“happily ever after”

"Happily ever after is only true if you have three minutes to live." 

Dan Gilbert

This quote gets right to the heart of how our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. Our brain often think in terms of 'happily ever after.' But real life isn't a fairytale, and happiness isn't some magical spell that lasts forever. Our minds are quickly adapt— even to the best things in life. https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DFuwo8LMf8K?xmt=AQGzzc7x5XX4OHvgULk3zLZrImszyuOOiYI6x5dnoe5fMQ

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Russell’s happy merger

"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." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/