TED Talks Daily: Why joy is a state of mind | Angélique Kidjo and Femi Oke

Why joy is a state of mind | Angélique Kidjo and Femi Oke
TED Talks Daily

With infectious energy, singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo ties together the threads of her legendary career as a creative force and global activist. In conversation with journalist Femi Oke, she discusses how joy powers her music (and sings an incredible impromptu song), details her work spreading educational opportunities to women and girls across Africa and shares her belief that everybody has the power to tap into their potential.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ted-talks-daily/id160904630?i=1000590408558

A New Formula for Happiness

The happiness we seek can require investing earlier than we think—and may help us align our expectations and reality at the end of life.

...You need to take care of your body like you're going to need it for 100 years. And if you do that, you end up much more likely to be happy, as well as well. And that means exercise. It means eating well. It means when you can, get regular health care. Getting enough sleep.

But the second thing is a little more surprising; at least it was to us. And that's that the people who end up not just the happiest but the healthiest are the people who have more social connections and warmer social connections. Connections of all kinds—not just intimate partners, but friends and work colleagues and casual relationships. All of that adds up to a happier and healthier life as you get older...

 Atlantic

LISTEN 

Happy dissolution

Willa Cather only wrote for two or three hours a day. She said, "If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die," she said. "I make it an adventure every day."

Willa Cather's headstone reads, "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." After her death, poet Wallace Stevens said, "We have nothing better than she is."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-december-7-2022/

Part of something broader

I'm learning this later in life, but happiness comes from having—or else finding or discovering—relationships and/ or groups and/or broader entities (eg humanity, nature, life) that you can learn how you are part of and contribute to. There isn't really anything else. https://infosec.exchange/@Suzyanalyst1/109444367169943664

The Opposite of Schadenfreude Is Freudenfreude. Here’s How to Cultivate It.

…Finding joy in another person's good fortune is what social scientists call "freudenfreude," a German term that describes the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds, even if it doesn't directly involve us. Freudenfreude is like social glue, said Catherine Chambliss, a professor of psychology at Ursinus College. It makes relationships "more intimate and enjoyable."
…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/well/mind/schadenfreude-freudenfreude.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Thinking is pedestrian

"There is time enough for a stream of consciousness that flows at the pace of walking. All the parts of your life, all the time scales, smoosh together. This pace is a mode of being: the walking pace, pedestrian and prosy. Thinking is pedestrian. Aristotle’s Peripatetics: they talked things over while walking around the Lyceum, and their walking helped them to think. They felt that. I like the sweaty huff and puff of the uphill slogs, and the meticulous stepping of downhill, and every other part of walking. Of course I also like the rest stops, and setting camp, making dinner, wandering around, watching the sunset, lying down at night; I even like insomnia if it happens to strike me. I like it all. But what you do most of the day up there is walk. And I like that most of all."

"The High Sierra: A Love Story" by Kim Stanley Robinson: https://a.co/03iIPKF

Insist on happiness

How to give thanks in a screwed-up world

This time of year, despite all sorrows, I try to see the world the way my father did.

...Until mid-November, the daily temperatures in Nashville danced around in the 60s and 70s, even hitting 80 from time to time. There were still a few zinnias left in my pollinator garden, and every warm November day the butterflies found them — a beautiful question mark, several gulf fritillaries and cloudless sulphurs, a couple of monarchs, painted lady after painted lady. Not a leaf left on the maple trees, but the garden was full of painted ladies! I kept going outside to look at them. All day long I could not stop smiling.

I wasn't supposed to be happy about this scenario. It should not be 80 degrees in November, even here in the temperate Midsouth. Migrating butterflies like monarchs and painted ladies evolved to travel along a corridor of fall-blooming wildflowers, but wildflowers are mostly gone by November. If not for my zinnias, the butterflies would've starved. "We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator," said the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, at COP27, the global climate conference, in early November. It was not an overstatement.

And yet I felt so happy about those butterflies, so happy there were still zinnias blooming in my flower beds. It felt wrong to be so happy when happiness arises from a source of great pain, but there I was, feeling both the joy and the pain anyway. My father would have understood...

Mr. Trump, of course, is far from absent. Several adherents of the big lie running to supervise state elections just lost their own elections, and that's a tremendous relief, but election denying is alive and well in the country despite its rebuke at the polls. Gerrymandering efforts to create artificially close elections are not disappearing either.

What voters want is transparently irrelevant to many of the officials charged to represent us, as the attorney general of Kentucky made clear last week. Voters in that state defeated a proposed anti-abortion amendment to its constitution, but the attorney general insists the vote "has no bearing" on its near-total abortion ban. Down here, Mr. Trump's movement is Glenn Close in the bathtub with a knife.

But it's Thanksgiving, and I'm determined not to think about that this week. I will think instead about my father and his insistence on happiness. I will let my whole heart fill up with gratitude for what is still breathtakingly beautiful about this weary, ragged world; for the many people who are fighting for our democracy; and for all the people I love.

I can't force polluting nations to work together to hold climate change to planet-surviving levels. I can't force Congress to work together for solutions to the economic inequities and information silos that separate us. But I can pull out my mother's recipe box and make a Thanksgiving feast. I can remember the loved ones who once shared this table and fill their seats with people whose loved ones are distant or otherwise missing. And I can be grateful for every single fantastic moment we have together.

A hard frost finally came to my garden last week, and the zinnias are gone now, along with all the butterflies. I am sorry to see them go, and I am trying not to interrogate my own gratitude for the days they had here. I tell myself it is not wrong to exult in the beauties that remain. I remind myself of the testimony of my father's whole life, of the truth he taught me — that loss and love will always belong to each other, that sorrow has always been joy's quiet twin. Margaret Renkl

The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything

…according to this newly prevalent gospel of self-actualization, the pursuit of private happiness has increasingly become culturally celebrated as the ultimate goal. The "authentic" self — to use another common buzzword — is characterized by personal desires and individual longings. Conversely, obligations, including obligations to imperfect and often downright difficult people, are often framed as mere unpleasant circumstance, inimical to the solitary pursuit of our best life. Feelings have become the authoritative guide to what we ought to do, at the expense of our sense of communal obligations…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/opinion/mental-health-therapy-instagram.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The big idea: why we shouldn’t try to be happy

… What, then, should we strive for? Not happiness or an ideal life, but to find sufficient meaning in the world that we are glad to be alive, and to cope with grace when life is hard. We won't achieve perfection, but our lives may be good enough. And not only ours. To live well is to treat not just ourselves but other people as we should. As Mill recognised, the first step in self-help is one that points beyond the self.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/07/the-big-idea-why-we-shouldnt-try-to-be-happy?CMP=share_btn_link

Countries Made Bold Climate Promises Last Year. How Are They Doing?

A year ago, at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, heads of state and business leaders made a long list of splashy promises to help fight global warming.

But as the 2022 climate summit gets underway in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, this week, many countries and companies have made only halting progress toward the goals they set for themselves, like curbing deforestation or increasing the amount of climate aid to poorer nations. In some cases, governments are backsliding on promises as war, energy shortages and inflation have overshadowed climate concerns.

The focus of this year's talks, experts said, will be figuring out how nations can follow through on their pledges. Unlike at previous climate talks, "there are no real big treaty-related negotiations left," said Kaveh Guilanpour, a vice president at the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions. "What we are now faced with is the very hard work of actually implementing promises made."

Below are five promises made last year in Glasgow and the progress (or lack of progress) countries have made to date…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/climate/glasgow-climate-promises.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Happy time

	The Atlantic ⁦‪@TheAtlantic‬⁩ In this episode of How to Build a Happy life, ⁦‪@arthurbrooks‬⁩ and ⁦‪@rebecca_rashid‬⁩ explore the gap between how we want to use our time and how we actually do. A conversation with ⁦‪@ashleywhillans‬⁩ helps us understand our complex relationship with time. theatlantic.com/podcasts/archi…   10/30/22, 12:15 AM

How to be happy-Andrew Copson

and Richard Docwra

Ep 4 - how to be happy
By

Listen on Audible:
https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B08WLTBRW6&source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=player_overflow

"charms to secure happiness"

"There are charms to secure happiness. If you believe that you are going to be lucky, you go about your business with a smile, you take disaster with a smile, you start afresh with a smile. And to do that is to be in the way of happiness." ~A.A.Milne #SaturdayMotivation https://t.co/p6qT6g4Bgd

(https://twitter.com/A_AMilne/status/1583702426468896769?s=02)

Play

	TED Talks ⁦‪@TEDTalks‬⁩ "So much of life drains us, but fun fills us up." Watch Catherine Price's full talk to learn why you need playfulness in your everyday life — and how to make it happen: t.ted.com/ZmpdcZo pic.twitter.com/uErSoWOG9i   10/8/22, 3:49 PM

The Little Rituals That Keep Us Going

Reading Nancy Drew. Watching the birds every day. Counting yellow doors. Thousands of Times readers shared their wellness “non-negotiables.”

...Nearly 2,000 people shared practices that anchor and animate their days. Below is an edited selection of some of our favorites — ways to stay grounded, become healthier or just a little bit happier. Read through to get inspired, and tell us about your non-negotiables in the comments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/well/live/wellness-rituals.html?smid=em-share

Positivity Is Overrated.

In acknowledging struggle, Kieran Setiya’s “Life Is Hard” offers an alternative to the bromides.

BISHOP, Calif. — Before the Egyptians built the Pyramids, before Jesus Christ was born, before the Roman Empire formed or collapsed, the trees were here.

Ten thousand feet up in the White Mountains of central California, in a harsh alpine desert where little else survives, groves of gnarled, majestic Great Basin bristlecone pines endure, some for nearly 5,000 years. Their multicolor trunks bend at gravity-defying angles, and their bare branches jut toward the sky, as if plucked from the imaginations of Tim Burton or J.K. Rowling.

These ancient organisms, generally considered the oldest trees on Earth, seem to have escaped the stringent laws of nature...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/books/review/life-is-hard-kieran-setiya.html?smid=em-share

Stoic happiness

	Ethics in Bricks ⁦‪@EthicsInBricks‬⁩ "The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things." - Epictetus pic.twitter.com/9miiYy3IwF   9/25/22, 10:05 AM

Tweet by Phil Oliver on Twitter

	Phil Oliver ⁦‪@OSOPHER‬⁩ Beautiful writing, deep reflection from ⁦‪@MargaretRenkl‬⁩ on seasonal transitions and why we must allow ourselves to "risk delight" while we can. nytimes.com/2022/09/19/opi…   9/19/22, 7:06 AM

“Barbara Ehrenreich on collective joy

	Boston Review ⁦‪@BostonReview‬⁩ "Barbara's call for collective joy was one that came from a deeply held belief that such celebrations were essential for the health of any society." Lynne Segal remembers Barbara Ehrenreich: bostonreview.net/articles/my-re…   9/18/22, 11:30 AM

Who is Pulling Our Strings?

 On the topic of free will as an explanation for human evil, I wanted to resurface this clip summarizing an experiment first conducted in the 80's that sought to gain some insight into who was calling the shots. This has since been replicated many times with similar findings. I wanted to post this as something to consider rather than stating my own thoughts about it. That said, I'm curious to hear yours. Also, for the skeptics who are only interested in increasing their skepticism, here is an article that I think provides some fair questions and criticisms about the methodology and interpretations of the study. 

    Enjoy

Lucretius and Epicurus on the radio

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001bkw8?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

What Is Fun? Can I Have It? Will We Ever Have It Again?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/20/opinion/fun-things-to-do.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Power of Negative Thinking

…Positivity lingo lacks nuance, compassion and curiosity. It comes in the form of blanket statements that tell someone how to feel and that the feeling they're currently having is wrong," writes the therapist Whitney Goodman in TOXIC POSITIVITY: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed With Being Happy (TargerPerigee, 304 pp., $26). In other words, if it's bad to harsh someone's mellow, it's sometimes worse to mellow someone's harsh. The book is a bracing tonic meant to counteract society's pressure to be a living, breathing smile emoji. "Toxic positivity," Goodman explains, comes out of an understandable desire to fix things — but when we can't, we become stressed and feel helpless... 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/books/review/toxic-positivity-whitney-goodman.html?referringSource=articleShare

For Instant Happiness, Grab a Book and Head Outside

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/06/books/review/reading-outside-pastime.html?referringSource=articleShare

Happiness Is Other People

"Study after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest, most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as to call them a "necessary condition for happiness," meaning that humans can't actually be happy without them. This is a finding that cuts across race, age, gender, income and social class so overwhelmingly that it dwarfs any other factor."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/sunday/happiness-is-other-people.html?referringSource=highlightShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Power of Negative Thinking

The happiness scholar Tal Ben-Shahar compares the relentless pursuit of happiness, happiness as a value, to sunlight. The sun is vital for life on earth, but if you stare directly at it, you can go blind...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/books/review/toxic-positivity-whitney-goodman.html?referringSource=articleShare

Mary Oliver: Give in to joy

 Cousin Mary's sage advice:

Zero-sum

 

The peripatetic highway to happiness

"The traditional name for Aristotle’s school of thought is Peripatetic philosophy. The word “Peripatetic” comes from the verb peripateo, which in Greek, both ancient and modern, means “I go for a walk.” Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that “only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all.” But the ancient Greeks would have been puzzled by the romantic figure of the lone wandering sage first celebrated in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1778). They preferred to perambulate in company, harnessing the forward drive their energetic strides generated to the cause of intellectual progress, synchronizing their dialog to the rhythm of their paces. To judge from the magnitude of his contribution to human thinking, and the number of seminal books he produced, Aristotle must have tramped thousands of miles with his students across craggy Greek landscapes during his sixty-two years on the planet. There was an intimate connection in ancient Greek thought between intellectual inquiry and the idea of the journey. This association stretches far back in time beyond Aristotle to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus’ wanderings allow him to visit the lands of many different peoples “and learn about their minds.” By the classical period, it was metaphorically possible to take a concept or idea “for a walk”: in a comedy first produced in Athens about twenty years before Aristotle was born, the tragedian Euripides is advised against “walking” a tendentious claim he can never substantiate. And a medical text attributed to the physician Hippocrates equates the act of thinking with taking your mind out for a walk in order to exercise it: “for human beings, thought is a walk for the soul.” Aristotle used this metaphor when he began his own pioneering inquiry into the nature of human consciousness in On the Soul. He says there that we need to look at the opinions of earlier thinkers if we hope “to move forward as we try find the necessary direct pathways through impasses”: the stem word here for a “pathway through” is a poros, which can mean a bridge, ford, route through ravines, or passageway through narrow straits, deserts and woods. He opens his inquiry into nature in his Physics with a similar invitation to us to take not just to the path but to the highway with him: the road (hodos) of investigation needs to set out from things which are familiar and progress toward things which are harder for us to understand. The standard term for a philosophical problem was an aporia, “an impassable place.” But the name “Peripatetic” stuck to Aristotle’s philosophy for two reasons. First, his entire intellectual system is grounded in an enthusiasm for the granular, tactile detail of the physical world around us. Aristotle was an empirical natural scientist as well as a philosopher of mind, and his writing constantly celebrates the materiality of the universe we can perceive through our senses and know is real. His biological works suggest a picture of a man pausing every few minutes as he walked, to pick up a seashell, point out a plant, or call a pause in dialectic to listen to the nightingales. Second, Aristotle, far from despising the human body as Plato had done, regarded humans as wonderfully gifted animals, whose consciousness was inseparable from their organic being, whose hands were miracles of mechanical engineering, and for whom instinctual physical pleasure was a true guide to living a life of virtue and happiness. As we read Aristotle, we are aware that he is using his own adept hand to inscribe on papyrus the thoughts that have emerged from his active brain, part of his well-exercised, well-loved body. But there is just one more association of the term “Peripatetic.” The Greek text of the Gospel of Matthew tells us that when the Pharisees asked Jesus of Nazareth why his disciples didn’t live according to the strict Jewish rules of ritual washing, the verb they used for “live” was peripateo. The Greek word for walking could actually mean, metaphorically, “conducting your life according to a particular set of ethical principles.” Rather than taking a religious route, Aristotle’s walking disciples chose to set out with him on the philosophical highway to happiness."

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/8YfVaNZ

"Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life"

"The words “happy” and “happiness” work hard. You can buy a Happy Meal, or drink a cheap cocktail during happy hour. You can pop “happy pills” to improve your mood or post a “happy” emoji on social media. We value happiness highly. Singer Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was number one and the bestselling song of 2014 in the United States, as well as in twenty-three other countries. Happiness, according to Williams, was a transitory moment of elation, or feeling like a hot-air balloon. Yet we are confused about happiness. Almost everyone believes that they want to be happy, which usually means a lasting psychological state of contentment (despite what Williams sings). If you tell your children that you “just want them to be happy,” you mean permanently. Paradoxically, in our everyday conversations, happiness far more often refers to the trivial and temporary glee of a meal, cocktail, e-mail message. Or, as Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip put it after hugging Snoopy, an encounter with “a warm puppy.” A “happy birthday” is a few hours of enjoyment to celebrate the anniversary of your birth. What if happiness were a lifelong state of being? Philosophers are divided into two main camps about what that would actually mean. On one side, happiness is objective, and can be appreciated, even evaluated, by an onlooker or historian. It means having, for example, good health, longevity, a loving family, freedom from financial problems or anxiety. According to this definition, Queen Victoria, who lived to over eighty, gave birth to nine children who survived into adulthood and was admired around the world, had a clearly “happy” life. But Marie Antoinette was clearly “unhappy”: two of her four children died in infancy, she was reviled by her people and executed while still in her thirties. Most books about happiness refer to this objective “well-being” definition, as do the studies set up by governments to measure the happiness of their citizens on an international scale. Since 2013, on 20 March every year the United Nations has celebrated the International Day of Happiness, which seeks to promote measurable happiness by ending poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the planet. But on the other side are philosophers who reject this, and instead understand happiness subjectively. To them, happiness is not akin to “well-being” but to “contentment” or “felicity.” According to this view, no onlooker can know if someone is happy or not, and it is possible that the most outwardly boisterous person might be suffering from deep melancholy. This subjective happiness can be described, but not measured. We cannot assess whether Marie Antoinette or Queen Victoria was happier for a greater proportion of her time alive. Perhaps Marie Antoinette enjoyed long hours of intense gratification, and Victoria never did, having been widowed early and having lived for years in seclusion. Aristotle was the first philosopher to inquire into this second kind of subjective happiness. He developed a sophisticated, humane program for becoming a happy person, and it remains valid to this day. Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realization of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won’t even talk to him about it. Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realization, finding “a meaning,” and the “flow” of creative involvement with life, or “positive emotion"...

Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/inx7Ndk

Quote from Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen

"I was crazy about bikes, but I was no expert. I knew gearhead kids who hung around bike shops and wielded Allen wrenches like switchblades—who were always revamping their bikes, making them badder and radder. I wasn't like that. To this day, I can barely patch an inner tube. I wasn't a masher who went on long rides and hammered up hills. I wasn't a BMX kid who popped wheelies and shredded half-pipes. I rode to get my mind right. It was as if there was a vent in my skull, and as I pedaled and built up speed, the wind would whip through, clearing out the muck. It's not that biking around made me sharper-witted or smarter. On the contrary, I was, like many males my age, confused about nearly everything important yet certain I had the world figured out, or could at least bluff my way through by affecting a certain swagger. I'm sure that bike riding made me more confident in these misapprehensions, a more self-possessed dolt. It definitely calmed me down and bucked me up. I could get on my bike in a fog of neurosis and dismount a while later feeling all right—brave enough, at least, to pick up a phone and call a girl. I've always paid attention to the way bicycles look, so it's odd that I can call to mind only hazy images of the bikes I owned as a child and young adult. I know that the bicycle I rode that day on Claremont Avenue was a banana-seat wheelie bike of some sort, a fitting first ride for a '70s kid. The bicycles of my younger years rather neatly align with period trends. Sometime in the early '80s, I got a ten-speed with dropped handlebars; in the late '80s, I got a mountain bike. Along the way, there were other bikes, of varied makes and looks. Bikes came; bikes went. I must have had six or seven between the ages of five and twenty-five. I outgrew certain bicycles and wore out others—or, rather, mistreated them, locking them up overnight on the street all year long, even in the winter. I love bikes, but I'm not precious about them. I've never owned an expensive bicycle. I don't doubt that a splendid high-end machine would ride like a rocket ship, but I've never felt the impulse to splurge on one. As a kid, I admired my neighbor's fancy Cannondale road bike, which looked like it had been assembled from bits of sky and cloud: gleaming cobalt frame, white handlebars, white saddle. But I also envied the piratical battered BMX Mongooses that kids zipped around on, with ratty tennis balls wedged between the spokes. Then as now, I was no connoisseur. I was, I am, something more along the lines of a bicycle glutton. If the pedals turn, I'll ride it."

— Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
https://a.co/7sS3TgA

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

"a responsibility to create the conditions for happiness"

"The subject of Gross National Happiness comes up often in Bhutan. GNH is both an emblem and a conundrum—a point of pride but also a subject of disquisition, debate, and confusion. Many in Bhutan find it hard to articulate exactly what GNH is. Many contend that the concept is misunderstood. Some observers of Bhutanese politics suggest that GNH is not so much profound as it is nebulous—less a philosophy than a brand or a slogan, vague enough to appeal to all comers, notably tourists with excitable Orientalist imaginations and ample spending money. Kinley Dorji is one of the people most often asked to explain GNH. For years he worked as a journalist—he is the former editor-in-chief of Kuensel, Bhutan’s national newspaper—and there is still a hint of ink-stained wretch in his gruff manner. But by the time I met with him, he had moved on to a different job, as the head of Bhutan’s Ministry of Information and Communications, working out of a pleasant office in a Thimphu compound that houses many government ministries. “Here is the key point on GNH,” he said. “Happiness itself is an individual pursuit. Gross National Happiness then becomes a responsibility of the state, to create an environment where citizens can pursue happiness. It’s not a promise of happiness—it’s not a guarantee of happiness by the government. But there is a responsibility to create the conditions for happiness.” Dorji said: “When we say ‘happiness,’ we have to be very clear that it’s not fun, pleasure, thrills, excitement, all the temporary fleeting senses. It is permanent contentment. That lies within the self. Because the bigger house, the faster car, the nicer clothes—they don’t give you that contentment. GNH means good governance. GNH means preservation of traditional culture. And it means sustainable socioeconomic development. Remember that GNH is a pun on GDP, gross domestic product. We are making a distinction.”"

Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" by Jody Rosen: https://a.co/hpYaSDR

Happy pedaling

"In 2006, the king shocked his subjects by unilaterally ending Bhutan’s absolute monarchy. He led an effort to draft a constitution and institute democracy. In 2008, the country held its first general election. Outside Bhutan, the fourth king is best known for his contribution to what might be called political philosophy. It was he, the story goes, who formulated the concept of Gross National Happiness, Bhutan’s “guiding directive for development,” an ethos of holistic civic contentment based on principles of good governance, environmental conservation, and the preservation of traditional culture. Gross National Happiness, or GNH, has made Bhutan a fashionable name to drop in international development circles and a tourist destination for well-heeled, usually Western, New Age seekers. Somewhere along the way, the king took up cycling. It is rumored that he learned to ride when he attended boarding school in Darjeeling, about seventy-five miles from Bhutan’s western border. His education continued in England, at the Heatherdown School, in Berkshire, whose stately campus was crisscrossed by pupils on bikes, commuting between dormitories, classrooms, and cricket greens. Eventually, the Bhutanese royal family imported a bicycle to Bhutan. According to one story, it was a Raleigh racing bike, manufactured in Hong Kong, which arrived in parts and was assembled “upside down” by servants. The defect was spotted by Fritz Mauer, a Swiss friend of the royal family, who personally rebuilt the bike. The now-functional bicycle became a favorite possession of the young crown prince, who often took cycling trips in the dense forests abutting various royal family residences. He became famous—infamous, in the circles of nervous courtiers—for riding “along mud trails at perilous speed.” The royal family’s bicycle was possibly the first bike in Bhutan, and Bhutan may well have been the last place on earth the bicycle reached. Prior to 1962, the country had no paved roads. Today, Bhutan remains, by the usual standards, inhospitable to cycling. It is, almost certainly, the world’s most mountainous nation. The average elevation in Bhutan is 10,760 feet. According to one study, 98.8 percent of the country is covered by mountains. Its roads twist through daunting climbs and hairy descents. Its rugged off-road trails, mottled with rocks and caked in mud, pose a challenge to the sturdiest bicycle tires and suspension systems. Yet today there are thousands of bicycles in Bhutan, and the number is growing. In Thimphu, a city of about one hundred thousand with no traffic lights, bikes scramble up the hilly streets, navigating the one major intersection, where smartly dressed police officers direct traffic from an ornate gazebo that stands in the center of a roundabout. Meanwhile, government officials are increasingly voicing the aim “to make Bhutan a bicycling culture.” The idea is not altogether surprising, given Bhutan’s commitment to environmentalism and sustainability. Still, the idea of a “bicycling culture” taking root in the Himalayas is by definition eccentric. It is no coincidence that the societies that have most successfully integrated cycling into civic life are in northern Europe, where the countries are, as the saying goes, low. The cycling fad in Bhutan is also noteworthy because the story begins with a king and his bike. We know this is not unprecedented: if we riffle the pages of history, we find various places in which bicycles first reached sovereigns and the sovereign-adjacent. But in the twenty-first century, at least, cycling fever does not typically spread from palaces to the people. “There is a reason we in Bhutan like to cycle,” says Tshering Tobgay, who served as Bhutan’s prime minister for five years, from 2013 to 2018. “His Majesty the fourth king has been a cyclist, and after his abdication, he cycles a lot more. People love to see him cycle. And because he cycles, everybody in Bhutan wants to cycle, too.”"

Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/5Bj1AuQ

A sign of HOME

"Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I’m calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods. The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one’s path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn’t so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson": https://a.co/atAGlEk

 Harvard studied people for 79 years to find the biggest thing that makes us happy

Breanna Robinson

Harvard studied people for 79 years to find the biggest thing that makes us happy | indy100

Harvard University researchers studied people for 79 years - and they discovered the most significant thing that makes us feel happiest.

The researchers found that close relationships make men happy in life through copious amounts of data obtained from medical records, questionnaires, and in-person interviews.

They also understood that social ties acted as a shield for people from life challenges while improving physical and mental wellness.

This comes as quite a surprise for a society in which work is prioritised and recognised as the golden ticket to a better life.

In a unique kind of ongoing research, the Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked the lives of 724 men for 79 years.

With that, the men were divided into two classes. One group was sophomores at Harvard College, and the second group was a group of boys from Boston's impoverished neighbourhoods.

From the moment they were in their adolescence up to old age, they were investigated to determine what keeps men healthy and jovial.

Since 1938 (and year after year), the researchers asked the men questions about their lives, health, and work without knowing how their truths would play out.

It turns out that being prosperous in life is a function of being close with friends, family and community. It didn't have anything to do with things such as IQ, genes, social class and fame.

Robert Waldinger - a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and fourth director of the study - said that our relationships have a powerful impact on health.

He made this observation in a popular TED Talk and said that the study uncovered these same lessons about relationships.

While noting that loneliness is toxic, Waldinger also said that social connections made people happier, physically healthier, and live longer lives.

On the other hand, Waldinger also said that people who happen to be more isolated than they mean to "are less happy" face "health declines earlier in midlife" and "their brain functioning declines sooner."

"And they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely."

Waldinger further noted that the quality of close relationships is critically important to take notice of. He also said that they could see which of the men would grow into happy, robust octogenarians by looking back at them in midlife.

"When we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old; it was how satisfied they were in their relationships," he said.

Meaning of Life

	Five Books ⁦‪@five_books‬⁩ Finding meaning in life is not the same as finding happiness, argues Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard. He picks the best books on the meaning of life. fivebooks.com/best-books/pau…   5/27/22, 11:06 AM

The source

"Happiness is not quantitative or measurable, and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and antidepressants. If it consists in anything, I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time Look again at what Rousseau writes. Floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one’s eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one does not feel the pull of the past, nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather, time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the Tractatus, “The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or, as Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place . . . not for another hour . . . but this hour.” Rousseau asks, “What is the source of our happiness in such a state?” He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved."
...
Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts" by Simon Critchley: https://a.co/8DX96aa

The Rich Are Not Who We Think They Are. And Happiness Is Not What We Think It Is, Either.

...The activities that make people happiest include sex, exercise and gardening. People get a big happiness boost from being with a romantic partner or friends but not from other people, like colleagues, children or acquaintances. Weather plays only a small role in happiness, except that people get a hearty mood boost on extraordinary days, such as those above 75 degrees and sunny. People are consistently happier when they are out in nature, particularly near a body of water, particularly when the scenery is beautiful.

The findings on the data of happiness are, to be honest, obvious. When I told my friends about these studies, the most common response was, “Did we need scientists to tell us this?”

But I would argue that there is profundity in the obviousness of the data on happiness.

Sometimes, big data reveals a shocking secret. At other times, big data tells us that there is no secret. And that’s the case with happiness.

This is crucial to keep in mind for the many of us who are not doing the obvious things that make people happy. We are falling for traps that the data says are unlikely to make us happy.

Many of us work far too hard at jobs with people we don’t like — not a likely path to happiness. Dr. MacKerron and the economist Alex Bryson found that work is the second-most-miserable activity; of 40 activities, only being sick in bed makes people less happy than working. The economist Steven Levitt found that when people are uncertain whether to quit a job, they can be nudged to quit. And when they quit, they report increased happiness months later.

Many of us move to big cities and spend little time in nature — also not a path to happiness...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/sunday/rich-happiness-big-data.html?smid=em-share

Hope for happiness

	Phil Oliver ⁦‪@OSOPHER‬⁩ "What matters for pragmatists is devising ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality, increasing the ability of all children to start life with an equal chance of happiness."-What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty a.co/4Tdav34   5/10/22, 4:08 PM

"Missionary for love and happiness"

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdTZNjmNcNL/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

Ben Franklin’s Radical Theory of Happiness

     Ken Burns grades the Founding Father’s pursuit of a good life.

Most of the happiness scholars I cite in this column are living and active, because the scientific study of human happiness, relying as it does on social psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience, is only a few decades old. But the philosophical premise behind this modern discipline goes back centuries. The topic was of particular interest to American Enlightenment thinkers of the late 18th century. Most famously, Thomas Jefferson declared the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson later explained that the Declaration, including this odd claim to happiness, was simply “an expression of the American mind.” The American mind of one of Jefferson’s fellow Founding Fathers was especially influential when it comes to the philosophy of happiness: that of Benjamin Franklin. This is according to the filmmaker Ken Burns, who also dubs him our nation’s first happiness professor. Burns has spent the past two years immersed in Franklin’s mind, to make a documentary on the man that is currently airing on PBS.

Franklin believed that everyone naturally seeks happiness. “The desire of happiness in general is so natural to us, that all the world are in pursuit of it,” he wrote in his memoir in a section titled “On True Happiness.” He dedicated his life to defining it for his peculiar American compatriots, and advising them on how they could work to get it. But like so many people who give advice for a living, it is not at all clear that he lived his own life in the happiest way. We can still learn a lot today by taking his counsel—and avoiding his errors..

What did Franklin mean by happiness, I asked Burns? Pleasant feelings? Not even close: “For Franklin, happiness meant lifelong learning in the marketplace of ideas,” Burns told me. “In other words, self-improvement.”

This conception of happiness encompasses the great contradiction in American culture: individualistic in the focus on the self, yet communitarian in the reliance on a cooperative marketplace. Further, Franklin defines happiness as an endless journey, not a comforting destination. This journey could be an exciting adventure or a terrible curse, depending on your point of view... Arthur Brooks

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/ben-franklin-happiness-self-improvement-advice/629767/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Concluding conversation

Ashley, Shira, and Jennifer,

UPDATE, May 3. I'd hoped you all would use the discussion thread below this post for a more extensive concluding conversation amongst yourselves, and intended to add my own more extensive comments. Alas, you know the saying about the best-laid plans etc.; I tested positive for COVID yesterday, I'm not feeling too chatty. I'll post grades as soon as I can. I hope you've gained some insight into the philosophy of happiness, and will continue to reflect on its centrality to life. As Wm James said, how to gain and keep and recover it is "our chief concern." And as he also knew, health is a big part of it. He told a friend: "Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament."

[Re-posting this... Please conclude your conversation in the comments space here by April 30. jpo]

Go ahead and post your thoughts on Russell's Conquest of Happiness and whatever else you'd like to read and discuss, in the brief time that remains. Then, for your final project, post a summary of what you've found insightful or not in the texts you've read AND discuss your respective conclusions/reflections/questions with each other. Maybe we can launch that discussion here, beginning with these questions:

What new insights into happiness do you take away from your reading and reflection this semester?

What do you find most/least helpful in Haybron, Russell, ____?

Have you come across other texts/sources you intend to pursue after the semester ends?

[Add your own questions...]

Russell- Final Thoughts

 The latter portion of Russell’s text delves into the possibility and contemplation of ‘is happiness possible?’ Promptly engage in different aspects of life that contribute to life’s happiness. He begins the second half by suggesting that happiness in the modern world has become an impossibility. He conveys that happiness is fleeting and can easily dissipate by introspection. That the happiest of men are those involved in science or the sciences. It took me a minute to unpack what that meant in my own understanding. The sciences, to me, literally meant men of science, once again excluding women as when he speaks of women he typically mentions women; nonetheless, these men of science are the only happy individuals walking around and thus everyone else is merely unhappy by default. I did not like this conclusion that I summarized, so I tried to understand differently. Russell mentions that there is a difference (of happiness) made by education. Perhaps science equates to education, an educated individual, or someone with the access to education. I can wrap my brain around this concept with a little more ease. In this perception, I do agree that access to education can provide an added benefit to happiness. In no way, however, is it the only requirement towards a happy life, but an understanding of even the basics in education can help open doors of opportunities. Russell, “Perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference between the two sorts of happiness is to say that one sort is open to any human being, and the other only to those who can read and write.” 

A humble respect and awareness towards one's ability also contributes to the level of happiness. As Russell states, “The difference made by education is only in regard to the activities by which these pleasures are to be obtained. Pleasures of achievement demand difficulties such that beforehand success seems doubtful although in the end it is usually achieved. This is perhaps the chief reason why a not excessive estimate of one's own powers is a source of happiness. The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure.”  Relating back to men of science, Russell says the reason for their happiness is that the higher parts of their intelligence are wholly absorbed by their work, and are not allowed to intrude into regions where they have no functions to perform. This level of functionality can get to the point of being unhealthy. I believe there is a fine line to being absorbed in one’s work and finding that balance is partially crucial in the overall happiness in life. 

Russell goes on to mention other characteristics that factor into what creates happiness. A certain level of passion, zest,  belief in a cause, a friendly interest in people and family. Health and energy are necessary for zest. For women as for men, zest is the secret of happiness and well-being. However, For women, “zest has been greatly diminished by a mistaken conception of respectability.” Women are victimized by being taught not to be too lively in public and not to take too evident an interest in men. Once again, I feel this limits the magnitude of happiness women are allowed or allotted to achieve.  He suggests that “the secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” However, who is this suggestion for. Simply men of science? Is it allowed for men not invested in science to have interest wide and deep. Are women limited to shallow interests? I do believe and agree that not possessing an outlet to engage our capabilities into can lead to a heavy level of discontent. I also fell that our society contributes to that discontent by insisting that happiness be labeled and divided into categories of who is worthy, or by sex. Seems idiotic that we place barries on something as lovely as happiness. Or that we insist that happiness itself is something we have to pursue. An act of effort. Tracing back to several weeks ago when we discussed that happiness can be found taking an extroverted look at others rather than an introverted labor within ourselves. If we limit the access to who can be happy, then we will never understand or fully achieve it.  

Chapters 8 and 9

 Chapter 8 Persecution Mania was a topic that I’ve heard of before but was not aware that it had an actual term or name to it.

Russell describes Persecution Mania as perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery. I honestly believe that we all exhibit layers of particular mania. I think it is “taught” to us from birth that we, in fact, matter and that we are entitled to certain desires, however when we encounter the opposite of unable to achieve or fulfill said desire we are flabbergasted. I think this phenomena varies from collective group to collective group however. Those typically in a more well to do scenario who experienced little hardships, discrimination and such, exude a greater amount of persecution mania than those who have encountered these things. Russell gives the example of a playwright whose lack of success is blamed on a refusal to fawn or some other credible reason and references malicious gossip in relation: Consider malicious gossip. We all do it, but when we learn that others have engaged in this at our expense, we are terribly aggrieved. 

He allocates four categories to this theory.  The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don't overestimate your own merits. The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you. 

What I gathered from this chapter is that society is inherently self centered.  Even under the best intentions, we hold ourselves in high regard. When that regard is not reciprocated, we struggle to understand why. Dwelling on that lack of reciprocation can lead to feeling unhappy with one's self and choices. 

As Russell states, “The lack of interest by others suggests conspiracy, at least to the victim, who attaches undue importance to facts which are perhaps exceptional rather than typical.” 

Chapter 9 only adds to the merit of chapter 8. Fear of public opinion seems highly rooted in believing that what you bring to the table or who you represent matters in some aspect,(matters more to others, and not necessarily to yourself) otherwise, fear of public opinion would be a moot point. Russell begins the chapter by expressing how very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have social relations. He dates this idea all the way back to the Renaissance era. I digested that it takes a great deal of perseverance to overcome the fear of what others think.  Though we encounter this feeling throughout life, Russell mentions that the youth may experience this sense of fear of rejection more. Perhaps the experience level is that same from youth to adulthood, however, we grow into learning how to manage it more appropriately. Younger people tend to harbor their emotions quickly and openly, sometimes without internal contemplation or processing; and I think that can lead to an increased sense of jumping to feeling inadequate and concerned about what others think. I don’t particularly believe that the level of pressure on an individual decreases over time. Perhaps just changes faces. He says that adolescence is extremely tiring. I don’t remember all the circumstances I went through in adolescence. But I’m sure there was a great deal of drama and angst. Having two younger kids, I am just beginning to witness first hand the constant internal dialog and conflicts that come along with being young boys. They exhaust me from time to time. :)  

We simply tie too much of existing on how others will perceive our existence. No wonder fear of public opinion factors into overall happiness. Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive and stunts growth. Russell concludes that it is impossible to acquire a spirit of freedom that leads to an amount of happiness. I disagree, while it is extremely difficult “to master”, I do think it is possible to find a spirit of freedom from fear of others' opinions. It takes a raw level of self reflection and patience that many of us are too encouraged to practice or ever shown how to do.