I shat this morning too. I am happy!

I have blogged in plenty about happiness.  Perhaps even obsessively.  It is not at all strange to me that I think a lot about death as much as I do about happiness.  How could one not?!

One aspect of happiness that has always bothered me, and in increasing magnitude as I get older, is the "pursuit" of it.  As I noted in this post earlier this summer, when the context comes up--and it always comes up in any class that I teach--I remind students that they can go to Walmart or Amazon or wherever and buy whatever they can afford to, or even not afford to ... but, no retailer sells at any price something that we often talk about--happiness.

I commented here about the impossibility of pursuing happiness; if at all, we are in pursuit of death, from the moment that we are born!  The challenge in life then is to find that inner happiness when we pursue the ending that awaits us all.

"Pursuit" of happiness?  WTF!?

The Epicurean outlook on happiness – which Thomas Jefferson was thinking of when he enjoined Americans to cherish ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence – is exceedingly simple and different. As Epicurus saw it, happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented.

I am on-board with this interpretation of happiness.  Well, except about praising Jefferson.

Think about the lack of pain and not suffering from any mental disturbance.  What an awesome life that is, right?

One can see this understanding of happiness across the foundations of the Western world, as in the Jewish prayer of asher yatzar, in which each morning, after going to the bathroom, one says thanks for being able to achieve even this most basic task under one’s own power. Happiness, in the Epicurean sense, is as simple as being able to go pee.

Being constipated for a couple of days will be enough for anybody to appreciate such a view of happiness.

Alas, we live in a world in which happiness is all about the external.  People buy stuff, go places, and document all these in order to demonstrate that they are happy.  Money is made by those promising such fake happiness, and those chasing the fake lose time and money.  "But all of this happy pretending catches up. A person living in a Western culture is about four to 10 times more likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than a person in an Eastern culture."

I am not sure about the Eastern culture either.  Back in the old country, people seem to be in the "pursuit" of happiness as much as people in the West do.  We are messed up all over world.

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Happiness and negative visualization

As many posts have made it abundantly clear, I walk around with my own quota of stress and unhappiness.  Life in the ashram for this hermit is not simply eternal bliss, especially in these tRump times!

The good thing is that many, many years ago, I figured that it will be very, very, very rare for a human to be stress-free and happy.  I mean truly stress-free and happy.  I have also concluded, to a large extent, that it is through unhappiness that we understand and appreciate happiness.  Happiness is something that emerges from and within the context of stress and unhappiness. I wrote, for instance, when thinking about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

Happy families are those that are able to be happy despite their own versions of unhappiness.

Thus, when a student remarks that I always look too damn happy in my office, he has no idea how much of a validation it is for me that happiness is like a gorgeous lotus in a dirty pond.  The stress causing agents are all around me and yet, according to that student, I look happy all the time.

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It seems like increasingly people are rushing around trying to figure out where that fountain of happiness is from which they can take some big gulps.

I want to tell them that the first step is a simple one that every ancient religion has stressed for ever.  And that first step?  Be careful about the frame of reference that you use.

“Our mind just happens to [pick] whatever reference point seems to be salient at the time, whatever reference point we happen to notice, and it tends to particularly [pick] reference points [involving people] who are doing better than us, which kind of sucks,” Santos observed.
But again, there are some ways to interrupt this process. One is to periodically force oneself to try living without the amazing thing one has become accustomed to. For instance, a summer night or two without air conditioning might make the rest of the season much more enjoyable.
Short of actually depriving oneself of something nice, engaging in short thought experiments can help, asking “What if I didn’t have this thing?” For instance, people might ask themselves: What if I didn’t have this house? Which friend or family member would I have to ask for help? This “negative visualization” might help them appreciate their home, even for its faults.

Try this exercise for "negative visualization": What if tRump were not the President?  You see how joyful it is? ;)

Don't go chasing waterfalls

When the context comes up--and it always comes up in any class that I teach--I remind students that they can go to a Walmart and buy whatever they can afford to, or shop online for whatever that they can afford to ... but, no retailer sells at any price something that we often talk about--happiness.

I know that my point won't register on 99.9999 percent of young people.  I am pretty darn confident that a 20-year old me would have internally chuckled at such a comment from an old, bald, and bearded man.  But, every once in a while I make such comments in class because, well, it is my responsibility.

Ok, ok, the 20-year old me was really concerned about such issues.

By then, I had read a few works of literature in order to understand life and happiness.  I was blown away with the simple and powerful opener that Leo Tolstoy had in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  Charles Dickens and Somerset Maugham provided me with plenty to think about.  And so did Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  When helping my parents clean out their old place, I came across my old friend:

All those, in addition to the Tamil literature, and the little bit of Hindu philosophy that I had picked up, gave me insights into life.  And I now distill all those when I make those remarks to students.  Too bad if they don't want to pay attention to this bald old man!

These are also why I have always been puzzled by the American idea of the pursuit of happiness.  How can one pursue happiness?  "To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness."  I know for certain that I don't pursue it.

In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

Yet, we fool ourselves into the pursuit of happiness, and "the pursuit of happiness gave birth to the consumer society."

Thomas Jefferson lived in a world of slavery and pervasive inequality; he knew perfectly well that the world was not as it ought to be. But he believed, rightly, that a world in which people were free to pursue happiness would be one in which liberty would slowly spread, until all could benefit from it. ... But there is an important difference between us and the founding fathers. They saw life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the alternative to despotism and intolerance. We now can see that a society devoted to self-gratification may, in the end, destroy the conditions of its own existence.

It has been a short descent from the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" to Instagram.

To flow is to live

Much to my own disappointment, I have stopped thinking that I am still the dashing young man with a whole lot of hair on my head.  I know well that I have become a part of the "old" generation.  In the old country, strangers and relatives alike who are younger than me address me as "uncle."  The next thing I know, they will talk sloooowly and LOUDLY to me with the hope that I will understand them!

I now have become old enough that there are children of my undergraduate classmates who seek my advice!  Of course, as always, I never advise them on what they should do.  

Whether it is students at my college who make the mistake of coming to me for advice, or the youth from the other side of the planet, my approach is no different: "What do you want to do, if there were no restrictions?" is what I typically ask them.

Almost always, it is a confused, stunned silence as an initial response.  Because, most never think about that.  If at all, their responses will be a whole bunch of general ideas.  "I want to travel." "I want to help other people." "Whatever I do, I want to own a nice car."  Yep, I have heard such responses, which can never get anyone any feasible plan of action.

Even you--yes, you--too perhaps did not think about that when you were young.  When you were 17, or even 21, did you think long and hard about what you wanted to do in life, if there were no restrictions and constraints?  Did you use that as a starting point in order to attempt to define the rest of your life?  Chances are that most people do not.  At that age, we are busily dealing with our emotions, or dutifully living out the elders' definition of whatever the right thing is.

What you and I, and almost everybody else, did not realize on our own, nor did elders take the time to tell us, is a fundamental aspect of life: At 21, we have barely begun the marathon.   It is a long life.

Life is a marathon, I now tell students.  And life is not easy.  In fact, for the most part, life gets harder in many ways as we grow out of our childhood.  As life gets increasingly challenging, imagine doing something that you really, really, really do not want to do, and having to do that day in and day out.  It will be a miserably long life, I would think.

A Cornell University economics professor writes about such matters and more in this piece, where he has a clear bottom-line:

Resist the soul-crushing job’s promise of extra money and savor the more satisfying conditions you’ll find in one that pays a little less.

Before reaching that bottom-line, he writes:

The happiness literature has identified one of the most deeply satisfying human psychological states to be one called “flow.” It occurs when you are so immersed in an activity that you lose track of the passage of time. If you can land a job that enables you to experience substantial periods of flow, you will be among the most fortunate people on the planet.

Have I told you enough times that I am one of the most fortunate people in this regard?  

The impossibility of the pursuit of happiness

Ahab was in pursuit of the white whale.  Javert was in pursuit of Jean Valjean.

What does it mean to be in pursuit of happiness?

The older I get, the more I think that the phrase "pursuit of happiness" is screwed up.  Why did the white, rich, slave-holding founders of the United States refer to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?  Instead, why didn't they go for a full fledged alliteration, for instance, of life, liberty, and love?

One cannot pursue happiness.  It comes from within.

We ought to enjoy the very limited time that we have.  But, we should also recognize that the external pleasure that we seek and enjoy, which we often falsely equate to the happiness that we are pursuing, is fleeting. Momentary.

The Buddha made that simple for us to understand through his Noble Truths.  The point of departure is the truth that "life is suffering and to live is to suffer."  Of course, as humans we share a desire "to be free from suffering."  However, the humans that we are, we not only do not want to acknowledge this, we even actively engage in denial.  We refer to our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

The pleasure and happiness that we seek are often wrong goals.

Happiness arises and ceases based on external conditions that are often beyond my control. What I was really seeking was equanimity, a calm and resilient state that is beyond happiness, and that emerges from internal conditions that are often within my control.

From internal conditions, within my control.  Within you.  It does not come from the number of likes in Facebook or the number of retweets in Twitter, nor from psychedelic drugs, nor from traveling to exotic places ...

One cannot pursue happiness.  It comes from within.

From within, and in the here and in the now, means "to spend time living meaningfully and sharing life experiences with the people we love."

The single most important factor for human flourishing is the cultivation of loving and enduring relationships. The depth and quality of our loving relationships determines how we feel about our lives.

Whether we love or hate, at some time or another, life comes to an end.  Inevitable, as humans have always known.  If at all, we are then in pursuit of death, from the moment that we are born!  The challenge in life is to find that inner happiness when we pursue the end.

May you find happiness and contentment, without pursuing the metaphorical white whale.

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Money, meaning, and happiness

"I just work, work, work," he said. 

His wealth is way above average, but he does not want to call it quits because he doesn't know what he would then do with his spare time.

He asked me if I have changed my car.  I told him I have, and that it is a small little car.  His is a northern European luxury car.

He has added quite a few pounds since I last saw him. He doesn't have the time to regularly exercise, he said.

He is not the only one either.  I know of quite a few--my age and older--who work despite being well-beyond a comfortable retirement savings and investment.  And they also complain about not having time for the things that they might enjoy.

Such is the life of the wealthy and the miserable!

It is not as if they have not heard, or read, or talked about the cliche that a dying person does not ever think that they should have spent more time in the office.  Yet, the lure of money keeps them doing time in the office, even when they hate themselves for doing that!

One classmate described having to invest $5 million a day — which didn’t sound terrible, until he explained that if he put only $4 million to work on Monday, he had to scramble to place $6 million on Tuesday, and his co-workers were constantly undermining one another in search of the next promotion. It was insanely stressful work, done among people he didn’t particularly like. He earned about $1.2 million a year and hated going to the office.
“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.”

Earns $1.2 million and gripes.  It is more than the work being meaningless--it is about the feeling of a meaningless life.

Perhaps they never constantly ask themselves a simple question: "What if today is the last day of my life?"

I have blogged in plenty about meaningful jobs that may or may not pay well, versus bullshit jobs whether or not it pays well.  I, for one, am glad to be doing something that provides me with meaning, both at work and in my personal life.

The author of the piece in the NY Times that got me thinking about these, Charles Duhigg, is a journalist.  A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.  And, with an interesting academic credential: He is an MBA from Harvard Business School!  He writes:

Some of my classmates thought I was making a huge mistake by ignoring all the doors H.B.S. had opened for me in high finance and Silicon Valley. What they didn’t know was that those doors, in fact, had stayed shut — and that as a result, I was saved from the temptation of easy riches. I’ve been thankful ever since, grateful that my bad luck made it easier to choose a profession that I’ve loved. Finding meaning, whether as a banker or a janitor, is difficult work. Usually life, rather than a business-school classroom, is the place to learn how to do it.

I am all the more convinced that I am a lucky guy!

The diminished expectations of good ol' Americans

As trump and his party go all out in their racist war against immigrants, one of these days even his own minions will begin to understand that it is not white supremacy that made America great, but that only immigrants can make America great again.

Take the case of two comedians with origins in India: Aziz Ansari and Hari Kondabolu.  Both their fathers are medical professionals who immigrated from India, thanks to the changes in the legal framework in 1965. In Kondabolu's case, his mother too is a medical professional.

These two guys are not surgeons or lawyers, but they ventured into comedy--despite their stellar academic credentials and not because they could not make it.

Ansari and Kondabolu typify the American way of life, which the US army has crafted well into its recruitment campaign: Be all that you can be!  If all that you can be means not being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, that is ok too.

The parents, the immigrants, work hard so that their children and and grandchildren can do what makes them happy in life.  This is not a new American concept, however.  John Adams wrote in one of his letters to his wife, Abigail:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History and Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

John Adams wished that his grandchildren ought to be able to pursue painting and poetry if that is what they wanted to do.  That is the American dream!

Such a wishful dream for his children is what this op-ed author--a highly successful son of immigrant parents from Asia--writes about:

I’m temperamentally unable to mimic my father’s succeed-at-all-costs immigrant mind-set, an instinct I share with most of my generation. And maybe that marks our immigrant parents’ ultimate triumph: We have become American. As part of the American parenting mainstream, I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.

Imagine an America that is walled off against immigrants.  In addition to a real decline in population--immigration and their fertility rates help the US not become a Spain or Russia--we will also have fewer people who are driven to succeed in medicine, or high tech, or ...

The author writes:

When I became a parent, I felt the wonder and uncertainty that accompany the awesome responsibility of fatherhood. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: The childhood I devise for my two young daughters will look nothing like mine. They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.
I’ve assumed this means my daughters might someday bring home grades or make life choices that my father would have regarded as failures. If so, I embrace the decline.

May our diminished expectations lead to happy lives!

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On pleasure and titillation

Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?... That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure and titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Contemporary life seems all about "pleasure and titillation."  Everywhere we turn, society now offers more and more avenues for "pleasure and titillation."  Sometimes, that pleasure and titillation comes from enjoying how others are humiliated.  This approach to "pleasure and titillation" has become so popular that 63 million voters elected that kind of an entertainer to the Oval Office!

I seriously doubt that this "pleasure and titillation" was what the founders stated as our inalienable rights to the pursuit of happiness.  But then, the writer was Thomas Jefferson, who continued to own slaves and defend his ownership even when his buddies were freeing their slaves.  I suppose Jefferson knew about "pleasure and titillation" through owning humans and raping them!

Ray Bradbury predicted with uncanny accuracy (except the physical act of book burning) how our madness for "pleasure and titillation" will end up.

Fahrenheit 451 also speaks of, and to, a culture that was becoming more superficial and philistine, in which television screens cover entire walls, where, in the words of the fire-chief Beatty: ‘School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected… Life is immediate… Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches.’ Bradbury had expressed his disquiet at ‘the great centrifuge of radio, television, pre-thought-out movies, and so forth. Give us no time to “stop and stare”.’

Bradbury, who to me was always a social commentator disguised as a science fiction writer, wrote Fahrenheit 451 well before the age of flat screen TVs that seem to cover entire walls, and before anybody had even imagined a smartphone.  The book was published in 1953!  Here we are in 2018, discussing how philosophy courses have been dropped from the curriculum.  Language proficiency is no longer a mark of an educated person, it seems.  Spelling is old-fashioned.  Nobody wants to stand and stare, and think.  Because, after all, thinking could possibly lead to unhappiness.  We want, demand, pleasure and titillation. Now, dammit!

Of course, the irony of ironies is that Fahrenheit 451 was first published in a serialized form during the early and struggling years of the very symbol of pleasure and titillation: Playboy magazine!

Contemporary life is increasingly about momentary happiness.  Instant gratification seems to be our collective motto.  Therefore, not a moment shall be spent in deep thinking, which requires people to turn away from the flat screens on the walls and the bright screens in their hands.

The pleasure from reading Fahrenheit 451 is certainly not titillation!  It is profound bliss.

The author of the essay writes, echoing my own thoughts on Fahrenheit 451:

Forever trying to be the optimist, Ray Bradbury couldn’t but help demand vigilance about the future. He was like Orwell: a progressive who banefully acknowledged man’s flawed nature, his timeless thirst for power, forever wanting to push people around and tell others what to do and what to say. And, as with Orwell, Bradbury recognised that tyranny is at its most potent when it’s superficially most benevolent, when it dresses up coercion and censorship in kindly, caring language. A society that believes it paramount to keep its citizens safe, happy and comfortable for the greater good can not, and will not, tolerate dangerous words.

Fiction makes us worry about down the continuum, if the trends continued along in the same direction.  After all, as the old Chinese saying goes, "if we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

When all hope is gone

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  With that opener, Leo Tolstoy set us on Anna Karenina's unhappy life. (Spoiler alert: She commits suicide.)

Students and colleagues who do not know me might think that I am unhappy camper. A curmudgeon.  But, General Malaise is by and large a happy fella.  I have been extraordinarily lucky that other than a few down phases in life, I have not known what unhappiness is.  The older I get, the more I understand and appreciate what an awesome lottery prize this is!

When talking with a student, I asked about her parents.  Her father is a veterinarian. "I bet he has quite some stories, like ..."  I blanked out on the author's name.  "The British guy who wrote those series of books ... like All Creatures Great And Small."  I couldn't recall the name. Old age :(

After she left, I googled.. James Herriot.  Of course!

Google also told me more about him. He (James Alfred Wight, in real life) suffered from depression. "Melancholy," is how he described it, and once had a complete nervous breakdown.  I would never have guessed that even as a possibility from his cheerful and upbeat books.  It turns out that depression and suicide are way above average when it comes to vets.  I had no idea that animal doctors are an unhappy  family, and unhappy  in their own way :(

It was a day of reading about unhappiness, it seemed. A review of Johann Hari's book popped up in my newsfeed.

Johann Hari took his first antidepressants at age 18, and the experience, he says, was like a “chemical kiss.” The burden was lifted immediately from his whirring brain. He kept on taking the pills for 13 years, at higher and higher doses–until, at one point, the drugs didn’t work anymore. He was still depressed.
In his early 30s, Hari, a journalist, started to question the prevailing wisdom about depression. Was his desperation and anxiety really connected, as he had been told by a succession of doctors, to a chemical imbalance in the brain? Was it genetic, as other scientists claimed? Or were the reasons why so many people are depressed these days really more social? Is the depression epidemic connected to how we’ve chosen to construct the world around us?

What the hell is going on?  

No wonder that the most popular course in Yale's long history is about happines, taught by Laurie Santos.  There are too many stressed out and unhappy young people.

Dr. Santos speculated that Yale students are interested in the class because, in high school, they had to deprioritize their happiness to gain admission to the school, adopting harmful life habits that have led to what she called “the mental health crises we’re seeing at places like Yale.” A 2013 report by the Yale College Council found that more than half of undergraduates sought mental health care from the university during their time there.
“In reality, a lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb,” said Alannah Maynez, 19, a freshman taking the course. “The fact that a class like this has such large interest speaks to how tired students are of numbing their emotions — both positive and negative — so they can focus on their work, the next step, the next accomplishment.”

Seriously, is it worth getting into that kind of a stress when one is sixteen or seventeen, and be unhappy to an extent that it becomes a mental health crisis?  There is incredibly more to life than an Ivy diploma!

In addition to the randomness in the universe that messes up our lives, we too do whatever we can to add to our miseries.  I wish we would take up Bhutan's idea of indexing happiness and working towards maximizing that, instead of worshiping the Dow Jones and other indices as a measure of how great we are again!

We're children, needing other children

I grew up in a cultural context where it was believed that if one chanted mantras, well, good things will happen.  For quite a few years, I believed in that approach--after all, I was only a kid, who was being brainwashed into a certain way of thinking.

And then one day, the question arose within: If the mantras have that effect, then we should be able to bring about peace and prosperity in no time at all.  Of course, there are mantras for peace and prosperity.  There are mantras that when chanted rain should pour.   When the intended effects did not happen, the answer was always ready and waiting--the chanter was not qualified enough.

In the modern, secular, world, people chant mantras of different sorts believing that those will deliver happiness.  Epic failures.  But, such practices continue on.

The app I eventually chose messaged me every hour or so with a positive affirmation that I was supposed to repeat to myself over and over. “I am beautiful,” or “I am enough.”

Mantras!  Instead of some "holy" man teaching one the mantra, now an app coded by some stranger teaches one to recite the mantra.

I wish people would be confident like me, and go around proudly proclaiming that I am ugly. I am bald. I am an idiot.  I tell ya, these are immensely confidence-boosting because they are honest to the core!

Ok, sarcasm aside, people have always struggled to be at peace and be happy.  Some might want to explain this as the inevitable result of the original sin.  Others might preach for a path towards nirvana that will deliver us from these existential struggles.  I wish people would understand that what we are going through is not all that different from what our ancestors went through.  Once we recognize it, well, only after that can we begin to understand that chanting mantras won't help.

But while placing more and more emphasis on seeking happiness within, Americans in general are spending less and less time actually connecting with other people.

Increasingly around the world too.

There is a difference between happiness that is within, versus a belief that happiness comes from within.  Happiness that is within refers to the intangibles that make us truly happy, as opposed to the tangible stuff that we accumulate.  The intangibles, it turns out, are dependent on people.

if there is one point on which virtually every piece of research into the nature and causes of human happiness agrees, it is this: our happiness depends on other people.Study after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest, most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as to call them a “necessary condition for happiness,” meaning that humans can’t actually be happy without them. This is a finding that cuts across race, age, gender, income and social class so overwhelmingly that it dwarfs any other factor.

To recap, this is what most people seem to be doing: Buy a whole bunch of stuff, travel as tourists without gaining any understanding, and waste a whole lot of time by themselves either watching TV or on social media.  To make things worse, they hang out with the wrong kind of people.  And then they wonder what they can do make themselves happy!

So, what can one do?  First, stop chanting any mantra--religious or secular.   Then, 

The most significant thing we can do for our well-being is not to “find ourselves” or “go within.” It’s to invest as much time and effort as we can into nurturing the relationships we have with the people in our lives.

As simple as that.  All you need is a few good people around you to be happy.  Just a few.  And then happiness gushes from within. 

Stuff doesn't make you happy. HAHAHAHA!

I laugh because they had to do research in order to figure that out, when even half-baked and pretentious irreligious philosophers who blab, er, blog everyday have been saying that forever, channeling the wisdom from the old country!

I had to follow up on this 60-second science podcast at Scientific American.  I simply had to.

"One of the most common things people do with their money is get stuff," Norton tells Harvard Business Review. But research shows that "things" don't make you happy.
Instead, spend your hard earned cash on what Norton calls "prosocial" experiences — like a vacation or dinner with the family.

Seriously, how is this any different from the age old wisdom?

"When you ask people the secret to happiness, they talk about living with purpose or having close relationships," says Norton. And while money can get in the way of that — if you work all the time at a job you hate, for example — spending money on things that foster those goals actually does increase well-being.

Seriously, how is this any different from the age old wisdom?

There is one aspect of the research that deserves serious thought and discussions.  According to researchers--at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School--"using money to buy free time -- such as paying to delegate household chores like cleaning and cooking -- is linked to greater life satisfaction."

"People who hire a housecleaner or pay the kid next door to mow the lawn might feel like they're being lazy," said study lead author Ashley Whillans, assistant professor at Harvard Business School who carried out the research as a PhD candidate in the UBC department of psychology. "But our results suggest that buying time has similar benefits for happiness as having more money."
...
"The benefits of buying time aren't just for wealthy people," said UBC psychology professor and the study's senior author Elizabeth Dunn. "We thought the effects might only hold up for people with quite a bit of disposable income, but to our surprise, we found the same effects across the income spectrum."

I suspect that this buying time contributes to one's happiness if that time were spent on "prosocial" experiences.  But, if that bought time were spent on, say, playing video games or mindless Facebooking, then I would think that the person comes out worse off.

There is another easy way to buy oneself time--simply cut the unnecessary waste of time.  Especially because of a fear of missing out, people increasingly seem to want to be engaged in a gazillion things and seemingly all at the same time.  Instead, if only people can be disciplined enough to simplify, simplify, and simplify; they would then have plenty of time to spend on "prosocial" experiences.

I would have told you all that for free without the "insights" from a HBS research, for which lots of money would have been spent.  But then, ahem, nobody listens to me! ;)

It is so easy to live the American Dream ... even in Timbuktu

The American Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims that we, the people, enjoy valuable inalienable rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Translating this ideal into everyday reality has always been a challenge.  It will become more of a challenge for one simple reason: We seem to want to reduce the wonderful ideal of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" to mere material possessions.

For centuries, philosophers and religious thinkers have advised us that happiness cannot be found in pursuing a life of fame and fortune.  If I interpret "heaven" to mean nothing but a blissful life, then that bliss simply cannot be attained with more stuff--whether that stuff is the latest gadget or the mansions that we want.  Maniacally pursuing the material possessions will lead us to the tragic end that King Midas met.

We apparently forget all those secular and religious lessons.  And then we wonder why we are unhappy!

Robert Samuelson says all those without saying all those.  Using a less philosophical framework, and more of an empirical approach, Samuelson writes:

The proper question may be: Is the American Dream killing us?

American culture emphasizes striving for and achieving economic success. In practice, realizing the American Dream is the standard of success, vague though it is. It surely includes homeownership, modest financial and job security, and a bright outlook for our children. When striving accomplishes these goals, it strengthens a sense of accomplishment and self-worth.

But when the striving falters and fails — when the American Dream becomes unattainable — it’s a judgment on our lives. By our late 40s or 50s, the reckoning is on us. It’s harder to do then what we might have done earlier. We become hostage to unrealized hopes. More Americans are now in this precarious position. Our obsession with the American Dream measures our ambition — and anger.

The American Dream has been equated to economic success, which is exactly where the problems begin.  If only the American Dream is truly understood as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" instead!  Liberty would then guide us to value the other and the other's life.  We will strive towards whatever makes us happy in ways that do not interfere with the life and liberty of others. It is so simple.  But apparently very hard for us--we, the people--to comprehend.  The unhappy people we are, well, we live nightmares every single day!

Go ahead. Be a nabob of negativity

Hey, does the following make sense to you?

المشاعر السلبية مفتاح الصحة النفسية

Before I tell you what the means, allow me to discuss something with you.  Remember, I noted in yesterday's post that you can't selectively edit me out--you have to put up with my boring stories also ;)

Quite a few months ago, I noticed something interesting in the New York Times.  A select report or a column included a link for the Chinese version or an Arabic version.  Once, I even tweeted the "foreign" language version just to see if there was an audience for it.  And there was.  (I have no idea how to quickly search through my tweets and track that down!)

As much as we (ok, I) beat up on modern technology, I, like many, am an ardent fan of it.  Without the modern communication technology, you, dear reader, and I would not have even met, right?  And here we are exchanging ideas, debating, all thanks to the modern marvel.  If we want to pass along a column to an English-challenged friend somewhere, we can send them the Chinese or Arabic version too.  (I suspect that the FBI has opened a file on me for using the Arabic characters in this post, and for repeatedly writing "Arabic". Hehehe)

So, back to that Arabic phrase.  It was there in this Scientific American piece on "Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being."  Now, go ahead and check that link out for the Arabic version.  (Click that link only if you are white-skinned; the FBI will track you if you are brown-skinned. Haha!)

Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment.

Why?

“Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being,” says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Are you thinking what I am thinking?  Why is a psychology expert in the College of Engineering, right?  Yep, this is how I read things, my friend! ;)

The complexity of life means that we can not, will not, be happy all the time.  There will be moments of other emotions that we classify as negative.  Remember the Pixar movie, Inside Out, in which sadness plays a key role?

Unpleasant feelings are just as crucial as the enjoyable ones in helping you make sense of life's ups and downs. “Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” Adler says.

Our life experiences are not mere facts, right?  Those experiences are loaded with emotions.

Instead of backing away from negative emotions, accept them. Acknowledge how you are feeling without rushing to change your emotional state.

Or, as I tell people--if they ever check with me--I tell them to honor those emotions and not deny their existence, or drown them in alcohol.  "What you feel is what you feel" is how I have come to conclude about the negative emotions.  To honor them and work through them is the way to do it.  "Learning how to cope with those emotions is the key."  Indeed.

If only I could convey these to the angry members of ISIS.  Hey, can you white readers send ISIS the Arabic version of the Scientific American piece? ;)

I have not worked for many years now

I have officially become a part of the "old" generation.  I now have become old enough that the children of my undergraduate classmates are writing to me seeking my advice.  And I thought I am still the dashing young man with a whole lot of hair on my head! ;)

Of course, as always, I never did advise them on what they should do.  Whether it is students at my college who make the mistake of coming to me for advice, or the youth from the other side of the planet, my approach is no different: "What do you want to do, if there were no restrictions?" is what I typically ask them.

Almost always, it is a confused, stunned silence as an initial response.  Because, most never think about that.  You--yes, dear reader, you--too perhaps did not think about that when you were young.  When you were 17, or even 22, did you think long and hard about what you wanted to do in life, if there were no restrictions and constraints?  Did you use that as a starting point in order to attempt to define the rest of your life?  Chances are that most people do not.

In the email, after giving one a bunch of ideas on how to proceed, I wrote at the end:

I want to assure you that you will be on the right track as long as you keep thinking.  

It is a long life.  And life is not easy.  For the most part, life gets harder in many ways as we grow out of our childhood.  In that challenging context, imagine doing something that you really, really, really do not want to do, and having to do that day in and day out.  It will be a miserably long life, I would think.

A Cornell University economics professor writes about such matters and more in this piece, where he has a clear bottom-line:

Resist the soul-crushing job’s promise of extra money and savor the more satisfying conditions you’ll find in one that pays a little less.

Before reaching that bottom-line, he writes:

The happiness literature has identified one of the most deeply satisfying human psychological states to be one called “flow.” It occurs when you are so immersed in an activity that you lose track of the passage of time. If you can land a job that enables you to experience substantial periods of flow, you will be among the most fortunate people on the planet.

Have I told you enough times that I am one of the most fortunate people in this regard?  I often comment to students that I would do what I do even if I don't get paid and, thankfully, I get paid as well.  I get paid to read, think, write, and--most importantly--help young people understand the world.  How fantastic, right?  "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is true--if we can find that job.

I am behind on a few bills though; wanna help me? ;)

On "the dispassionate pursuit of passion"

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sure, but, it is not because I am an Indian-American that I see Indian-Americans everywhere! I open the latest issue of the Atlantic and there is an Indian-American: Anand Gopal has a lengthy and informative tragic piece the hell that Iraq is as ISIS recedes:

The Sunni refugees I met have little hope for a peaceful Iraq; whatever ideas they may have had about reclaiming their place in Iraqi society or undoing Shia-dominated rule have come unraveled, replaced by the most basic imperative of all: Stay alive.

And then at the magazine's website today, there is an interview with Raj Raghunathan.  Raghunathan, Gopal, ... I tell ya, not only Indian-Americans but the names suggest origins from my part of the world in the old country.  Trump can make all the moronic fun he wants to of the Indian accent, but beige is in, baby!

Raj Raghunathan is a professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, who has written a book on an approach that will make people happy, instead of  the route that smart people seem to take in which "people may have a sense of what will make them happy, but they approach those things in ways that don’t maximize happiness"

which is to become a little more aware of what it is that you're really good at, and what you enjoy doing. When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you're going to progress towards mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.

Hey, the rational research that leads Raghunathan to these conclusions is no different from that old philosophical idea from the old country.  The one that is familiar to even the Hindu who could not be bothered with the old texts: "Let not the fruits of action be your motive"

Interesting how much we forget such fundamental aspects of a meaningful and happy life.  More from Raghunathan:

Ultimately, what we need in order to be happy is at some level pretty simple. It requires doing something that you find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis.

Wait a second, I have been blogging about this for a long time and the management friend of mine did not help me monetize my thoughts?

Raghunathan has a valid point here:

In the big picture, the business world’s messages are a little jumbled. In business schools, I see that there's a huge push towards corporate social responsibility and finding a passion, but at the same time, if you look at the kinds of people who get invited to come give keynote addresses, or what it is that we focus on to improve our Businessweek rankings, it's things that are extrinsic. We invite people who made a million bucks, and we look at incoming MBA students and their outgoing salaries.

Exactly!  Whether it is MBA or undergraduate liberal arts, whether it is multinational corporations or otherwise, we talk one talk but then walk a completely different walk and end up valuing people based on the extrinsic measures like their earnings.  

Any parting words, Professor Raghunathan, on "the dispassionate pursuit of passion"?

There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.

Which means?

basically the concept boils down to not tethering your happiness to the achievement of outcomes. 

Amen, brother!

On living a happy AND meaningful life

Perhaps I will continue with the theme explored in the previous post and comments--happiness.

When we discuss poverty and economic development, I can always count on a student to thoughtfully remark that people in the video and photographs of the "poor" Sub-Saharan or South Asian countries seem happy.  Genuinely happy.  Which is when I give them my usual spiel that once we go beyond the absolute poverty (those rates have been falling) we notice that getting rich is not the same the as being happy.  I discuss that without the academic language behind the Easterlin Paradox.

A psychology professor at Florida State University observes in this essay that "happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning":

To be sure, happiness and meaningfulness frequently overlap. Perhaps some degree of meaning is a prerequisite for happiness, a necessary but insufficient condition. If that were the case, people might pursue meaning for purely instrumental reasons, as a step on the road towards happiness. But then, is there any reason to want meaning for its own sake? And if there isn’t, why would people ever choose lives that are more meaningful than happy, as they sometimes do?

These days, I am suspicious about anything that psychology researchers have to offer based on the experiments that they conduct. There is a "reproducibility crisis" in psychology:

A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked for misconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.

But, we will set that aside for now and consider the essay, which argues that "happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning"--after all, this is also something that I have been talking, and blogging, about for years.  If it agrees with my view, then--of course--the research is true ;)

Kidding aside, the author writes:

If you want to maximise your happiness, it looks like good advice to focus on the present, especially if your needs are being satisfied. Meaning, on the other hand, seems to come from assembling past, present and future into some kind of coherent story.

Increasingly, it seems like people would rather focus on the present and seek a meaning of happiness that comes via instant gratification.  So much so that they even use technology that helps them assemble a past in order to tell a story that airbrushes out the misery.  Is all that really happiness, and is the meaning thus created really any meaning at all?  Ah, I digress.  Back to the essay at hand.  Why do we care about meaning anyway?

Perhaps the idea is to make happiness last. Happiness seems present-focused and fleeting, whereas meaning extends into the future and the past and looks fairly stable. For this reason, people might think that pursuing a meaningful life helps them to stay happy in the long run. They might even be right — though, in empirical fact, happiness is often fairly consistent over time. Those of us who are happy today are also likely to be happy months or even years from now, and those who are unhappy about something today commonly turn out to be unhappy about other things in the distant future. It feels as though happiness comes from outside, but the weight of evidence suggests that a big part of it comes from inside. Despite these realities, people experience happiness as something that is felt here and now, and that cannot be counted on to last. By contrast, meaning is seen as lasting, and so people might think they can establish a basis for a more lasting kind of happiness by cultivating meaning.

You are perhaps thinking, well, what is the meaning of life then?  That is for you to figure out.

People ask what is the meaning of life, as if there is a single answer. There is no one answer: there are thousands of different ones. A life will be meaningful if it finds responses to the four questions of purpose, value, efficacy, and self-worth. It is these questions, not the answers, that endure and unify.

Find your meaning. And be happy!

Good times, bad times

Even as I was reading this piece at the Scientific American, my thoughts were along the lines of "I knew this already" and "I have been saying this for years."  But then when has the world ever listened to me! ;)

And what was that Scientific American piece about?  Happiness and meaning in life.  Themes that I often explore here.

Unlike me, the writer there has credentials. I mean, Ivy creds:

Scott Barry Kaufman is scientific director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

So, if you didn't care for what I say, you will pay attention to Kaufman, right?  Story of my life! ;)

With hyperlinks all over the place, Kaufman writes about meaning and happiness, which are are two of our central motivations.  He writes that  "there can be substantial trade-offs between seeking happiness and seeking meaning in life."

Consider, for instance, the “parenthood paradox”: parents often report that they are very happy they had children, but parents who are living with children usually score very low on measures of happiness. It seems that raising children can decrease happiness but increase meaning. Or consider revolutionaries, who often suffer through years of violence and discord for a larger purpose that can ultimately bring great satisfaction and meaning to their lives and the lives of others.

Any parent knows that parenting is not unicorns and rainbows.  In between the fleeting moments of ecstasy of being a parent is a great deal of pain, anguish, hurt, and more that make parents stressed and unhappy.  But, parenthood also gives meaning.  Now you are beginning to think that it was unwise not to listen to me, eh! ;)

It seems that happiness has more to do with having your needs satisfied, getting what you want, and feeling good, whereas meaning is more related to uniquely human activities such as developing a personal identity, expressing the self, and consciously integrating one’s past, present, and future experiences. 

No kidding!  Have I not been blogging about these, like, forever? ;)

Unfortunately, especially these days, every where one turns the message is about happiness that is instantaneous.  The excellent sheep that most are, people bah-bah their vacuous and meaningless existence until it hits them hard one fine day when they begin to wonder what their lives were about--but, by then it is always too late.

There is a lot more to pursue than happiness.  One of the impressive ideas in Pixar's Inside Out was not about happiness but about sadness.  Sadness and the full range of human emotions help us put together meaning.

While happiness may make us feel good in the moment, the avoidance of negative thoughts and feelings may stunt personal development over time. After all, personal development often requires experiencing the full range of emotions

I will leave you with yet another message that I have been talking/blogging about forever:

The more people felt their activities were consistent with core themes and values of their self, the greater meaning they reported in their activities.

That requires people to understand for themselves who they truly are for which they have to find their own answers to "who am I?"

There is only one place where I differ with the Ivy researcher, and that is a significant difference as well: there does not have to be any tradeoff between happiness and meaning--it all depends on how we interpret happiness and meaning.  But, this is merely an intuitive understanding for which I, without any Ivy credentials, cannot provide any "scientific" evidence.  Take it or leave it, as it pleases you ;)

Our own felicity we make or find

"Have you ever read my school's Golden Jubilee book?" asked my father.

I know that the school that he attended in the village is an old one, founded many decades ago.  Yet, I had forgotten that the school dates back to the late 19th century and the book that he was referring to is from 1941-42.

The down-the-memory-lane essays by two distinguished alumni were a treat for this pretentious intellectual and writer.  One of them was certainly a classy essay that was about the school days, which were from 1900.  It vividly brought to life the personalities--the headmasters and the teachers--and the few students who were mentioned.  A piece of writing of the highest caliber, in which wonderfully woven was the quote from Oliver Goldsmith, "Honour sinks where commerce long prevails."

I had never come across that quote.  Yet again, I am humbled by how little I know.

Google gave me the source of that quote,  It is from Goldsmiith's poem, The Traveller.  It turns out that the poem is about one of my favorite topics--the pursuit of happiness.  Wikipedia offers this:

The dedication to The Traveller sets out Goldsmith's purpose:

I have attempted to show, that there may be equal happiness in states, that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess.

He begins the poem by extolling the happiness of his brother Henry's simple family life. Then, from a vantage-point in the Alps, he surveys the condition of the world. Every nation, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each nation judges by its own standards. In fact, happiness is probably equally spread, though in different forms which tend to be mutually exclusive.

The poem is from 1764, when "nations" meant different from how we think of nations now.  We could, therefore, even think of cultures, and the sentence reads very well: "Every culture, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each culture judges by its own standards."  We could also bring that down to the individual level, and it still  makes sense that we would judge happiness by our own respective standards.

I located a site that had the entire poem.  As tempting it was to note "tl; dr" I gave it a quick read.  The poem, certainly philosophical, is loaded with thoughts, place names, and events, all of which require careful reading.  I can easily imagine the essayist remembering the impressive headmaster reciting the poem and interpreting it for the class.  I wish I had that kind of a teacher even now who would  provide me with the kind of a thrilling and memorable learning experience that the essayist had as a school-boy in the classroom more than a century ago.

Wikipedia further notes that Goldsmith concluded the poem with the philosophical notion that wherever we might be--England or America or France or Italy--happiness comes from within:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find

May you also find or make your own felicity.

The quest for happiness

I always seem to have a tough time conveying to twenty-year old students in any of my classes that happiness might not be correlated with, nor dependent on, higher incomes.  I think they think that I am setting them up for something when I say that plenty of poorer folks are happy with their lives.  But then I would not have believed me either when I was an undergraduate student.

Source

I wonder if even what happiness is can be truly understood only with age and experience, after all the teenage angst, and the troubles of the twenties, and everything else that unfolds in life.  Not age alone--after all, one can be old and foolish, and there are too many of those among us.  Aging is natural, but wisdom about happiness we systematically have to work for.  Old and wise is something to hope for, I suppose.

We work and earn money but are less happy than the poorer folks?  So, who then is happy?

Plato believed that the best of all lives were based upon a quest, and an arduous quest at that. People who sought the Truth were the ones who, to Plato, lived with the most intensity and even joy.

Interesting stuff from Mark Edmundson, as always.  His point of departure is this Louis CK bit.  Say more, sir.

[Plato] was devoted to finding a truth that would apply to all people at all times. What is a just state? What is a well-balanced soul? What are the uses of art? How do you educate children? When Plato attempted to answer these questions, he was trying to do so for all time. He might well have failed: Even Plato, confident as he was, understood that. Others might come along in time to do better.
The quest for Truth is an ideal. When men and women engage it, their days are alive with meaning and intensity. They know what they are doing on Earth. They know what they want. They don’t need everything to be amazing. They know that happiness comes from picking out a noble goal, an ideal, and dedicating themselves to it.

So, all we need to do is to somehow get these across to the young?

People don’t talk much about ideals any more. We don’t usually offer them as viable options to the young.

Edmundson is on to something that I have often worried about.  Maybe it is just me, I used to think, but now that I read Edmundson, I now am convinced that among the young there are fewer and fewer who seem to at least talk about grand ideals.  Is it because we adults do not talk much about ideals anymore?  Are we so focused on material comforts and ease and navel-gazing that we have no place and time for ideals?  When we don't, and when everything else that surrounds us--from movies and television to internet and even books--are far from ideals, and with a world that is increasingly secular with even the religious paying only lip-service to their religions, are we doomed to lives without ideals?  And, hence, unhappiness?

These people will feel that life ought to be more than sleeping and eating and hoarding, getting and spending and having a good time. In our current culture those people may feel confused. Where are they to go for an alternative?
There is Plato behind them but still out ahead of them; there is Homer; there are Jesus and Confucius and Lord Buddha. And perhaps they will turn to them and see a new world of possibility open up.

That's wishful thinking.  But, this happy and content guy will take that, at least for now.

More is not always better

When I reconnected with old school mates after thirty years--many of them were "lifers" like me at that school--I got updated not only about them but also about some of those who were senior or junior to our batch. One, who went to a prized engineering college--IIT at Madras--apparently chose to go back to work at the same industrial township where we spent all our childhood.  He decided he was content with that and didn't want anything else that most of us chase after--working in exotic locations, earning fat paychecks, being at prestigious firms, ...

"I now think that I should perhaps have done what he did" lamented one, who made it clear that he was not leading a happy life but was stuck with it anyway.

Blogging about happiness and contentment is not anything new here.  I suppose I often return to this theme only because I think people do not think through this as they go through the process of college degrees and careers and incomes and travel and everything else.  Thus, unlike that school mate who opted to work at a place that was "beneath" the prestige of the university from where he had graduated, most people I interact with try to "rise up" to higher and higher levels.  As they continue with the rising, at some point, they realize that they are way past the stages when they were the happiest.

Why don’t people stop rising when they are happy?

Arthur Brooks raises that question in his NY Times column.

Because we are built to think that more is better — more power, authority, money and responsibility. So we incorrectly infer that promotions will equal greater satisfaction. In an economy that has left so many people behind in recent years, this might seem like a nice problem to have. But it is a problem nonetheless, as recent research clearly demonstrates.

My only quibble there is with how Brooks presents it: " we are built to think that more is better."  I am not sure whether we are built that way; I suspect that this is a modern phenomenon.  But, either way, we are incorrect to think that more is better.

So ... ?

Does this suggest quitting and joining the Peace Corps? Not necessarily. In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita, “The renunciation of work and work in devotion are both good for liberation. But, of the two, work in devotional service is better than renunciation of work.” In other words, even better than renouncing your exalted position is converting it into a source of personal liberation by devoting it to the good of others.

Earlier today, I was telling the friend that in my profession, I know I am doing two kinds of service--one to students, and another to taxpayers because I work at a public university.  Thus, I have always felt, believed, that my job is not about me nor is it about my atrociously unprofessional colleagues.  I believe that a clear understanding of my role--as serving others--is why I am largely happy and content despite those who protect themselves "with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees" and demean and discredit what I do.

People seem to have a twisted notion that "service" means spending a day with the litter patrol or helping at the soup kitchen or any of those kinds of activities.  That is a bizarre understanding of what service means.  To me, service is what we do everyday--at our work, with our friends and family, to strangers (like at the soup kitchen,) and even to the backyard squirrel.  Service is an understanding that life is not merely about me.

Citing researchers, Brooks writes:

[Everyone], in every industry, affects the lives of co-workers, supervisors, customers, suppliers, donors or investors. How often do we spend our morning commute thinking consciously about how to make their lives better through our work? What if we made this as routine as our morning coffee?

To serve is that simple.  And in order to that, one does not need to focus on more, more, and more.  And one does not have to focus on how to keep rising either.