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."
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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