A former professor speaketh

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”

Think about that.

The person who articulated that for all of us? 

e.e. cummings.

I doubt that most of us are born with the courage to grow up to be who we really are.  Most of us are the cowardly lions of the Wizard of Oz.  Somewhere we have to pick up that courage.

Where?

Education.

In a real education, institutions and educators will emphasize “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”

I wish!

Increasingly, it does not work that way though.

Even we individuals apparently do not care to become better people.  We are most fascinated with those who have built "better mousetrap" who are also the ones who have made money from those mousetraps.  We are making it increasingly clear that a moneyed person is much more important and valuable than a better person.

Such an attitude gets reflected in education too.  In college, it is all about the better mousetrap.  College has stopped being the place where students gain the courage to find out who they really are and to then live that life with happiness and contentment.

Is it any wonder then why students are unhappy.  There is a growing body of evidence that students are unhappy.  And in the adult world, anxiety and angst seem to dominate over happiness and contentment.  Yet, we have a lot more educated population today than ever before.  The two sides of the ledger don't balance well.

“I think students are looking for meaning,” Peter Salovey, president of Yale, told Quartz at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Of course they are looking for meaning.  But, apparently most educators don't care.

Increasingly, we run into graduates feeling intense burnout only a few years into their "real" lives outside college.  They begin to wonder, and worry, if what they do is not fulfilling, then what?

If only we had equipped them with the ability to prepare for life with a meaning, that provided them with happiness that is intangible!

Oh well ... I tried to do the best that I could.  Now, the countdown to the end date has been set by my managers.  In a matter of months, I will be referred to as "a former professor."

Such is life!

The highly improbable fact of being alive

Forget everything.  Clear your mind.

And then read the following:

A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch came from the third planet out from a G-type star, 25,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way, itself located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. On the night of the launch, the sky was clear, with no precipitation or wind, and the temperature was 292 degrees by the absolute temperature scale. Local intelligent life forms cheered the launch. Shortly before the blastoff, the government agency responsible for spacecraft, named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote in the global network of computers: “We are looking at a gorgeous night to launch the Kepler observatory on the first-ever mission dedicated to finding planets like ours outside the solar system.”

Usually, a scientist doesn't write like that.  But, Alan Lightman is no ordinary scientist.  He is one of the few alive who is a master in science and literature.  An established physicist, he has also authored six novels among other writings.  Like in the essay that I refer to in this blog post from more than 5 years ago, Lightman weaves science and the humanities so well that even those of us who barely know any science or literature can easily follow along.

When people glibly tell kids that they can be whatever they want to be, I can't but help wonder if any kid can become an expert in both science and literature.  Can any kid be whatever they want to be?  Seriously?

But, I digress.

In that paragraph, which is how this essay begins, Lightman imagines that the "account might have been written by an intelligent life form located on exactly the kind of distant planet that Kepler would soon begin to search for."

Is there life outside our own planet?  We do not have proof.  But, the probability is high that we are not the only life forms, and not the only intelligent ones either.  "With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life" if something like 10% of stars have a habitable planet in orbit."

So, on one hand, it might seem like life in the universe is not rare.  But, Lightman makes us think in another manner, which I find fascinating:

I have estimated that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is roughly one-billionth of one-billionth. Here’s a way to visualize such a tiny fraction. If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is a single grain of sand on that desert. How should we think about this extreme rarity of life?

How should we think about this extreme rarity?

[If] we can manage to get outside of our usual thinking, if we can rise to a truly mind-bending view of the cosmos, there’s another way to think of existence. In our extraordinarily entitled position of being not only living matter but conscious matter, we are the cosmic “observers.” We are uniquely aware of ourselves and the cosmos around us. We can watch and record. We are the only mechanism by which the universe can comment on itself. All the rest, all those other grains of sand on the desert, are dumb, lifeless matter.

I wish I could require students to read this essay and comment on it as a requirement for successfully completing liberal education.  I wish!

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us

I think about death a lot.  Not because I am pathologically obsessed with dark thoughts; far from that.  Death being inevitable is not an existential crisis either.  Thinking about the coming death--of parents,family, friends, myself--provides clarity about the life that I want to live.  In many ways, death gives meaning to life, which otherwise is absurd!

Thus, the blog-posts in plenty about death.  Read them carefully, and you will find that the posts are not about death per se, but are my thoughts on how to live one's life. Whether it is about visiting with parents or not burdening the children, that clarity results from an understanding that we all have expiration dates that we carry; thankfully, those dates are hidden from us.

Of course, most of us do not want to die.  If only we can live a little bit longer.  Extending life has been a quest, I suppose, ever since humans started thinking.  Like the Tom Cruise character in Vanilla Sky, we have all been mumbling or yelling "ellie", by which he is referring to LE--Life Extension.  Over the past 200 years,  we have dramatically increased the average life expectancy at birth, and reduced the chances of dying from ailments that easily killed our ancestors.  We even defeated small pox, and rounded up the last of the virus into test tubes that are in secure locations!

Yuval Noah Harari writes about all these and more in the context of the novel coronavirus.  Harari raises an important question:

When the vaccine is indeed ready and the pandemic is over, what will be humanity’s main takeaway?

That question is practically a Rorschach Test.  How you answer it says a lot about how you think about life and death, and the meaning of your existence.

Harari writes:

In all likelihood, it will be that we need to invest even more efforts in protecting human lives. We need to have more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses. We need to stockpile more respiratory machines, more protective gear, more testing kits. We need to invest more money in researching unknown pathogens and developing novel treatments. We should not be caught off guard again.

We will, of course, do all that.  Maybe we will even reduce our military by a couple of stealth bombers and instead use that money to stockpile on medical masks.  We will throw as much resources that we can into LE.

But, shouldn't we also spend some to help us all deal with the mystery of our existence?  The puzzle that haunts us?  As Harari notes: "We have to own up to our transience."

Neither Harari nor I imagine that humans will take up that question of our fleeting existence.

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

We will waste yet another opportunity that presents itself as a crisis.  Colleges will further decimate the humanities, and instead invest more in science and technology!

Harari ends his essay with this:

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us. But they can buy us some more time to grapple with it. What we do with that time is up to us.

Up to us.

I know what we will do with the time: Watch sports, porn, baking shows, ... everything other than owning up to our transience and making sense of this absurd life!

Searching for meaning behind the coronavirus? Don't!

"We are meaning-haunted creatures."

A remarkably well-phrased sentence, which I quoted in this post about a year ago.  In a less philosophical manner, and in a way that would easily appeal to students, I have often remarked in classes that we want narratives that seem to explain whatever it is that we are curious about, or even afraid of.  We have narratives that explain how the universe came about, how life was created, what happens after we die, and anything that puzzles us.

We are now in a pandemic moment.  The meaning-haunted creatures we are, well, we wonder whether there is a larger purpose behind the coronavirus.  Why is this happening, and why now?

A few days ago, an old friend forwarded me an email that had plenty to think about for "those of you trying to make sense of why nature is putting us through the current pandemic."  I disagreed with the premise in that original email; to me, there is no purpose behind this pandemic, nor is nature trying to teach us anything.  I wrote to him:

Viruses, for instance, have always terrorized humans, even when we lived a lot more respectfully of nature.  Even when we absolutely worshiped nature.   All over the world, for hundreds of years, people were afraid of the small pox, and prayed to every god and saint and mysterious forces.  Modern science eradicated small pox.  There is the HIV virus. Dengue. ... the list of deadly virsues is long, to which COVID-19 is the latest addition.

Nature is.  The cosmos is. The virus is.  They exist.  That is it.  There is no grand reason.  As this NY Times essay puts it, the current pandemic has no purpose either.

But then we are meaning-haunted creatures.  Which is why:

Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.

If only we accepted and operationalized something that is fundamental: "Nature doesn’t care about you."  But, we mostly don't.  "Against the frightening neutrality of nature, we humans marshal the powerful imagination."  And from that imagination we construct meanings.

It is all part of a Darwinian natural selection, and the struggle to continue to live.  Whether it is bacteria or viruses or spiders or fish or elephants or humans, it is a struggle to survive against the odds.  Going extinct is not wired into us, but adapting to survive is.  We humans also adapt and survive and fight one battle after another.  We Homo Sapiens have made it thus far because of remarkable brains that have made many things possible.  It has been a phenomenal run thus far.

As a naturalist, I resist the theological version of human exceptionalism, but as a philosopher, I’m inclined to recognize that nothing has intrinsic value until we humans imagine it so. Since we cannot find our species’ value objectively by looking at the neutral laws of nature, then we must just assert it. And simply affirm that the universe is more remarkable with us in it.

Nature does not care about us humans.  We humans--not tRump or the Republicans or the Chinese--want to be here, and we humans will make every effort to defeat the damn coronavirus and anything else that comes our way!

Natural lies

I often comment that I read random stuff that interests me.  I do. And they do interest me. A lot.

There is one thing that I do with this randomness that makes it all worthwhile.  I connect that randomness to other randomness and make meaning out of it all.  I mean, isn't that what life itself is about?  We make meaning out of randomness. (A reminder that I do not believe in the meaning of life that the religious subscribe to.)

The randomness is about things mundane and profound.  We forget that there is a lot to be learnt from the mundane too.  After all, even the everyday absurd life is mostly about the mundane, right?

Consider this:

Strawberries and raspberries aren't really berries in the botanical sense.

It is mundane. But, does it not upend our understanding of berries?

Sometimes, in life too, it is a simple revelation, a truth, that compels us to rethink our estimate of people, history, whatever.  The mundane is never really about the mundane itself.

More about this berry berry interesting aspect of berries:

[Berries] are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them an aggregate fruit. True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds. Tomatoes fall into this group, as do pomegranates, kiwis and—believe it or not—bananas. (Their seeds are so tiny it's easy to forget they're there.)

At this point, if you are like me who is botanically challenged, we are left dazed that "bananas are berries and raspberries aren't."

If you wonder how I end up reading such random stuff ...

I ran into a parenthetical sentence in this essay on natural foods: (Yes, technically bananas are berries.)

I stopped right there, stunned that bananas are berries.  How could one not be stunned with that revelation!  Scientifically speaking, even tomatoes and cucumbers are berries.  Up is down, and right is left ;)

Making meaning out of randomness is hard work.  It is far easier to believe in a narrative and never question even a random event or idea that is inconsistent with our favored narrative. But, such an approach has never appealed to me.  I hope it never will.

I work double shift on Labor Day!

When we adults wake up, we begin to think about what to do that day.  As the poet-extraordinaire Kannadasan wrote in his astounding lyrics for this phenomenal song, காலை எழுந்தவுடன் நாளைய கேள்வி அது கையில் கிடைத்தபின்னும் துடிக்குது ஆவி  (Kaalai Ezhunthavudan Naalaiya Kaelvi | Athu Kaiyil Kidaitha Pinnum Thudikkuthu Aavi), which roughly translates to "After waking up, one ponders about the day | Even if one gets what one wants, the mind remains restless."

We have had to figure out what exactly we want to do with our lives, especially since humans got away from their hunting/gathering existence and invented agriculture. 

Not being able to figure out the day, when it happens day after day, makes one worry about the more fundamental, existential questions.  Perhaps that is all the more that we report to work, even if it is not the work that we love to do because the alternative sucks and even frightens us.

Even before getting into the engineering program, I worried that I wouldn't enjoy it.  Four years in the program certainly confirmed that.

Working in India upon graduation erased even the tiniest doubts I might have had.  I hated waking up in the morning and heading to work.  I barely survived ten weeks in my first job, and then it was a quite a few months before I took up my second one, in which I didn't even last a month.  After a couple more months of "unproductive" existence, which perhaps triggered quite a few heartburn episodes in my parents' lives, I took up another job in which I served the longest--six months!

And then it was off to the US for graduate schooling.

The "work" after graduate school was not one that I had planned on, and I certainly felt ill at ease there, while it certainly paid immensely more than what I currently earn.  But, I was no longer in my early twenties, and being older meant that I had to be more "responsible."  So, I faked my way through those nearly six years.

Lucky breaks I got.

I do not even pretend to my students, however, that they can always get to do whatever they want to do.  I warn them that "you can be whatever you want to be" is more often than not a lie.  A big fat lie. To those who engage me on this topic, I remind them that very, very rarely in life are we able to do whatever we truly enjoy doing, and that they ought to be mentally prepared to simply suck it up and get going.

"Too many of us expect our jobs to give meaning to our lives."  Exactly!

In truth, we can’t be anything we want, nor should we try, because dreams are imprecise, and wants are insatiable. It is far better to focus on what we can do, where we can help. Our duties are a surer guide in life — and we are happier for embracing them.

But, the key is to always keep that dream and passion alive within.

Work builds character

Perhaps you are nodding your head in agreement with the title of this post: Work builds character.

Are you sure?

Let's suppose the work is with the mafia.  Does that work build character?  How about as a butcher?  A teacher? A soldier? A ...? You get my point.

Perhaps you then argue that "work builds character" is applicable to young people. To kids. To Teenagers.

If we are what we repeatedly do, well, "to see if work really builds character, then, we need to ask: What do we repeatedly do at work?"

In the first chapter of his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith marvels at the division of labor in a pin factory. He writes that someone who had to perform every step of the pin-making process himself would struggle to make a few pins a day. Put him on a team of ten, though, and assign him only to sharpen the point of every pin that comes down the line, and he can contribute to the manufacture of thousands.⁸But who do you become if you sharpen pinpoints all day long? Do you advance in virtue? Do you attain moral excellence? 

You can now see where this discussion is headed.  Imagine the work that the "cleaners" do every single day as Facebook content moderators.  What character does that build?

So what should we do? Repair the whole rickety heap of our work ideology? Redesign work so that it delivers the dignity, character, and purpose it’s supposed to? Pass laws that limit employers’ control over workers’ bodies and public behavior? Push for transparency regarding the actions workers perform, and establish norms that they specialize less narrowly and have rotating duties? Set humane limits on service work and eliminate the pointless tasks most professionals do during the workday? It wouldn’t hurt to try. These are all worthy short-term goals that would help work in America live up to its promise. But making these changes would likely either reduce productivity or increase costs, leading companies to accelerate the rollout of machine labor in every aspect of their business. The changes would be self-defeating. Eventually, there would hardly be any jobs at all.

What exactly are we working for?

I am not sure if we ask ourselves that question even once.  We seem to have been brainwashed into believing that we have to work, and work is the answer to the question of our existence.  So much so that if we come across a person who cares not about work, but who does not depend on others either, we have only negative things to say about them.

Of course, I am channeling my life here, as I always do in my blog.  I know damn well that I could "work" a lot more than I do.  Instead of playing bridge, I could spend time writing essays. Or even books.  But why?  What for?  The typical response is about fame and fortune.  But, what is the big deal about all that fame and fortune that I might have given up, and am continuing to give up?  What does this say about my "character"?

A few weeks ago, a big-time economist, with plenty of fame and fortune, and with a lot more left in him, died. He committed suicide. I have no idea about what troubled him that severely for him to end his life.  What a tragedy!  Imagine if he had sacrificed a chunk of his fame and fortune, and had worked "only" as a high school teacher, and enjoyed his life.

We are born. We live. We die. Within this there is work. "We just need meaning, wherever we might find it."  I am confident that work does not offer any meaning to our existence.  It does not build any damn character either!

"True joy is a serious thing"

I came across "true joy is a serious thing" in this wonderful essay on higher education.  On redeeming the liberal arts.

I became a huge fan of the author, Leon Botstein, after reading an essay in The New Yorker that was about him and Bard College that he presides over.  Quite a force he is!

In this recent essay, Botstein writes:

Students entering college ask basic questions about life. They are in search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature. These grand, wide-ranging concerns are not mirrored by the professional or disciplinary divisions of a university. The proper response is not old-fashioned survey courses; rather, courses on issues and problems that probe deeply and draw from more than one discipline are needed. So too are curricular structures that develop, from the first year, a common ground for all students that can enable serious conversation and debate among them. Finally, the sense of excitement and satisfaction derived from the active life of the mind must be nurtured. As Seneca put it, “True joy is a serious thing.” Cultivating that recognition ought to be a basic goal of the liberal arts.

And this exactly what we do not do.  In fact, we do everything possible to kill any innate student interest into inquiring about their place in this world and how to make meaning of their lives.

Higher education has been reduced to a glorified trade school. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with trade schools.  There is a place for trade schools that teach skills, and there is a place for universities that go beyond trade skills.  Trade schools, to their credit, do not suffer from any mission drift and stay focused on the trade.  Universities, on the other hand, have completely lost sight of their mission.  Increasingly, universities even go one step more and systematically transform themselves into becoming glorified trade schools.

Earlier this week, as we engaged in discussions in the classroom, I told students that I want them to  consider learning as personal.  It is not about something in the abstract; instead, it is about them, their lives, their communities, and their country.  I was telling them, without telling them, that education helps them with what Botstein refers to: Find their own answers to in their "search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature."

But then ... yes, you have heard me say this before, nobody listens to me!  When even Botstein has very little influence over all these issues, what chance do I have of being heard!

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!

Life is meaningless. Deal with it!

It is bright, sunny, and warm as I blog about the meaningless life.  That perhaps says something to you. To me, it says nothing. I blog about the meaningless life on sunny days and on dark nights too.  Because, well, life is meaningless. It is absurd!

To me, that is a given. The task is, therefore, to make it worthwhile. It is up to me, up to you, to make life enjoyable. To make us excited to get out of our beds in the morning and let the sunshine in.

The traditional ways of making it worthwhile are rapidly disappearing. Religion. Communities. Children and family. Marriage. Which means, it is increasingly up to individuals to make their lives worth it and enjoyable.  In this, there is only approach--to get out there and do it.  Whatever it is, well, it does not happen by itself.

Two years ago, when my daughter was graduating from college, I asked her if her friends who had not yet found jobs were concerned. “No,” she replied, “they’re not concerned about not having a job, they’re concerned about not having a narrative.”
Here’s the trick. The impressive narratives you see in the lives of the adults you admire emerge only in retrospect. Somehow, each one of them got from twenty, to thirty, to forty, to fifty, to sixty, and whatever the twists and turns of their chosen paths, they, by definition, emerge with a narrative that, looking backwards, connects the dots. More often than not, the narrative has a strong sense of coherence, sometimes, even, an aura of inevitability.

Exactly!  In my teens I had ideas on what would make my life worthwhile. It changed as the years rolled on.  But, I kept doing whatever it was that I did. And, looking back, the dots do connect to a neat narrative. It would be foolish of me to think that where I am today and what I am doing now to make it all worthwhile and enjoyable was exactly what I set out to do when I was in my undergraduate program or even when I joined graduate school.

 So the question is, how do you square the arbitrariness of your first step — or for that matter any given next step you may take along the way — with the goal of finding work over a lifetime that aligns with your deepest interests, brings you joy, and allows you to contribute to purposes larger than yourself?

And the answer is ...?

if you approach whatever work you have chosen with focus and diligence and reflection, you will advance along a path — and it will be one that is authentically yours, not because of the specific steps you have chosen, but because of the way you are making the choices and processing the experiences.

Sincere reflections and conscious decisions. I am confident enough that--and a whole lot of luck--is how I ended up where I am today.  "E.E. Cummings once said, “It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”  Traveling the life of a Tamil Brahmin engineer in America would have been incredibly "safer" path.  But, that would never have been "who you really are."

Pointless jobs

Relaxation, hobbies, raising children or reading a book are dismissed as laziness. That’s how powerful the mythology of work is.

It is strange world in which we live; "the nine-to-five feels like a relic of a bygone era."

Life has become so much about work that I feel I have to defend myself when not working, even though the friend assures me that I am all the time "in my head" and that I need to get out of it!

In the bad old days, workers and prisoners were even be chained to their work.  In these modern times, we have replaced those physical chains with digital tethers.  People work, work, and work all the time through their various digital devices.

And, when they are not working in order to earn for themselves, people are working in order to help gazillionaires make even more money--their interactions via Facebok and WhatsApp and everything else are monetized by the corporations.  Remember, you are their raw material that they mine so that you can be entirely replaced by machines!

What most of us do even now is darn useless. Pointless.  Bullshit jobs.  Which is why we refer to some jobs as "essential services" while most of the rest are, ahem, dispensable to varying degrees.

Soon, there will be such a huge number of useless people that there will be "the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable."

The quest for meaning in work, and meaning in life, will become even more urgent than now. Because, when meaning is not to be found, then you can easily imagine any number of things going wrong in a human's life.  Dystopia looms large without a sense of meaning.

I need to get out of my head and stop working for a while.  Bye for now ;)

In your head

Consider the following paragraph:

Some time ago I went with my six-year-old nephew Matan to hunt for Pokémon. As we walked down the street, Matan kept looking at his smartphone, which enabled him to spot Pokémon all around us. I didn’t see any Pokémon at all, because I didn’t carry a smartphone. Then we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

What a wonderful analogy!  No wonder the author is a celebrated thinker, futurist!

I have quoted the author, Yuval Noah Harari, in a previous blog-post.  I am now all the more convinced that Harari is now my go-to-guy to think about the future.

So, yes, those strange critters are invisible to me because I don't play that game, even though I carry a smartphone.  A technological approach to understanding maya too?  Nah, I don't want to digress.

If it were not for those religious "smartbooks" the stones of Jerusalem will be mere stone and nobody would fight over them.  Of course, this fight over the stones is not a new insight.  What is awesome about Harari's essay--read it in full because I am doing injustice to it by excerpting to tell my own stories--is how he compares religions to multiplayer virtual reality computer games:

What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions of people together? Religions such as Islam and Christianity invent imaginary laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender” and so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination. No natural law requires the repetition of magical formulas, and no natural law forbids homosexuality or eating pork. Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).

Can one get addicted to such a virtual reality game that religion is?  Harari has thought this through:

n Israel, a significant percentage of ultra-orthodox Jewish men never work. They spend their entire lives studying holy scriptures and performing religion rituals.

Talk about game addicts!

Harari's essay is awesome.  Lemme say it again--read the entire essay.  Do not base your thoughts on whatever I have excerpted for my own selfish reasons.

Harari's point is that in the near future, when computers/AI will make more and more among us unemployable--the useless class, as he calls them--sophisticated video games will keep them busy and entertained, just like how religions have forever kept humans busy and addicted.

Harari ends the essay with quite a flourish:

In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Eighteenth-century English country squires, present-day ultra-orthodox Jews, and children in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.
But what about truth? What about reality? Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.

It is all in our imagination!  It is maya!

Food for thought

Having a few people around the dinner table is always a wonderful learning opportunity for me--to understand how human I am and, therefore, how much I prove that to err is human.  I never fail to err, it turns out.  I suppose that unlike that guy with a pointy cap, I am not infallible ;)

Getting together with people is about more than food, of course.  But, does the food have to be home-cooked?  Do people consider that as a waste of time?

I recall a husband teasing his wife at a party that the kitchen in their home is the most expensive room with all the fancy upgrades they had made, because now they were eating out more than before.  She immediately put him in his place with a sharp comeback.  The rest of us experienced quite an awkward moment.  We men, believing we are funny, easily connect our feet and mouths.  I suppose it is best for the males not to talk at dinners, whether or not the food is home-cooked ;)

Of course, cooking and food are not new questions.  Not new to this blog, where Soylent has been featured in more posts than I would like to.  But, seriously, how many of us would completely opt out of cooking if we could?

Take my favourite example, from a ground-breaking, obsessively detailed ethnography of the material culture of 32 middle-class Los Angeles households based on research conducted at UCLA between 2001 and 2005. In the resulting book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (2012), the authors note that when families in the study cooked weekday dinners from fresh, rather than pre-packaged, ingredients, it took only 10 to 12 minutes longer, on average, than preparing a convenience-food meal. Nonetheless, most of the parents in the study cite time scarcity as the reason they rely on frozen pizza, boxed macaroni-and-cheese, microwave dinners and takeout for two-thirds of their family’s weeknight meals.

Interesting, right?  As I read that, I was thinking about my latest restaurant experience.  Time to drive to the restaurant and then the time driving back.  The waiting time. The time it takes for the food to arrive.  It is not as if eating out takes way less time than cooking at home with all the modern convenient gadgets.

"Why, then, is eating convenience food viewed as a timesaving strategy?"

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’

How strange, right?  It comes back to that one thing that I have always argued is what education is fundamentally all about: Thinking.  In this case, the family food preparer can't be bothered with investing the time need to think about what to cook and to, therefore, plan out the sequence of actions.

More than anything else, "food is the primary means by which we embody and enact our shifting, species-shaping relationship with natural world." We now have more than anecdotal evidence that kids do not know where the food comes from.  My favorite on this is a news report a few years ago on how a bunch of elementary school kids were "traumatized" when their teacher explained how Elsie becomes the hamburger that they like.

Oh well ... I suppose the only advantage with not cooking is this: There won't be dishes to clean.  I now head to the kitchen to wash those pots and pans.  Poor me!

Homo Deus is a threat to our souls

I was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog--in its various avatars at different places.  I checked in with his blog every day, just like I did with, say, the New York Times.  I liked to find out what he had to say especially because of the unique intersection of his various attributes that we normally do not expect: An immigrant, with a PhD from Harvard, deeply committed to Catholicism, gay, a Republican ...  And, he was on the forefront of blogging.  I can safely bet that he was the pioneer in the kind of public-intellectual blogging that we now take for granted--and he even made money from it!

And then, one day, just like that, he pulled the plug.  He closed shop.  He went away.

The digital/intenet life of "living-in-the-web" nearly killed him.  Literally.

In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

So, why did Sullivan keep doing that?

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve.

And what was the problem with this?  A problem more than the health effects?

The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

Sullivan realized that he used to be a real human being before this life on the web.  And even worse, he did not know how to get back to being a real human being.

I read his essay a few days ago and I put it aside.  I was drawn to it a second time because a student in my class tweeted about it.  It is one awesome class; more on that some other time.

In many, many ways, technology is rapidly redefining our lives even before we have even had a minute or two to think about the changes.   Today is not anything like yesterday, and tomorrow will be even more different.  Even if you want to call a time-out to pause, well, it is not as if there is one person whose foot is on the accelerator and we can request that person to instead step on the brakes.

Continuing along this path of no return threatens "humanity"--as in what it means to be human.  This book-review essay notes:

The next great stage of our evolution has begun. But what will our successes look like – and will they be that different to us?

At the recent conference, when having breakfast with two retired geographers, I told them that virtual interactions are rapidly diluting, eliminating, an important attribute--empathy.  The face-to-face interactions through which we truly understand the other and the other's feelings are now rare.  The less we have real world meaningful interactions, the less empathy we will have, I told them.

Sullivan writes:

Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

In my classes, for the first time ever, this term I have made it clear to students--right in the syllabus--that I will not permit any use of laptops or smartphones.  For the nearly two hours that we meet, they have to shut themselves off from the outside world.  I was worried that this might backfire.  But, three weeks in, the trend that is emerging is clear: It is working great.  Students are engaged.  We are actually connecting as humans.

I recognize that my classes and my blog won't make a damn difference in the grand scheme of things.  But, when the time comes, I will assure myself that I gave it my best.

I will have Andrew Sullivan's words wrap up this post:

There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

Money! Money! Money!

The old Soviet system couldn't care a shit about gods; after all, they were implementing the ideas of a thinker who declared that religion was the opium of the masses.  Commies were godless and were anti-market.

The pro-market America was all about god and bible-thumping politicians.  "God bless America" became a mantra that if not faithfully rendered made one a dirty commie.  Can you imagine an American President not concluding a serious address to the nation with a "God bless America"?  It is like how beauty pageant contestants wish for world peace ;)

In that lies an interesting irony. The faith in god requires many beliefs, including that there is a higher purpose to life, with the path leading to god.  The market, on the other hand, is built on the exact opposite idea--there is no purpose to any damn thing.  If you want to sell and if there are buyers for it, the transaction happens.  If you can't sell, you lose.  If you make money out of it, so be it.  The market simply is.  The commies, on the other hand, firmly believed in a political economic system that served a higher purpose.  They were, ahem, religious about it.

Perhaps it would be more consistent if the god-believing "non-commies" designed their political economy in order to serve a higher purpose, while the godless "commies" lives in the anything-goes system.  But, inconsistency is what life is, I guess.

Apparently god likes the purpose-less free market of anything, and cursed the godless "higher purpose" commies to collapse ;)

The sudden death of the command and control Soviet economy features a lot in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time.  One of the people, who talks to the author dropped out of the university after his second year, says "the market became our university ... Maybe it's going too far to call it a university, but an elementary school for life, definitely."

I feel sorry for my parents because they were told flat out that they were pathetic sovoks whose lives had been wasted for less than a sniff of tobacco, that everything was their fault, beginning with Noah's Ark, and that now, no one needed them anymore.  Imagine working that hard, your whole life, only to end up with nothing.  All of it took the ground out from underneath them, their world was shattered; they still haven't recovered, they couldn't assimilate into the drastically new reality.  My younger brother would wash cars after class, sell chewing gum and other junk in the subway, and he made more money than our father--our father was a scientist. A PhD! ... This was how capitalism came into our lives ...

Whether or not we believe in gods and religions, every one of us--consciously or subconsciously--attempt to create a meaning for the insanely short times that we have in this cosmos.  When that meaning is shattered, the existential crisis becomes unbearable.  When people here in the US suddenly lose their jobs for no fault of theirs, the existential struggle is as real as the Russian PhD who was not needed anymore.  The tragedy is that the pro-market but god-believing people, who vastly outnumber us infidels, rarely want to spare a dime and help ease that existential struggle of the "losers."  But then that's what the "free market" is all about, I suppose.

Hit the road, (Union) Jack

For all the angry anti-colonialist that I am, even I can't believe that I am cheering Britain.  Cheering for Britain to exit the European Union.  Brexit, Brexit, Brexit!

This New York Times report sets up the context:

underlying all the dire predictions of doom — that staying or going will cause Britain to fall apart in various apocalyptic ways — is a deeper emotional issue that speaks to the country’s sense of self. Who does it think it is, and where does it think it belongs? Has it ever felt like it’s part of Europe?

It is a "deeper emotional issue" about whatever it is that provides value to people.  In the brief time that we get to live on this beautiful planet, we handle our existential crisis in so many different ways.  We try to answer the question of "who am I?" through many affiliations and ideas,  When people search for meaning, there are different institutions that provide them with comfort.  Even though I seem to be getting more convinced about my evidence-based atheistic framework, I do not go about criticizing what people believe in their respective faiths because I understand--and appreciate--how their religious beliefs help them with making meaning of their existence.  And especially about that great certainty that awaits all of us, irrespective of the beliefs.

The political identity also plays an important role. While I personally and intellectually recognize that the political identity is a freakish accident--being born in a country--it is very much like the accident of being born in a family that practices a particular religion, speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, listens to particular music, ... All these accidents together help with understanding our own place in the cosmos.

We err when we conclude that those institutions that give us various identities are irrelevant.  It is a huge mistake to force people into behaving as one.  It was along these lines that I blogged two years ago about Scotland's (failed) effort to break free; I wrote then:

We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out how to understand each other and engage in constructive cross-cultural relationships even while holding on to the identities and without making those identities as a metric for hierarchical comparisons.  The solution is not to erase the identities but to understand that we can create a much better future even as we tightly embrace whatever identity that we want to hold on to.

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!

The whole is more than the sum of its parts

A few years ago, a student who was apparently intrigued by my interpretation of economic geography came to my office to chat with me.  He was a non-traditional student who was also a naturalized citizen after his formative years in a large South American country where the Iberian Romance language is not Spanish.  (How about that for a clue, eh!)

We freely talked about a whole bunch of topics.  Including abortion.  He was opposed to it, he said, and added that he was a born-again Christian.  He asked me where I stood on this issue.

When people ask me, especially when we have established our interests in constructive discussions, well, I have no hassles sharing my thoughts.  I told him the long version.

During my internship way back when I was in graduate school, during a lunch time walking around in downtown Los Angeles, I came across a pro-life (anti-abortion) rally.  It suddenly clicked in me that I was neither in the pro-life camp and nor was I in the pro-choice camp.  To me, aborting a fetus is murder, yes.  Because, pregnancy is the only way we know how to create a human life.  Until science figures out some other process, abortion means terminating a life.

However, it is justifiable homicide even well into a woman's pregnancy.  If she decides to terminate the pregnancy late in the second trimester, yes, she has the right to do so.  Women choose to do it because they know that is the best possible outcome.  Who am I to say otherwise.  I cannot imagine the emotional decision-making process that a pregnant woman goes through.  "Imagine" is important here--given that I am a male who has no idea about what it means to be pregnant and, that too, unexpectedly.

Of course, that student was completely taken aback with such a view.  Especially because he knew that I am an atheist.  But, to me, such a stand is not anything strange.  As I often write here, all these are a part of a drive to understand what the point of my existence is.  The meaning of life.  In these contexts, I am, therefore, almost always saying yes to Camille Paglia, like in the following:

Although I am an atheist who worships only great nature, I recognize the superior moral beauty of religious doctrine that defends the sanctity of life.

I truly cherish and value the sincere sanctity of life arguments that sincere practitioners offer.  They--not many there are who are sincere--and I are fellow-travelers in the quest to understand the meaning of life though our preoccupation with the meaning is from different perspectives.

I like the way Paglia concludes as well:

A liberal credo that is variously anti-war, anti-fur, vegan, and committed to environmental protection of endangered species like the sage grouse or spotted owl should not be so stridently withholding its imagination and compassion from the unborn.

If only we can de-link the cheap politics from such profound discussions!

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 ;)