Mary Oliver’s owlish happiness

Of Owls and Roses: Mary Oliver on Happiness, Terror, and the Sublime Interconnectedness of Life themarginalian.org

Healthy minds, flourishing lives

  

 

POSTSCRIPT. It was pleasing to receive a group email from Dr. Evins of the Honors College, at semester's end, thanking all the faculty participants for their contributions to the Mental Health semester series. These remarks in particular gratified: 

"...It was a really really really good series, thanks to all the wonderful presenters. Truly excellent... Phil touched on so much. He brought the classics and the wisdom of the ages directly to the students in one meta Philosophy lecture. It was powerful. The students will have much to say about the many points he touched on in his lecture. And also about going outside to walk the dog :) ...Also, Tom stood up for cat culture as personal therapy, balancing out Phil very nicely. (My husband is an Epictetus guy. I myself brought Epictetus home from both Phil and Tom.)"

Cat culture? Well, whatever works. 

 

MTSU Honors Lecture Series Spring 2024, here are the links to videos from each lecture; some videos are better than others depending on who was there to be the videographer!, but much was, happily, captured:

1/22 M. Evins, Honors Intro

1/29 Michelle Stevens, MTSU Center for Fairness, Justice, and Equity

2/5 Mary Kaye Anderson, MTSU Counseling Services

2/12 Rudy Dunlap, MTSU Health and Human Performance

2/26 Seth Marshall, MTSU Psychology

3/4 Spring Break – No Classes

3/11 Sarah Harris, MTSU Nutrition and Food Science

3/18 Kent Syler, MTSU Political Science

3/25 Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, Belmont University

4/1 Bill Dobbins, NAMI-TN

4/8 Phil Oliver, MTSU Philosophy

4/15 Honors Student Presentations: Emilie Conners, Eli Ward, Madalyn Dye

4/22 Tom Brinthaupt, MTSU Psychology

Errand of happiness

"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

— Henry James

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Remembering speaking with Dennet in Chicago at the APA February 2020, Told him I appreciated his email correspondence back in the 90s (and then later when I asked if he could arrange a meeting with Dawkins). Sat across the aisle from him listening to Philip Kitcher and Martha Nussbaum at that meeting. 

"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence  is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_c_dennett-thank-goodness

4 foundational harms of the phone-based childhood

"These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework). The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet. The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place. The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality, around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is extremely well studied, and its effects are far reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents. The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or 10 minutes to think without an interruption. There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function. The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products. Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families. When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based."

"The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness" by Jonathan Haidt: https://a.co/eDXALS9

The key factor is commitment

"The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going. There are certainly many online communities that have found ways to create strong interpersonal commitments and a feeling of belonging, but in general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don’t need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills."

"The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness" by Jonathan Haidt: https://a.co/1HWOxQn

The Happiness Curve

The Happiness Curve
By Jonathan Rauch
Narrated by Robert Fass

Listen on Audible:
https://www.audible.com/pd/B077BJ992W?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp

Keep your health

https://www.threads.net/@_stoicteacher/post/C5er_xorptn/?xmt=AQGzjCrNjlYq7WlLHO06gD7-8q3Xauo3l97QmcHxz5elew

"Niksen"

bbcnews

Niksen is a Dutch wellness trend that quite literally means "doing nothing".

It first caught the attention of the world in 2019 as a way to manage stress or recover from burnout.

At the time, many people were complaining about exhaustion and depression caused by overwork and were looking for solutions.

Whereas mindfulness is about being present in the moment, niksen is more about carving out time to just be, letting your mind wander wherever it wants to go.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C5JaNKvMUYZ/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Companions in Misery

 Stay tuned: this philosopher may be coming to deliver an MTSU Lyceum lecture in the near future...

BY MARIANA ALESSANDRI

I had just arrived home from my summer vacation — a week in a Minnesota cabin whose brochure warned “no crabbiness allowed” — when I came upon a study that declared New York the “unhappiest city in America.” I doubt many people were surprised by the results — New Yorkers, both in lore and reality, can be hard to please, and famously outspoken about their grievances — but as a born-and-raised New Yorker, and as a philosopher, I was suspicious of how the study defined happiness.

The survey in question, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked how “satisfied” Americans were with their lives — very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But the National Bureau of Economic Research used the data to conclude things about their “happiness.” Some might not have minded that the terms satisfaction and happiness were used interchangeably, but I did. The study was titled “Unhappy Cities,” and the headlines that followed it came out swinging against New Yorkers.

I was certain that a person (even a New Yorker) could be both dissatisfied and happy at once, and that the act of complaining was not in fact evidence of unhappiness, but something that could in its own way lead to greater happiness.

At times like this I appreciate philosophers’ respect for words, and a number of them have argued to keep happiness separate from satisfaction. In his 1861 essay “Utilitarianism,” John Stuart Mill carefully distinguished between the two, saying that a person can be satisfied by giving the body what it craves, but that human happiness also involves motivating the intellect. This means that happiness and satisfaction will sometimes conflict, and that those of us who seek happiness, and even attain it, may still be dissatisfied. Mill considered this a good thing: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, one of history’s best-known pessimists, also believed there was more to life than satisfaction. Better to honestly describe a negative world, he believed, than to conceal it with beautiful lies. That sounds very New York.

There’s plenty to complain about when living in a big city: overcrowding, potholes, high prices, train delays, cyclists, bees. When I was growing up in Rockaway and schlepping to school in Brooklyn, it was perfectly normal to complain, and almost everyone I knew did. Our complaining was not an indicator of our level of happiness. In my experience outside the city, however, people routinely misinterpret my casual expressions of dissatisfaction as unhappiness. They consider complaining to be a sign of negativity, which they think should be replaced with positivity in order to be happy. “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is an example of this ubiquitous, if banal, attitude.

When I relocated to Texas, I quickly learned that kvetching about rain was no longer socially acceptable. “We need it!” became my new small-talk response to rain to avoid being dubbed a Debbie Downer. In a world where cheerfulness is applauded and grumpiness frowned upon, those who express dissatisfaction are often politely bullied to “look on the bright side” of rotten things.

In a less insufferable way, the ancient Stoics also proposed that we stop complaining, that we minimize negative emotions like sadness and anger in order to maximize joy, tranquillity and peace of mind. The former set will lead to a miserable life while the latter will lead to a good life “in accordance with nature.” They believed that misery is rooted in trying to control things that are out of our hands (wealth, honors and reputation) instead of working on those things that we do have control over (desires, aversions and opinions).

In his “Enchiridion,” Epictetus, the Greek Stoic and former slave, presents complaining, too, as pointless because it’s based on a mistaken belief that we can control the uncontrollable. Many people today agree that complaining is useless and “won’t get you anywhere.” This predominant attitude assumes that something is only useful if it can change the hard facts. My husband, for instance, recently told my toddler that crying in the car was useless because it wouldn’t get us home any faster. And people similarly tell me that it’s pointless to worry and complain about things that are out of my hands. They must think, like the Stoics, that when I finally understand and accept this, I will agree that worrying and complaining are useless.

But what if my worrying and complaining aren’t an attempt to change the laws of nature? Can it be that my negativity is still useful, that it can get me somewhere?

The 20th-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno didn’t recommend banishing the negative emotions or “keeping on the sunny side of life.” In “The Tragic Sense of Life” he described his anxiety over the prospect that there might be no afterlife, adding that he failed to understand people who had not once been similarly tormented by this or by the certainty of their own death.

Unamuno believed that a life worth living consists in communing with others, and that this happens most genuinely through negativity. In “My Religion,” Unamuno wrote: “Whenever I have felt a pain I have shouted and I have done it publicly” in order to “start the grieving chords of others’ hearts playing.” For Unamuno, authentic love is found in suffering with others, and negativity is necessary for compassion and understanding. If we try to deny, hide or eradicate the negative from our lives, we will be ill-equipped to deal with people who are suffering.

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COMPLAINING is useful, but we must first shatter and rebuild what “useful” means. My son is not crying in the car to get home faster; he is crying because he is trapped. When I get trapped in crummy situations I too cry, whine, complain. I get it out. I vent. I do these things because they are useful, but not the kind of useful that people usually have in mind. Usefulness doesn’t exclusively mean undoing what we don’t like about our situation; it can also mean dealing with our situation creatively. I use negativity both to change myself — to release disappointment, anger and frustration — and more important, to connect with others.

Complaining is part of our daily expression, one way that New Yorkers bond with one another. In addition to, and perhaps even more often than exchanging pleasantries, we also exchange dissatisfactions. In all of these spontaneous interactions, we acknowledge one another’s existence. Two strangers complaining on a subway platform can end up cracking a smile or laughing, and though it would hardly be considered the beginning of a lifelong friendship, it is still neighborly. Just because the topic of conversation is negative rather than positive doesn’t mean we are unhappy, and oftentimes the opposite is the case. A funny complaint from the person next to me can quickly lighten my mood, and hers. But the possibility of someone’s being a happy complainer gets lost when we equate dissatisfaction with unhappiness.

From the outside, the image of dissatisfied and complaining New Yorkers might seem to exemplify Schopenhauer’s portrait of humans as prisoners “paying the penalty of existence.” Penal imagery is neither rare nor new in philosophy. Plato called us prisoners to our bodies. The Stoics and Camus condemned us to our fate; Sartre to our freedom. But Schopenhauer’s portrait of us as broken beings sentenced to life together leads him to ethics instead of individualism. Instead of twisting free from our fellow inmates, Schopenhauer suggests that we stay put and serve our sentence collectively.

His account of others as “fellow-sufferers” in “On the Sufferings of the World” encourages us to nurture a soft spot for even the most flawed individuals. That we are all condemned to the same Sisyphean fate ought to make us compassionate instead of competitive, work together instead of in isolation, and rely on one another instead of just ourselves. While Camus, in his well-known essay on the myth, has Sisyphus suffer his punishment alone, Schopenhauer’s account of redemption through shared misery might give Sisyphus, and us, neighbors to love. Still, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” And if Camus can imagine happiness for a man sentenced to an eternity of meaningless toil, perhaps we can do the same for dissatisfied New Yorkers. Whether we are grieving the death of a friend or complaining about alternate-side-of-the-street parking, I think Schopenhauer was right to call us “companions in misery,” with the emphasis on companions.

Mariana Alessandri is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-Pan American.