Pursuitofhappinessnotes - Google Docs PDF

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Some various notes collected through the semester on different required readings/videos and during the lectures....

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. Harari on JOHN -

Dataism

In communities where alcohol is a communal bond, it energizes you Find magic in ordinary things; his son and snow Being able to clear your mind Obsessing over something stupid and toxic and negative, is going to make you unhappy and undermine important things around you Finding joy by finding a healthy obsession

When someone is addicted, they have a lack of support;love;spirituality;meaningful job HAIDT

Most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. Bob is rich, attractive, single, healthy. Mary is overweight, minimum salary job, kidney problems, married, has strong connections to church. Bob seems to have it all, and few readers of this book would prefer Mary’s life to his. Yet if you had to bet on it, you should bet that Mary is happier than Bob. What Mary has that Bob lacks are strong connections. A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses. But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence. Mary also has religion, and religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people. This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self. Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.

YOUTUBE VIDEO: (YUVAL NOAH HARARI) The advent of algorithms i know you heard about this yuval noah harari = what kind of challenges this might pose for human happiness and also what kind of potential advantages it might actually have for human happiness but there's a lot of ways in which these algorithms could be used to manipulate us to undermine our freedoms. i mean our whole system of our our culture is to a large extent based on classical liberal assumptions, our economic system is largely based on the idea that the customer is always right, which means that we believe that

people should be entrusted to make decisions about what they want to do with their money to the most part and we shouldn't kind of tell them what to do. our system when it comes to love is very much predicated on people should be allowed to love what they want to love, follow your heart to their own self, be true you know all that stuff. it's all predicated on individual choice and our democracy is based on the idea that the best way to make political decisions is to have citizens make individual choices. some people make bad choices and we understand that not everybody has all the information that perhaps they need. but still we think that on balance it's better to have a whole bunch of people sort of making this decision with everybody acting in a free way right. well these algorithms in the future may make it possible for whoever has the money to pay for them right whoever has the power to wield these powerful tools; they will be able to manipulate us in ways that are really terrifying. It is gonna seriously erode confidence in democracy, if it turns out that consumers can be manipulated in ways that we never imagined, we're gonna have to rethink consumer protection laws. now one one sort of bright spot or potentially bright spot; these uh technologies is that we could have a therapist on our phone right which would be connected to all sorts of biometric data, everything from measuring your blood pressure, your heart rate, your breathing, stress hormones. the fitbits and things like that which will record all sorts of biometric data from you, well if this was strapped up to a therapist that was monitoring you all the time, this therapist could actually potentially give you really good advice Because up to then, they've only heard this incredibly one-sided view of things which could be wildly inaccurate right and then there's an even bigger problem which is that the therapist even if you are being as truthful as possible, you may not actually understand what's going on with you or why you're doing things. an algorithm that knows you extremely extremely well could provide you with a kind of self-knowledge that even your best friend can provide to you or even the most insightful therapists can't provide to you. that could be very potentially useful now of course there'd be a downside to that, as harare points out because making important decisions is a skill, and like any skill, it degrades if you don't use it i use it or lose it

RELATED READING: Don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults,

because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite while enslaving the majority of humans. Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Should we rely on ourselves? The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs. Will you still be able to tell the difference between yourself and their marketing experts? To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life. TOPIC : ANGER The vengeance drive, when it is non regulated by taboos, becomes a danger to society and one's personal life. The frontal cortex is responsible to regulate the vengeance drive and the sex drive.

Aristotle : Failure to get angry at a time when you ought to get angry is, then, in the final analysis, for Aristotle, a sign of moral weakness or slavishness: you’re not as free (or honorable or courageous) as you imagine yourself to be, nor is your commitment to the people and things you claim to care about particularly trustworthy, dependable, or strong. Even so, at one and the same time, he argues that being a hothead who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation is at least as vicious, if not more vicious, than being a spineless pushover. Seneca: Anger cannot be moderated by reason precisely because anger actively impairs our capacity for reason. The angrier you get, the more unreasonable you become. Only the mildest forms of anger can be controlled by reason. CONCLUSION: Although there are plenty of good reasons to be pissed off, being perpetually pissed off does not, in and of itself, make you a good person. Likewise, being in a good mood does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It’s what we do that matters, at the end of the day, not how serious or sullen or cynical we are.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying life, appreciating beauty, and feeling joy. Besides, how can you save a world you don’t really love? And why would anyone else want to embrace your worldview when it seems to be making you so miserable? → YOUTUBE VIDEO Seneca says that we should try as hard as possible to not get angry at all. Rather than moderate and focus our anger, he says in a way to practice abstinence with anger. John says that the moments he regrets the most are moments where he angrily said or did something. To live a happy life, you have to get ahold of your anger. Repressing is not good. Better way LOST CONNECTIONS “But we’ve become quite bad at meeting these psychological needs. That’s a crucial reason why you—and so many of the people around you—are depressed and anxious.” “It’s a signal, saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.” “You can try to muffle the signal. That will lead you to many wasted years when the pain will persist. Or you can listen to the signal and let it guide you—away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and toward the things that will meet your true needs.”

CHEMICAL KISS “Is there anything hurting you that we might want to change? Even if he had asked, I don’t think I would have been able to answer him. I suspect I would have looked at him blankly. My life, I would have said, was good. Sure, I’d had some problems; but I had no reason to be unhappy—certainly not this unhappy.”

WEIRD HENRICH

-prioritizing impersonal pro-sociality (helping others without involving personal feelings) over interpersonal relationships (family, friendships…). Impersonal psychology includes inclinations to trust strangers or cooperating with

anonymous others. Another big one is having high levels of individualism, meaning a focus on the self and one’s attributes. This is often accompanied by tendencies toward self-enhancement and overconfidence. -WEIRD people also rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problems. I’ll give you an example: Analytic thinking places people or objects into distinct categories and assigns them properties to account for their behavior. Here people get assigned preferences or personality. Particles and planets get assigned charge and gravity. On the other hand, holistic thinkers focus on relationships, context, and interaction. For example, if person A is yelling at person B, an analytical thinker might infer that person A is an angry person while a holistic thinker worries about the relationship between persons A and B. This patterning extends to mental states. - WEIRD people tend to focus on people’s intentions, beliefs, and desires in judging them morally instead of emphasizing their actions. In many non-WEIRD societies, for example, the penalties for premeditated murders and accidental killings were the same while in many WEIRD societies they came to depend on the killer’s mental states, on his intentions and beliefs. -Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about personal accomplishments and success than about meeting family obligations (which is not to say that other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it comes with the package of family obligations). Westerners identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans. NOTES E2P2 1st step as Mei does—“If someone thinks you were mean, you were mean”—is a recipe for bad communication. Because the way I feel isn’t necessarily a fair or accurate reflection of reality. The fact that I think someone is being mean to me doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually being mean to me. Maybe I’m just sick. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I just misunderstood what was said. Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,”

3rd step He encouraged them to engage in emotional reasoning—to start with their feelings and then justify those feelings by drawing the conclusion that someone has committed an act of aggression against them. Those feelings do sometimes point to a correct inference, and it is important to find out whether an acquaintance feels hostility or contempt toward you. But it is not a good idea to start by assuming the worst about people and reading their actions as uncharitably as possible. This is the distortion known as mind reading; if done habitually and negatively, it is likely to lead to despair, anxiety, and a network of damaged relationships. These all hinge on the fact that listeners could choose to interpret the statement or question in a way that makes them feel insulted or marginalized This approach would make it easier for students to respond when they feel hurt, it would transform a victimization story into a story about one’s own agency, and it would make it far more likely that the interpersonal exchange would have a positive outcome. We all can be more thoughtful about our own speech, but it is unjust to treat people as if they are bigots when they harbor no ill will. Doing so can discourage them from being receptive to valuable feedback. It may also make them less interested in engaging with people across lines of difference. Teaching people to see more aggression in ambiguous interactions, take more offense, feel more negative emotions, and avoid questioning their initial interpretations strikes us as unwise, to say the least. 86 DAYS OF SOLITUDE But this amounts to precisely half of what it is to be human—there is a flip side, an entire second half to human nature, which is the human nature sculpted for use when alone in wilderness. Human structures and altered landscapes are like manifested thoughts. You can feel the concepts and the human striving behind them—to look at them is to be reminded of others. After a few weeks your world starts to become interesting; you begin to lose a habit that you don’t even know you have: the habit of compressing your thoughts so that they are succinct enough to put words to them, an absolutely essential precondition for speaking. When you never speak, those parts of your mind get repurposed. Something over a month without speech or human contact and the transformation is

complete—dismissal of concepts from one’s mind, and a weakening of the self, such that you have no longing or habit for either. In two more weeks your waking and sleeping are similar. That is to say, we all enter a mode where our days and nights of dreams and aspirations are no longer filtered through any kind of self or ‘me.’ There is no such entity as ‘me or I’ after this point. And when you go back to civilization, it’s a long slog back into the mindset needed to deal with chattering people and their world of battling, thrusting, concepts, and artifice. Usually it’s one for one: if you had minimal human contact for five months, it will be five months of strenuous effort, equivalent to learning a foreign language, to flip back to normal, during which time you’ll appear to others to be ‘bush-crazy.’ Cynicism & Innocence Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities people who know how to cut through the crap with ease; people with extremely well developed bullshit meters; people who are exceptionally good at discerning the real motives behind actions; people who always seem to know what’s really going on; people, in short, who are exceptionally cynical. Cynics often sneeringly maintain that whatever they can’t see or experience isn’t real (e.g., true love, genuine altruism, empathy, divinity, spirituality, transcendence, communion with nature, etc.). And this leads me to suspect that those who are especially good at seeing through bullshit pay dearly for their gift. The ability to rapidly reduce complicated moral questions into simple either/or propositions is probably a function of an absence. The moral clarity of most cynics is probably a function of some sort of emotional colorblindness. Turns out, kids who go the distance aren’t blessed with extraordinary willpower; they’re blessed with extraordinary parents. They trust the grownup because they’ve grown up in loving homes, surrounded by grownups who keep their word—stable, predictable grownups—grownups you can trust. These kids trust the adult world because it’s proven trustworthy. They’re privileged. And their privilege has made them naïve. But there’s a wisdom in this naïveté, just as there’s a wisdom in innocence....