(Thanks for sharing this, Gary.)
Message of the Week Clay Stauffer Guest columnist The Tennessean Sept. 14, 2025
I have been teaching moral leadership at Vanderbilt University since 2019. My courses tend to focus on topics like happiness, fulfillment, values, emotional intelligence, and the quest for a meaningful life. I want my students to reflect upon what it means to live a moral life that seeks to make a positive difference in the world. How will they make big decisions? Which values matter most? How will they approach the world regardless of their chosen career path? What will sustain them when they face disappointment, tragedy and hard times?
In his classic book 'The Happiness Hypothesis,' Jonathan Haidt identifies three different theories of human happiness. The first theory is called the 'Progress principle:' Happiness comes from success and acquisition. This principle clearly dominates our consumer culture. We feel that we will be happier if we make more money, buy a nicer car, a bigger house, or more toys. But remember the timeless words of Ecclesiastes: 'I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.' (Ecc 2:11) So many of the material things we chase provide temporary satisfaction... (continues at Nashville Tennessean)
Otroversion seems to be the condition Groucho Marx declared: unwillingness to join any club that would have someone like him for a member...
Feel like you don’t belong? Crave emotional independence? Constantly come up with original ideas? Like Frida Kahlo, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein, you could have a distinct case of otroversion ...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/20/are-you-an-otrovert-why-this-personality-type-could-be-your-greatest-gift
"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture IIIMentioned in Richardson's James bio:
"...The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."
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