Happiness

Sort of like a bank shot in pool/billiards, there's reason to believe that the best way to become happy isn't to try to make yourself happy, but other people. Then happiness likely will circle around and visit you through a back door. This fits with something I failed to mention in my recent post, "After prostate surgery, I try to get some philosophical implications from the experience." Even though I wanted to have the surgery, as the date for it grew closer I had increasing worries about what could go wrong with it, including the prospect that it could make…

"Be all you can be" used to be a long-time recruiting slogan for the United States army. That implied you could be more than you are now, not less, if you enlisted. But there's another way of looking at this. What if being all you can be pointed toward being smaller and less significant than you are now? Before I share some perspectives about this, here's an addendum to my previous blog post, "If God created the universe, why is it so goddamn HUGE?" -- which was a good introduction for the theme of this post. This post by The…

There's nothing wrong with self-improvement. Unless you don't feel like improving your self. As this letter to the editor in the March 23, 2023 issue of New Scientist says, there's good reason to simply accept yourself as the imperfect person that you are (nobody's perfect, for sure), whose life is marked by some stupid decisions and screwups. Fed up with the desire to spin our lives in this way7 January, p 33From Caroline Deforche,Lichterveide, Belgium According to your guide to being your own hero, psychologists say we should spin our memories "into a well-told life narrative" to "help us achieve…

Time for some grandiose thinking, an activity I excel at. Not that my grandiosity leads to grand ideas or wisdom, but, hey, it's the grandiose effort that counts. Tonight's Big Ponder is centered on the question, is there a universal method for being happy?  My first reaction was absolutely not. For if there was, seemingly we wouldn't have such a plethora of ways people seek happiness. The "self-help" category on Amazon would shrink to just a small number of books, each advising pretty much the same approach to being happy. Complicating my pondering was another issue.  Is happiness really what…

Most of us have experienced a lot of failures. Probably we feel bad about those. Most of us have some sort of perfectionist tendency. Probably we feel this is a good thing, since it spurs us toward success.  But maybe we should look upon ourselves differently, viewing failure more positively than perfectionism. Here's excerpts from Oliver Burkeman's book, "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." Dome is a reference to the failed Millennium Dome, built as a monument to the dawn of the year 2000. There is an openness and honesty in failure, a down-to-earth confrontation with…

Here's a guest post from myself. It comes from one of my other blogs, HinesSight, where I called it My iron-clad argument to be happy right now, no matter what. Not surprisingly, what I wrote makes a lot of sense to me. After all, one of the greatest gifts we can offer to others is our own happiness. Why? Because it's much more pleasant to be around a happy person rather than someone who isn't happy. Also, life is much bigger than we are, as is the world we live in. We can hope for certain things from life, from…

I've been saying "No lions" to myself quite often the past few days. Not because there aren't any lions in my life, because there also aren't any elephants, black holes, or starfish in my immediate vicinity, and I don't go around commenting on their absence via my inner thoughts. Rather, recently I started reading Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, a book by Robert M. Sapolsky. First published in 1994, it's been updated regularly, with the current 3rd edition coming out in 2004. Naturally I checked the index under "ulcers" to see if Sapolsky talks about the research that implicates H.…

Am I happier since I gave up the fantasy of religion? Probably. It's a big relief to not have a cosmic weight on my back -- the expectation that I need to do this and that, plus that and this, in order to be worthy of being admitted to God's heavenly realm.  That's a lot of pressure, believing that the fate of my supposedly immortal soul rests on whether I've been fortunate enough to find a path that leads to God-realization, and, having hopefully found the right path, on whether my efforts to follow it will meet with success. In…