Priceless

My thoughts yesterday, watching the MLB postseason...

https://www.instagram.com/p/CxS7bOMoX6H/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Questions Oct 5

1. After you... 

JPO's Questions (but yours first)...

1. In light of Emerson's epigram, how stingy should you be with your "gifts"?
2. How often do you pay attention to "small" physical experiences like the wind in your hair or the sun on your face (or the ice cream in your oatmeal)?
3. Does the idea of constantly (or frequently) thinking about your life in terms of a time budget of unknown quantity appeal to you? 118
4. When you look back on your life, what do you imagine you'll wish you'd done less/more of?
5. What does it mean to you to (as Edith says) put things into perspective?
6. COMMENT?: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
7. Do you agree that "time and attention are the essential materials of happiness"? 120 Do you think you manage your attention well? If not, how will you improve?
8. Does Leo's & Grace's 80s life together sound appealing to you? 125
9. Do you regulate your online behavior in the ways suggested on 130-131?
10. Can you relate to what Rachel says about her parents? 136 
11. Can "focused attention" slow down your perception of the pace of time's passing? 139
12. What does Leonard Cohen's song lyric mean? 140
13. "What is your philosophy for getting over rough spots?"
14. How do you answer any/all of the questions on 142-143?
15. Do you agree with *Proverbs, Epictetus, and the Buddha? 148
16. Do you try to "fill in the blanks" like Bob? 153
17. Do you ever reflect on your response to a challenge by questioning yourself in the way suggested on 157-8?

* 

“A happy heart is good medicine and a cheerful mind works healing, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. Proverbs 17:22”

A scoop of happiness

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A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher) 

And also on the lighter side of Happiness: Existential Comics...

Without a College Degree, Life in America Is Staggeringly Shorter

"… Public health authorities in the United States record educational qualifications at death so that, after 1992, we can calculate life expectancy by college degree, starting at age 25, when most people have completed their education. In new research using these individual death records, we have found startling results.

Life expectancy at age 25 (adult life expectancy) for those with four-year college degrees rose to 59 years on the eve of the pandemic — so an average individual would live to 84 — up from 54 years (or 79 years old) in 1992. During the pandemic, by 2021, the expectation slipped a year.

But we were staggered to discover that for those without college degrees, life expectancy reached its peak around 2010 and has been falling since, an unfolding disaster that has attracted little attention in the media or among elected officials..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/opinion/life-expectancy-college-degree.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Without a College Degree, Life in America Is Staggeringly Shorter

Senator Butler

It was a day of historic firsts in American politics. Don't overlook this one:

"…while the Republicans were making history on the House side of the U.S. Capitol, the Democrats were making history on the Senate side. Vice President Kamala Harris swore into office Senator Laphonza Butler to complete the term of Senator Dianne Feinstein, which ends next year. Before her nomination, Butler was the president of EMILYs List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic female candidates who back reproductive rights to office, and has advised a number of high-profile political campaigns, including that of Harris in 2020.

Butler is the first Black lesbian in the Senate. She and her wife, Nenike, have a daughter."

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-3-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

The 40% solution

 The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky--

Questions Oct 3

1.  You first please, y'all. Everybody pose at least one discussion question and respond to it... and to your classmates'...

JPO's Questions Oct 3

Please don't respond to any of my questions until you've posed at least one of your own.

1. Can you tell us the life issues that have faced you before age 50 (or 25) that may not seem so important when you are older? How will you try to master these issues?
2. Do you know anyone whose childhood resembled Wes's (violently abusive & philandering alcoholic dad who abandoned the family)? 55 How'd they cope? Did they also have difficulty making plans and envisioning a positive future?
3. How much unhappiness do you imagine is due to the feeling of being alone, of suffering unique adversity not shared by others? How much to the false perception of being "an unchanging rock" etc.? 56
4. Do you regularly reflect on (and appreciate) what you have? Does that help clarify what you want from life? 57
5. Have you looked at a photo of yourself at a much earlier age? "What were you thinking about back then" etc.? "What do you regret?"  --Okay, me first this time.*
6. What (st)age of life are you presently occupying (whether in Shakespeare's terminology or your own)? Do you look forward to the coming stages? 59  
7.  Have you begun to establish a sense of generativity and concern for the next generation(s)? Must it await "midlife"? 60, 75
8. Are you (will you be, when the time comes) ready to become a parent? 61  Or are you an anti-natalist?
9. How much should you try to be like somebody you respect? 63
10. Have you learned Mark Twain's lesson about your parents yet? 64
11. Do you know anyone who joined the military as a way out of adolescence or into friendships? 66 Did it work? 66
12. How long do you think it should take to figure out who you are? Or to make a solid commitment to another person? 70
13. Do you see the beauty in the possibilities, the time, and the choices ahead of you? Or are you just stressed about them? 68
14. Have you pursued different activities just to see if they interest you? Have you found friends and a community that way? 70
15. Do you know any NiNi's, NEETs, or hihikimoris? 71 Or InCels? Should we be concerned about so many young people "failing to launch" up into their 30s?
16. Is any specific time of life the "prime of life"? 74  Do the questions in the last paragraph of this page remind you (as they do me) of that Talking Heads song...? 
17. How will you avoid having the regrets enumerated on p.76?
18. Do you think much about the future (yours on humanity's)? 78  Do you agree with WJ about our  "really vital question: what is this world going to become, what is life going to make of itself?"
19. Shouldn't we all cultivate a sense of limited time at every age? 80
20. Do you welcome chaos and its demand for improvisation in your life? 83
21. On that 1-7 scale, how would you rate your relationship with your parents and siblings? 
22. How often do you feel lonely?84  How often do you experience a pleasant solitude? Was Blaise Pascal right (“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”)? Are you surprised at the toll loneliness takes on mortality? 93
23. Why do so many men in our society have "a hard time expressing [their] feelings"? 86
24. Do you "make a conscious effort to move"? 88  Does "social fitness" require the same kind of intent?
25. Is it wrong to "use optimism to push away" fear? 91
26. If we've evolved to be social and in need of love, connection, and belonging, might social media paradoxically produce a counter-evolutionary push towards social isolation? 94
27. How do you feel about the prospect of spending decades of your life interacting with media? 96
28. COMMENT on the "powerful yet simple message" about interpersonal contact. 97
29. How many of your significant relationships would you describe as energizing and depleting, respectively? Why do you persist in the latter? 100
30. Do you know anyone who makes you feel the way teenage Sterling made his sister feel? 103
31. How do you answer any of the questions on 104-107?
32. Is Behavioral Science a reputable field? 108 (see yesterday's NYT story...)
33. Is the Dalai Lama right about wise selfishness and generosity? 110
34. Are you curious about others' experience? 113

*

 

Proud big brother, thinking I was happy not to be an "only child" anymore...

 

L: Probably looking for my next hit of baby formula... Bewildered, trying not to displease the adults...

 

About to be an ex-bachelor... happy but also (still) bewildered...

Wallace Stevens, peripatetic poet

He was one of WJ's students too.

It's the birthday of Wallace Stevens (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). He wanted to be a journalist, but after a couple years of writing for a New York paper, he decided that he would fulfill his father's desires and go to law school. After graduating, he took a job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he was in charge of inspecting surety claims. He would remain at the job for the rest of his life.

Each day, he walked the two miles between his office and upper-middle class home, where he lived with his wife and daughter, and during these walks to and from work, he composed poetry. He said, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job." He would only let people walk with him if they didn't talk. He never ate lunch, except for once a week "to break up the monotony" — and on that day, he would always go to a place near his Hartford, Connecticut, office.

He claimed that "poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem. There's nothing perfunctory about them for each case is different."

His first collection of poems, Harmonium, was published when he was 43 years old. Though the volume received only lukewarm praise at first, it later became considered a modernist classic. In 1955, just months before he died, he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his volume Collected Poems.

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." And he wrote, "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=10759.html

Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars

Will they be happy to be there?

"We're at a pivotal moment, and in some ways it feels like a dream sequence," said Niki Werkheiser, NASA's director of technology maturation [and native of Franklin, TN]. "In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here." nyt