Perspective-changing books

Henry Oliver asked Substack: what is the one book that changed your perspective on life the most?

After HUNDREDS of responses, these were the top 25 — in order of how often they were suggested (save this list):

25. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

24. On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

23. Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

22. Tao Te Ching, Laozi

21. The Stranger, Albert Camus

20. Stoner, John Williams

19. Confessions, St. Augustine

18. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

16. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

15. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

14. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

13. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

12. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

11. East of Eden, John Steinbeck

10. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

9. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. 1984, George Orwell

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

6. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

5. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

4. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

3. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

2. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

1. The Bible (and several mentions of Ecclesiastes, specifically)

https://substack.com/@henryeliot/note/c-176157474?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

(Too much Rand here, but it's still impressive that Burkeman made the cut… ahead of Aurelius and Seneca!)

Fwd: Final Presentation

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Adeline Lennon <aml2cf@mtmail.mtsu.edu>

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

How long do Americans hope to live?

The average desired lifespan is 91 years, but while most say they're trying to age well, only three in 10 adults under 65 think they actually will, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.

The good news: "49% of adults ages 65 and older say they are aging extremely or very well."

Be kind

Kurt Vonnegut was born on this day (11.11) in 1922.

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind." —God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Caricatoons (@caricatoonsstudio)

Questions Nov 13

1. What does research show about impatient driving? Does this also apply to those of us who are impatient with drivers who go too recklessly and fast? Do you experience frustration (or rage) behind the wheel? How do you manage it? 162
2. Have you experienced, or worried about falling prey to, a vicious addictive spiral? 168 Do you have any advice for those who have or who do? (Ask me about This Naked Mind...)
3. What was Jennifer Roberts' initial art history assignment? 174 Would you do it? Have you ever done anything comparable? What did that teach you?
4. What's Peck's insight? Is there anything in your life to which it might apply? 179
5. What does it mean to "stay on the bus," creatively and otherwise? 183 
6. What is "Super Mario's" misunderstanding about the value of time? What sort of good is it, in Burkeman's view? 186-7
7. Have you been, or are you tempted to become, a digital nomad? What are you risking, if you do? 189
8. What's a fika? Do you ever take one, or need one? 191-2
9. "That's no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself." 193 Agree? (And do you have Thanksgiving plans this year?) 
10. Do you regularly engage in any form of collective ritual or coordinated action? Have you experienced "the sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy"? 196
11. Was Hannah Arendt right, and prophetic? 200
12. Did the pandemic offer a silver lining of "bittersweet gratitude" or a "possibility shock" for you, in any respect? 205-7  How can we lock in such lessons before reverting back to the old normal? 
13. Do you think the cosmos itself has a significance? If so, don't we share in that? Does it matter, for this, that our lives transpire in the relative blink of an eye? 208-9
14. Are you okay with the likelihood that you probably won't be another Mozart or Einstein? 212 (After all, Mozart and Einstein weren't an earlier you.)

==

How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.10)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
==
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

Chronic weather

Santayana was right…

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe’

Rhys's presentation was richly provocative. I wish we'd had more time to discuss it. Maybe we can do that here, in Comments?

Three quotes stood out to me:

• "One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life."
• "I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand."
• "Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."

And, I could not help but think of Philip Pullman's "dust," which he has said is an analog in his work of consciousness, curiosity, and creativity-and is also an inexorable natural force (like Abe's "sand") with which we must grapple in our respective pursuits of happiness. 

Some questions:

• If sand is time itself, as we experience and embody  it, can we say the same of dust? (And are we, as the old song said, "dust in the wind"?)
• There's more to life than repetition, of course, but would you agree that happy people learn to love and  cherish the regular repetition of their various, multifarious springs of delight-like me and my dogwalks, for instance?
• Is there a connection of the flow of sand to  the "flow" of optimal human experience when time seems to vanish?
• The fact that we exist at all indicates that we are all survivors of "shipwreck" and should be laughing, no?

What other questions would any of us like to pose about this work?

Ploughshares

Questions Nov 11

1. Have you found Hofstadter's Law to be true?
2. What is worry, at its core? 116 Are you, or were you ever, a worrier? How did you, or will you, get over it?
3. What do we mean when we say we have time? How does that bear on the way we think about the future? 117-8
4. Do you struggle for certainty? Do you acknowledge the futility of that? If you stop, will you be liberated from anxiety? 119, 123
5. Do you find de Beauvoir's reflections on chance "soothing"? 120-21
6. How important is it to you to make specific plans for your days, weeks, year, lifetime? Does it disturb you when your plans are foiled? Do you think it should?
7. To what extent do you "live mentally in the future" (126), either your own or that of your (actual or prospective) children, or of humanity in general? Can it ever be a good thing to do that? Do you agree with WJ that "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
8. Is it "insane" to live from project to project? Is Alan Watts right about the "hoax" of education? 127-8
9. Does the deliberate attempt to optimize a child's development in some way devalue childhood? 129-32 Have you spent time with a zero-year old? Do you look forward to doing so? To what end?
10. Could we de-instrumentalize our relation to capitalism and turn life into less of a "slog" simply by rethinking our relation to time? Was Keynes right about "purposive man"? 133-6
11. Do you have a hard time "being here now" and pleasantly, un-self-consciously absorbing yourself in mundane activities ? 137-9
12. Does society or higher education overemphasize "justifying life in terms of the economy"? 142 Should you feel guilty for "enjoying leisure (whether in Aristotle's sense -144- or some other) for its own sake" rather than for its contribution to your potential productivity?
13. Do you or anyone you know suffer "idleness aversion"? Are you/they "attempting to avoid confronting difficult emotions"? Such as...? 148-9 Is John Gray right about the present age? 154
14. Does the Protestant Work Ethic make any sense at all?
15. Is modern fitness a form of self-flagellation? 150
16. Is Thomas Wolfe right? 151
17. Should we re-institute a real (if secular) Sabbath? 152
18. What are your favorite atelic activities? 156 Did Schopenhauer overlook the possible gratifications of this dimension of life? 158
19. Does Rod Stewart have the right approach to hobbies, and Richard Branson a wrong one? 159

FINAL REPORT PRESENTATION/POST - Request your topic

Indicate your topic preference in the comments space below. We'll do two (or three) presentations per class. Select a topic pertaining to something in the assigned reading on your designated date, OR select a topic in one of the recommended/reserved texts (Moral Ambition, Word of Dog, Wanderlust) that hasn't already been covered; OR suggest another happiness-related topic of  your choosing. The blog post complementing your presentation is due to be posted on our site no later than Dec.5, but post earlier for potentially-constructive feedback or to support your presentation (you can continue to edit until the due-date).

UPDATE Oct 29: Let's fill all our slots with at least one scheduled presentation before scheduling any more 2d or 3d presentations on any given date, please.

UPDATE Nov 5 10: We still need at least a couple of you who've not yet requested a date to go before Nov 25.

OCT 

28 Flanagan 8-11 Final report presentations begin

30 Flanagan 12-15 -p.248. 


NOV

4 Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Intro, ch1 - Jonathan

6 Burkeman ch2 - Amanda, Rhys

11 Burkeman 3-6 - David, Jacob

13 Burkeman 7-9 - Carol, Adeline, Kendal

18 Burkeman 10-13 - Nick, Tyler, Sophie

20 Burkeman 14, afterword, appendix -p.245 - Landon, Jayden, Basil

25 Conclude final report presentations - Air Mark, Moral Ambition ch1; 

Aphantasia

"There's an early memory from my childhood, representative of its peak happiness. I'm on a simple, iron child's seat on my father's bike. He's just picked me up from kindergarten and is taking me home through the forest on the way to our house. It is a spectacularly fluorescent Danish spring, and we're travelling through woodland illuminated, from above, by the light-green foliage of the tall beeches only just coming into soft leaves and, from below, by snow-white forest anemones spreading around us in dense, endless carpets.

Bringing this scene to my mind, I don't 'see' anything. I have aphantasia, the neurological condition of being unable to visualise imagery, also described as the absence of the 'mind's eye'. Still, I know that those visual elements were there; they're stored in my mind as knowledge and concepts; and I have particular and strong emotional responses to the thought of the light and colours.

Until very recently, I had always assumed that my experience of reality was typical, and that being able to see only things that are actually there – present and visible in the external surroundings – was normal. But discovering that I have aphantasia brought to my awareness differences in perception and self-conception between me and others that I'd always registered on some level, and felt disturbed by, but had never consciously thought about

.

The further I've delved into research on this neurological anomaly, the more extensive its explanatory reach has proven. It has been like finding the master key to my life and personality, and has significantly deepened my understanding of my psychology, my philosophical views, and my aesthetic and literary preferences…"

https://psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me

A.I. Is on Its Way to Something Even More Remarkable Than Intelligence: "consciousness"

Skeptics overlook how our concepts change.

...You might object that this is a verbal trick, that I'm arguing that A.I. will become conscious because we'll start using the word "conscious" to include it. But there is no trick. There is always a feedback loop between our theories and the world, so that our concepts are shaped by what we discover.

Consider the atom. For centuries, our concept of the atom was rooted in an ancient Greek notion of indivisible units of reality. As late as the 19th century, physicists like John Dalton still conceived of atoms as solid, indivisible spheres. But after the discovery of the electron in 1897 and the discovery of the atomic nucleus in 1911, there was a revision of the concept of the atom — from an indivisible entity to a decomposable one, a miniature solar system with electrons orbiting a nucleus. And with further discoveries came further conceptual revisions, leading to our current complex quantum-mechanical models of the atom.

These were not mere semantic changes. Our understanding of the atom improved with our interaction with the world. So too our understanding of consciousness will improve with our interaction with increasingly sophisticated A.I.

Skeptics might challenge this analogy. They will argue that the Greeks were wrong about the nature of the atom, but that we aren't wrong about the nature of consciousness because we know firsthand what consciousness is: inner subjective experience. A chatbot, skeptics will insist, can report feeling happy or sad, but only because such phrases are part of its training data. It will never know what happiness and sadness feel like...

--

By Barbara Gail Montero

Dr. Montero is a philosophy professor who writes on mind, body and consciousness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/opinion/ai-conscious-technology.html?smid=em-share

[But will they be happy?]

Know more, suffer less

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MdjbqeZ2D/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Why?

Happiness rests on three pillars: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Today, meaning is collapsing, especially for the young, because we've neglected the part of the brain that asks "why."

To rebuild it, we must return to life's deeper questions: coherence, purpose, and significance. That's where true happiness begins.

— Arthur Brooks

“Love primals”

"If you're a parent like me, you know that very little strikes terror into your heart like the prospect of something bad happening to your kid. You literally lay awake nights, worrying about every kind of threat. So, what do you do? Oftentimes, you try to scare them so that they will have a healthy fear as well, and thus protect themselves.Don't talk to strangers! Don't walk alone! Don't even go out of the house!

But this tendency can and is creating a lot of problems today for young people's mental health. Here's a better approach to keeping your kids safe—and happy.

What the science says

According to a 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this) parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children. You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, on average, parents say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park. 

What I think 

No doubt these beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe, you should teach them that the world is dangerous—that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.

The contention that the world is mostly safe or mostly dangerous is what some psychologists call a "primal world belief." A negative primal assumes that the fundamental character of the world is threatening. This used to make a lot of sense in the era of caveman survival, but is much less practical in our modern era. 

The psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl found in 2021 that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts. 

What you can do

It is not in young people's interest that we instill in them negative primals. In so doing, we might harm them by making them less happy, less healthy, and more bigoted toward others. To break this pattern, parents—and anyone who interacts with children—should instead work to cultivate a sense of safety. Here are three rules to help you get started.

1. Heal thyself. Parents might feed their kids negative primals because they hold such views themselves. Research shows that many parents pass on their anxiety to their children—what scholars at King's College London have called the "intergenerational transmission of anxiety". Take a step back from the toxic media environment and remind yourself that, in fact, being a kid in America has never been safer.
2. Be specific and proportional. Grown-ups want to teach young people how to stay safe in the face of threats. However, the research is clear that a blanket attitude of fear can actually make them less able to do so. (Ever heard about the Boy who cried Wolf?). Talk to your children about safety, but make sure you're doing so when it really matters.
3. Teach them a positive primal belief. Consider the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. "Through Love, one has no fear". Instead of teaching our kids fear primals, let's teach them love primals, which neutralize fear and put something good in its place. Let them know that people are made for love—we all crave it, and we can find something lovable in just about everyone we meet. We don't always give it or accept it, because we make a lot of mistakes, but love is what all our hearts desire.

If you want to give your children a rule to live by, love is a much safer bet."

—Arthur Brooks

How to Be Unhappy

-stay inside all day
-move as little as possible
-spend more than you earn
-take yourself (and life) too seriously
-look for reasons why things won't work
-always consume, never contribute
-resent the lucky and successful
-never say hello first
-be unreliable

James Clear

Happy Sagan Day

It's the birthday of the man that Smithsonian Magazine called "truly irreplaceable": that's astronomer Carl Sagan, born in Brooklyn (1934)...
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-0a1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

 

 

Pale Blue Dot, PBD text, PBD video, Who Speaks For Earth video, Cosmos, Cosmic Connection...Sagan@dawn...Contact opening scene... 

and Carl's & Ann's daughter Sasha's For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

More Carl quotes [but he didn't say the first one]...

Cheers!

Sneak peek: a happy wedding toast.

On walking

"That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/18/in-praise-of-walking-thomas-a-clark/

William James's Answers to a Questionnaire on Religion

8. Do you believe in personal immortality? Never keenly; but more strongly as I grow older. If so, why? Because I am just getting fit to live.

The whole questionnaire here... And a brief discussion of it:

 

Information, Attention, the Internet, and Our Brains – Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr's work, particularly his book "The Shallows," explores how the internet and information technologies are reshaping our brains and impacting our ability to concentrate and think deeply. He argues that while technology has historically augmented human capabilities, the internet's constant distractions and stimuli are diminishing our capacity for sustained attention and deep thought...

https://share.google/DHIob8ZOCYhSkTdas

Questions NOV 6

 

1. What do you think it means for his philosophy (or your interest in it), that Heidegger was a Nazi? Was he right that most of us are "forgetful of Being" and insensitive to our fundamental identity as loci of finite time? 
2. What's the etymology of decide? 60 Why is that important philosophically?
3. It's only from what position that we can truly care about our existence on earth, according to Martin Hagglund? 63
4. What's "entitled" about the complaint that we don't have enough time? What perspective shift enables us to see that? What's the opposite of FOMO? 66-7, 69
5. What simple insight emerges from "paying yourself first"? 75
6. What did Costica Bradatan say about perfectionism? 79
7. Of what universal human impulse was Kafka an extreme example? What did Bergson say about it? 82-3
8.  Why is the decision to refuse to settle also a case of settling? Why should you settle? 84-6
9. Have you ever wasted time watching people abuse a watermelon on the internet (or something comparable)? Why?
10. ____ just is life... but achieving total sovereignty over it is impossible. 91-2
11. How did Viktor Frankl fend off despair? 93
12. What did Harry Frankfurt say our devices sabotage? 96-7 What might T.S. Eliot say about this (once you explained to him what a "device" is)?
13. What was Steve Young's real problem? 103
14. What does Burkeman say about the secret for overcoming distraction? 108 Do you agree?

How to add links, embed videos etc. for the final report blogpost (after you become an AUTHOR on the site):
To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
== 
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”

…said Nietzsche (and Kanye, and Kelly Clarkson). But is there any truth to this idea, or the idea that suffering is necessary for happiness? Exploring the concept of post-traumatic growth…

Healing 2.0: What We Gain from Pain
Hidden Brain

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healing-2-0-what-we-gain-from-pain/id1028908750?i=1000633893076 

Still looking?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzZHJcvt_Dx/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=OWE2MDY3ZDIzMg==

Lyubomirsky’s definition

One of my favorite definitions of happiness is from the positive psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky. She defines happiness as having two parts: (1) being happy in your life and (2) being happy with your life…

Laurie Santos

How to Think About Your Death

"...By forcing yourself to think about death—your own death and that of loved ones—your time-use decisions change. I ask my 20-something graduate students to estimate how many Thanksgivings they realistically have left with their parents, and then to consider how they should spend those remaining occasions. This is a hard exercise for them, and some of them cry. But it can also alter such decisions as where they choose to live and work. Rarely, if ever, have I heard anyone regret deciding to live near friends and family—any more than I recall hearing someone say, as they near death, “I wish I’d spent more time focused on my job.”"

...

Arthur Brooks

==

Also see (Maria Popova on) Bertrand Russell...

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."

Make America Great Gatsby Again

I've always been inspired by Fitzgerald's "green light" at the end of the dock, but it looks different at Mar-a-Lago.

"Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.

Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration’s refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered.

Trump posted on social media that “[o]ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP,” so he has “instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that “even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out.” His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office, telling people: “If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!”

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”"

...

HCR
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-1-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=20533&post_id=177771625&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=35ogp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Are You Happy Documentary Trailer

https://youtu.be/vOLXMiQXSGU?si=wMDaQGLr0HL0Vcw6

Watch the full documentary here: https://www.happyproductions.me/ayh/o...

From MTSU student to Philosophy professor, Kaity Newman finds her way home – MTSU News

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — When Kaity Newmanwalks into Room 202 of the James Union Building on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, she can't help but smile.

Dr. Kaity Newman 

The room feels familiar. Not just because she's taught here this semester, but because it's the same classroom where she sat wide-eyed as an undergraduate student taking Introduction to Philosophy at MTSU more than a decade ago.

"Standing at the front of that room now, where I once sat as a student, it's surreal," said Newman, a new lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. "It feels really good being back on campus."

…

https://mtsunews.com/philosophy-professor-mtsu-alumna/

Happy Halloween

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m4iclswh5s24

Questions NOV 4

Commencing Burkeman's 4,000 Weeks (Intro, 1-2 (p.55)

1. How long must you live to reach 4,000 weeks? 6,400? Does this surprise or disturb or motivate you in any way? How would you feel if you had less than 800 weeks left (to reach 4,000)?
2. What do you think of Seneca's lament? And Nagel's observation? 4
3. Do you wage a daily battle against online distraction? 6 Or have you surrendered?
4. What's the "maddening truth about time"? 9
5. Have you found your "larger cause"? 12
6. Does time feel to you like a conveyor belt you can't keep up with? What does this analogy suggest is wrong with our relation to time? 20 Would we be wise to rethink that relation, in terms of the time it takes to actually complete specific tasks (like a "pissing whyle" for instance)? Have you had an experience of timelessness like Jung's? 22
7. What's the Pomodoro Technique? Have you ever tried it, or anything like it? How'd that go? 27
8. Have you conquered FOMO? Are you trying? Are you comfortable with COMO (Certainty...)? 33
9. Does Busytown appeal to you?
10. What was Arnold Bennett's dubious assumption? 40
11. Have you experienced "existential overwhelm"? 45 If you believe in an afterlife, does that help?
12. Do you send e-cards? 52 Will you still? How about letters, notes, postcards?

 

Boo!

To[morrow] is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out...trying to make everyone happy...”*

Bring candy to class, if you want. Best costume(s) get extra bases on the scorecard.

 

* It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year until they filled the entire month of October and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the monthlong Festival of the Dead. There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel.

Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy. Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016). He says:

“The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.” WA

🍕 party

We'll plan to dismiss class a little early, so any who want to attend can get over to the JUB before the pizza (and the people) get gone.

---

FYI, my Spring '26 upper division course:

MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) 6050-

Philosophy in Recent American Fiction

Meeting Tuesdays at 6 pm, James Union Building 202

We'll all read three recent (=21st century) novels together – Richard Ford’s Be Mine, Richard

Powers’s Playground, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of

God: A Work of Fiction – and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel

of your choice, or on a specific author’s life and works.*

*Some possible fourth choices (to name just a few), for individual reports:

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (2022) - Explores themes of memory, connection, and

digital surveillance. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024) - Considers whether the path to

emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Demon

Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2024) - a new take on Dickens's Copperfield. Flight

Behavior by Kingsolver (2012) - Explores climate change, ecological disruption, and

human responsibility. Any of the other Frank Bascombe novels by Richard Ford. Any other

Richard Powers novels. Any other Rebecca Goldstein novels…

For more information:

● phil.oliver@mtsu.edu

● https://prafmtsu.blogspot.com/

 

A.I. Threatens Our Ability to Understand the World

Artificial intelligence threatens students' most basic skills. If they lose their ability to understand what they read, will they lose their ability to think?

Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up "writing" about.

My situation was hardly unique — rampant A.I. cheating has been reported all over the country. But I felt a dread I struggled to express until a colleague articulated the problem in stark terms: "Our students are about to turn subcognitive," she said. That was it. At stake are not just specialized academic skills or refined habits of mind, but also the most basic form of cognitive fluency. To leave our students to their own devices — which is to say, to the devices of A.I. companies — is to deprive them of indispensable opportunities to develop their linguistic mastery, and with it their most elementary powers of thought. This means they will lack the means to understand the world they live in or navigate it effectively.

A.I. is hardly the first technology to threaten our cognitive competence. Long before ChatGPT, the smartphone and the calculator, Plato warned against writing itself. Literate human beings, he foresaw, would "not use their memories." He was not entirely wrong. But few of us would consider this a bad bargain. The written word is, after all, the condition for the survival of these very same Platonic dialogues across two millenniums. Great gifts have often come at great cost. The question is always: Are they worth it?

As students' A.I. use has proliferated, many of its critics focused on intellectual gifts. "A.I. undermines the human value of attention," the poet Meghan O'Rourke wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion, "and the individuality that flows from that." Other endangered powers: "unique human expression," "the slow deliberation of critical thinking" and the "ability to write original and interesting sentences." As a humanities professor, all these concerns resonate with me...

Anastasia Berg
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/ai-students-thinking-school-reading.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xE8.cbCE.xWI9KNbZ3YzQ&smid=em-share

"Have you tried taking long walks?"

Which Is Better, One Long Walk or Many Short Ones?

A new analysis is one of the first to study whether spacing steps out or consolidating them was linked to better health outcomes.

"...Those who regularly walked longer than 15 minutes were 80 percent less likely to die from any cause and nearly 70 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease over a roughly 10-year period, compared with those who got most of their steps in walks of five minutes or less..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/well/move/long-short-walks-health.html?smid=em-share

Crash and recovery

The stock market crash of 10.29.29, the ensuing economic depression, the New Deal—and then 🎶Happy days were here again…

HCR
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-28-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Try this

"At the end of my show in Princeton, NJ last Friday, I took questions from the audience. The final question was from a Princeton undergraduate, who asked how to deal with the stress she and her fellow students are feeling in our current dystopia.

I shared some advice that my grandfather gave me..."

Andy Borowitz
https://open.substack.com/pub/borowitzreport/p/secret-to-happiness?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Amazing

"Happiness is amazing. It's so amazing, it doesn't matter whether it's yours or not. It's that lovely thing; a society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in. Good people do things for other people. That's it, the end." -Anne in 'After Life'.
 

Reminds me of...

“An individual human existence should be like a river - small at first, narrowly contained within it's banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged with the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old

And

• 
  
•  
•   
• 
  
• 
  

•