Young Alan Watts

Alan Watts, born on this day in 1915, was in his twenties and living through the second World War of his lifetime when he wrote this beautiful letter to his parents about living with inner sanity in an insane world:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/12/27/collected-letters-of-alan-watts/

Meaning crisis

What is the number one goal of your life? "Professor of Happiness" @arthurcbrooks says that in the 60s, finding meaning was the number one goal of most college students. Now, it's not even in the top 5 goals! In this conversation Above the Noise with Brooks, he helps you break down why we have lost this search for meaning, as well as the science backed pillars that can help us all find our own deeply meaningful lives!

https://www.threads.net/@thesundaypaper/post/DEfvDrQyShm?xmt=AQGzf9ck9iNu4oKrP1EgcPgZtfPk5cLuHy5BdtSXu-noNA

Burkeman’s imperfectionism

In a world that often demands perfection, it's easy to get caught up in the belief that we need to have everything figured out before we can move forward. But what if we started from a different assumption?

The concept of "imperfectionism," as Oliver Burkeman explains it, invites us to accept that there will always be loose ends, unfinished tasks, and areas for growth - and that's okay.

https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DEXNnhcol4q?xmt=AQGzBj3nd_6GOS04YXhp6bTJ3iU0iJ2NIp_-S-eHakwzdg

Mind cure

"Not to put too glib a gloss on it: there is no denying that the rampant “spread of the movement” was “due to practical fruits,” as William James remarks affably in his 1902 lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Perhaps it did not cure tuberculosis, but what James called “the religion of healthy-mindedness” could not have amassed such a sizable following if it did not help people cope with their daily frustrations. Admittedly, it was helpful only to those already disposed to pathological optimism: James joked that mind cure produced such a militantly cheerful attitude that “complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households.”

But different temperaments require different medicines, and “mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness.” As for the rest of us, those burdened with what James terms a “sick soul,” darker stratagems (prime among them more traditional species of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism) are available. Perhaps because my soul is sick, I cannot share James’s sanguinity about mind cure.

The most charitable thing I can say is that, from a certain point of view, its popularity is understandable. It at least purported to relieve—which meant it at least took seriously—many of the symptoms for which the establishment was equipped to offer nothing but condolences. As the historian Donald Meyer notes in his witty study, The Positive Thinkers, “Statistics on the incidence of diffuse dissatisfactions, unfixed discontent, vague depletion and free-floating unhappiness do not exist.”

We cannot know whether “nervousness” and “neurasthenia” are uniquely modern ailments, but we can and do know that they hardened into acknowledged conditions at the turn of the century. Medieval peasants may have been (indeed, almost certainly were) anxious and unfulfilled in their own way, but it was not until the late 1800s that malcontents understood their complaints as maladies in want of remedy..."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess" by Becca Rothfeld: https://a.co/d9iUwJ4

The light will win

Though possibly not in the present.

This was a good and timely holiday read.

"What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.

I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea. I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.

There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win."

"Creation Lake: A Novel" by Rachel Kushner: https://a.co/9Mc2OTr

Best Happiness books of ‘24?

#14 should be #1

https://open.substack.com/pub/nextbigideaclub/p/24-must-read-happiness-books-of-2024?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

You don’t need a pill: Neo

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness
True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future. — Keanu Reeves

Burkeman’s non-pursuit

"Sometimes it is the very pursuit of happiness that stops us from achieving it"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/negative-thinking-oliver-burkeman/

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

—Viktor Frankl

2,500 years of happiness philosophy, distilled into 3 pillars | Jonny Th...

https://youtu.be/2WShJeNX7W8?si=XVj9sMUXQKmmIEhN

English heritage

That ubiquitous internet attribution to Ben Franklin of the line that beer is proof that God loves us is surely apocryphal.

"His (London) colleagues nicknamed him the Water-American because he refused to partake in the ubiquitous beer drinking: a pint before breakfast, with breakfast, after breakfast, with the midday meal, at six, and a last one before bed. (Franklin preferred Madeira.) Franklin also prided himself on healthy habits…"

— The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss