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.

Source

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? ;)

Stress Valley

Despite a booming economy, pleasant climate and natural treasures, nearly two-thirds of Bay Area residents say the quality of life here has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll.

No wonder people working there get paid a lot as compensation for the misery.

Apparently people love money and fleeting fame so much that they have made quite a deal with the devil!  And even the people who don't have money don't want to leave, which makes no sense to me.

Meanwhile, The New York Times notes that the Silicon Valley's very-important-people seem to be obsessed with the virtue of suffering.

They sit in painful, silent meditations for weeks on end. They starve for days — on purpose. Cold morning showers are a bragging right. Notoriety is a badge of honor.

Madness, my friends, madness this is!

I have often joked with students that if I wanted to starve and not have hot showers, well, I could have easily stayed back in a poor village in India ;)

So, the Valley's very-important-people are turning to ... Stoicism?  WTF?

Stoicism has been the preferred viral philosophy “for a moment” for years now — or two decades, by one count. The topic of Stoicism usually comes up in the Valley in terms of the maintenance of the personal life. Start-ups big and small believe their mission is to make the transactions of life frictionless and pleasing. But the executives building those things are convinced that a pleasing, on-demand life will make them soft. So they attempt to bring the pain.
“We’re kept in constant comfort,” said Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, in an interview on Daily Stoic, a popular blog for the tech-Stoic community. Mr. Rose said he tries to incorporate practices in his life that “mimic” our ancestors’ environments and their daily challenges: “This can be simple things like walking in the rain without a jacket or wearing my sandals in the December snow when I take the dog out in the mornings.”

Seriously, these are the nutcases that are shaping our collective future through hi-tech?

Why Stoicism?

Ada Palmer is a professor of early modern history at the University of Chicago and a novelist. Her books are popular in Silicon Valley, and she often visits for dinners with tech workers.
“It’s very interesting to see their sort of sad lethargy,” Dr. Palmer said. “When you’re 37, rich, retired and unhappy, it’s very perplexing.”

"Sad lethargy." There is a cure for that--go do something that connects you with real humans.

Are you stressed?

As one who has always loved puns, when a younger person recently talked about being stressed, I couldn't help sharing with her a neat word play with "stressed."

It all depended on how one looked at "stressed."  From the last letter to the first, it is nothing but "desserts."

Apparently there is a more serious connection between stressed and desserts--there is a "desire for chocolate and other carbs during tough times."  But why so?

It is all because of one organ. 

No, not that organ; you and your dirty mind!  I am referring to the brain, of course:

Although our brain accounts for just 2 percent of our body weight, the organ consumes half of our daily carbohydrate requirements—and glucose is its most important fuel. Under acute stress the brain requires some 12 percent more energy, leading many to reach for sugary snacks.

But, what if one is chronically stressed, which then makes them eat all the time?

Often the only way out of such eating habits is to leave a permanently stressful environment. So although many tend to be hard on themselves for eating too many sweets or carbs, the reasons behind such craving aren’t always due to a lack of self-control and might require a deeper look into lifestyle and stressful situations—past and present. Once the root cause of stress addressed, eating habits could ultimately resolve themselves.

Eating is not always just about the eating.  And not eating can also cause problems:

If a person craves chocolate in the afternoon, I advise him or her to eat chocolate to stay fit and keep his or her spirits up. That’s because at work people are often stressed and the brain has an increased need for energy. If one doesn’t eat anything, it’s possible the brain will use glucose from the body, intended for fat and muscle cell use, and in turn secrete more stress hormones. Not only does this make one miserable, it can also increase the risk of heart attacks, stroke or depression in the long run. Alternatively, the brain can save on other functions, but that reduces concentration and performance.

Yup, have a dessert if that's what can straighten you up every once in a while.  But, if you are leaning on desserts every time, maybe you need to look at what the stress agents are, and change them for the better.

Why am I stress-free? From slow food to slow reading to just being slow!!!

Way back, when I had hair on my head, and when it was black, and when my beard had nothing but a few strands of grey, there were quite a bit of discussions on the Slow Food movement.  Ok, quite a bit is an exaggeration because nobody in the real world that I interacted with had any freaking notion of the movement itself.  As with most other ideas, the skeptic that I am, I did not become any fanatical follower; even though I love creating tasty food in the kitchen, I don't always start at step one.

There is a lot to be said about slowing down.  Whether it is on the road, or in the kitchen, or even on the bike path, a slower and an observing approach that leads to introspection is a life that is immensely richer than rushing through life when the destination is all the same for the every single one of us.  But then,of course, this atheist also knows that there is nothing beyond that ultimate destination, which means, well, go ahead and live a life that suits you well--as long as you don't bug me about it ;)

For most of us, one of the pleasures in life, especially back when we were kids came from reading.  Reading for pleasure.  Reading for entertainment.  And serious reading too.  But, in the age of rushing around, even uninterrupted reading has become as rare as people cooking at home.  Ok, I am exaggerating, again, but, hey, what's life if we don't exaggerate!  Those who love fishing tell tall tales about their catch.  We men exaggerate about the size of the very thing that dangles freely from our bodies.  And women exaggerate about, well, every damn thing! ;)

But, seriously, how we read--and, therefore, think--is changing and changing rapidly.  How often do you read completely immersed in the content like how you used to as a young teenager?  Right?  It won't surprise you, therefore, to know that a few want to slow down in order to read slowly. Like the Slow Food movement with food.

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore.

The set of words at the end of that quote is the key issue: "after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore."  We are so distracted that we have pretty much lost the ability to make it through a book.  Heck, even making it through an article in the New Yorker.

Hey, you are still reading this?  Good for you.  Quite an achievement; congratulate yourself! ;)

You can, therefore, imagine the frustrations of a typical student in my classes, or in other classes too where students have to read a lot.  To read without distractions so that they can think about the issues.  To read and think so that they can then put together convincing arguments.

Did you read about the benefits of slow reading?  From my own life, I can attest to every one of those--except "enriches vocabulary."  Big and fancy words stump me for I am no sesquipedalian ;)

So, here is a weekend assignment for you.  Shut off the phone, computer, television, radio, and everything else that could interrupt you.  Pick up something you had always wanted to read, or would enjoy reading.   Head to your favorite spot at home.  Read uninterrupted for at least thirty minutes.

There is always a chance that you will begin to like that so much that you won't come back to this blog ever.  That is a risk I will gladly take.  Because, I know that you are one damn lazy reader who won't shut the devices off for even thirty minutes and read a damn book.  See you are still reading this, aren't you? ;)