background preloader

There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith

There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith
"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. As Anna S. Related:  On Being HumanPsychology

Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness - Emily Esfahani Smith Health People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Of course, it’s important to first define happiness. It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote.

Online disinhibition effect The online disinhibition effect is a loosening (or complete abandonment) of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interaction during interactions with others on the Internet. This effect is caused by many factors, including dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority.[1] General concept[edit] Because of this loss of inhibition, some users may exhibit benign tendencies, including becoming more affectionate, more willing to open up to others, and less guarded about emotions, all in an attempt to achieve emotional catharsis. With respect to bad behavior, users on the Internet can frequently do or say as they wish without fear of any kind of meaningful reprisal. CB radio during the 1970s saw similar bad behavior: You don't know me[edit] You can't see me[edit] Core Concept: Invisibility See you later[edit] Core Concept: Asynchronicity See also[edit]

1 Technique To GUARANTEE You Will NEVER Be Rejected By Women - Attraction Institute | Attraction Institute I’ve seen quite a few emails from other dating companies recently giving out FOOLPROOF methods for eliminating the possibility of a woman EVER rejecting you. Frankly, they’re all shit. So, to make sure you get the right information rather than some voodoo magic trick to hypnotise women into becoming your dirty sex slaves… …I thought I’d give you the truth about how to avoid rejection from women. So here it is: The 1 technique that will guarantee that you will NEVER be rejected by a woman again, is: Never talk to a woman again. Seriously. That’s the only way. There’s no other way. If you plan on talking to any women over the course of your life, eventually, you’re going to meet one who isn’t attracted to you. There’s no set of lines, routines, techniques, structures, methods, or tactics that will prevent a woman from saying ‘No.’ None. Anyone who says there is a magic formula for avoiding rejection is trying to sell you snake oil. There’s no logic to it. Women are human beings. Foolproof! 1. 2.

What Writing Has in Common With Happiness By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. The final line of an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges poem became the title for Yasmina Reza's latest book, Happy Are the Happy. For Reza, Borges’ poem suggests that happiness, which people tend to talk about as achievable and context-dependent, is dispensed more mysteriously than we like to think. In our conversation for this series, we discussed the ways contentment transcends our understanding—and how works of literature, too, are more than what their authors understand them to be. Happy Are the Happy features 18 different narrators, each of whom gets to command the reader's attention for at least one chapter. Reza’s books—novels, plays, and an unorthodox book-length profile of Nicolas Sarkozy—have been translated into more than 30 languages. She lives in Paris and spoke to me in New York City. And we can never know.

Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity. As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity. However, creativity also requires knowledge. If you are not willing to do something new, then it’s hard to be creative. At the same time, creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and another. In order to have deep knowledge about a discipline as well as a wide base of knowledge that can be mined later for analogies, it is important for someone to enjoy thinking. How About You?

The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! | Neurobonkers A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions. The report is quite a heavy document so I’ve summarised the techniques below based on the conclusions of the report regarding effectiveness of each technique. Be aware that everyone thinks they have their own style of learning (they don't, according to the latest research), and the evidence suggests that just because a technique works or does not work for other people does not necessarily mean it will or won’t work well for you. If you want to know how to revise or learn most effectively you will still want to experiment on yourself a little with each technique before writing any of them off. Elaborative Interrogation (Rating = moderate) A method involving creating explanations for why stated facts are true. An example of elaborative interrogation for the above paragraph could be: Reference:

Kierkegaard on Our Greatest Source of Unhappiness by Maria Popova Hope, memory, and how our chronic compulsion to flee from our own lives robs us of living. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. “On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with overplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness. Kierkegaard, who was only thirty at the time, begins with an observation all the timelier today, amidst our culture of busy-as-a-badge-of-honor: Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. The unhappy one is absent. Consider first the hoping individual. Donating = Loving

Why indigenous and racialized struggles will always be appendixed by the left Inspired by artists, academics and activist colleagues who have rolled their eyes at the spiritual beliefs of their Indigenous counterparts as well as protested the inclusion of prayer and ceremony into political, academic and artistic activities, I have decided to share my thinking on some fundamental differences in values and knowledge ways that impede relationship-making across our communities. While I can't generalize about what Indigenous or other racialized peoples mean by the words "decolonization", anti-racist or "anti-colonial", I can certainly observe how SOME philosophies and action strategies employed in leftist movements relegate anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles to the periphery. Furthermore, concepts of "decolonization", as they are talked about in many Indigenous and other racialized communities, are not always compatible with what are essentially Eurocentric philosophies and actions strategies. That isn't to say that glasses can't ever be useful.

Energy Shocks - Quartz Europe is warning Russian president Vladimir Putin of reputational harm if he shuts off the natural gas flow to the West, but judging by the behavior of western oil chiefs, he is secure if he dismisses the admonishment as so much noise. Energy—and not the deployment of incognito, ragtag or straight-out government troops—is the central actor in the drama playing out between Russia, Ukraine and the West. If the West wants to ensure that Putin’s land grab stops at Crimea, it will impose sanctions that impair or halt the activity of foreign oil and gas companies in Russia and ignore his threats to suspend Ukraine’s gas supply. Russia relies on oil and gas exports to support 52% of the state budget. So it is that, with production on a natural decline, Putin has brought in western behemoths ExxonMobil, Shell, Statoil and others to break open the Arctic and the enormous Bazhenov shale field. The signs are that they intend to.

A Guide for the Perplexed: Mapping the Meaning of Life and the Four Levels of Being by Maria Popova How to harness the uniquely human power of “consciousness recoiling upon itself.” “Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her sublime meditation on how the art of getting lost helps us find ourselves, “and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.” Schumacher begins with an apt anecdotal metaphor for how these misleading maps are handed to us: On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. Map of Palmanova, from Umberto Eco's 'Legendary Lands.' Instead, Schumacher set out to “look at the whole world and try to see it” — which requires examining what it really means to map knowledge and meaning in life, including its invisible, unprovable layers. The maps of real knowledge, designed for real life, showed nothing except things which allegedly could be proved to exist. 'Isle of Knowledge' by Marian Bantjes.

activism, optimism, compassion, occupy love, zainab amadahy, International Indigenous Gathering 2012 In this article, guest author ZAINAB AMADAHY explores the power of positivity as a force of transformation in the world. Here at Occupy Love, we are always looking for love in all the wrong places, and finding it. On a panel discussing the relationship between “Love and Decolonization” I once spoke about protocols and ceremonies that are used by Indigenous communities in struggle. Because ceremonies allow participants to give thanks, vision an optimistic future, feel grounded on the land, connect to ancestors, feel responsibility to coming generations and cooperate together, they generate wellness. Mainstream science now understands that cultivating thoughts and feelings of generosity, gratitude, optimism, hope, compassion and cooperation are good for your health. Of course, this mindset also impacts your relationships, affecting friends, family and co-workers in positive ways. However, not every carrot will do the trick.

50 Best Websites 2013 | Forvo Using audio clips, Forvo tells you how to pronounce things. It depends on user submissions, so it’s only as good as its community, but that also means that all kinds of words are included. There are words you’d find in a dictionary (like, say, emeritus) but also names and places related to current events. Don’t know how to pronounce that Russian leader’s name? Well, look up Medvedev. Users can vote on good and bad pronunciations, which should help weed out inaccuracies and anomalies of the sort you find at sites like Urban Dictionary. Link: Forvo Next TED-Ed

Related: