip and twist through chicken-wire-fenced farmsteads and grazing pastures cluttered with rusty agricultural equipment until you reach 1,145 acres of largely undeveloped highland forest, where cedar, oak, pine and mulberry create a dense canopy. Beneath that are 27 buildings and structures, including four large dormitories, nine personal shelters, a kitchen and dining facility, an automobile shop, a nut butter manufacturing plant and a cold-storage warehouse, all built over the years by the community since its founding in 1974. Outside, farm animals — six piglets, 50 chickens, several dozen brown-and-white cows — crunch through the carpet of winter leaves.

Nearby, a pair of women make their way down a muddy field, one pushing a wheelbarrow, to a weathered-gray wooden barn where they’ll draw gallons of milk from their dairy cows. A reedy man with a long, sandy mullet presses a chain saw to the base of a tree trunk. People stop each other on the dirt paths, asking about the understaffed forestry program, or recounting anecdotes about going into town to sort through credit card charges. Everyone has somewhere to be, yet no one is hurried. There are no smartphones in sight. The collective feels like a farm, a work exchange and a bustling household rolled into one, with much work to be done but many hands to be lent....

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paperon the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

Though many residents of intentional communities are undoubtedly frustrated by climate inaction and mounting economic inequality, others are joining primarily to form stronger social bonds. According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.” (nyt, continues)

Delighted

Delight as a daily practice – a poetic illustrated meditation on the meaning of happiness and its quiet everyday sources https://t.co/86Cv038WFp pic.twitter.com/ZjJf71005Q

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) January 11, 2020

Pain-free

What if pain and our other worst feelings are just vestigial evolutionary garbage? https://t.co/RbxVtLqTMc

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 7, 2020