Stumbling on Bloginess
I am always thinking of things to blog about. Lately I have been having trouble finding the time. Tonight I had time. I sat down and read 49 comic strips at Sinfest. Then I made sure I was caught up on the astronomy picture of the day. Following that I read all of my regular blogs, and then finally I watched two episodes of Ask A Ninja.
So obviously I am stalling. And if I am stalling that means blogging has become important to me. Because I avoid anything that might make me feel better about myself with a religious zeal. And yet here I am stalling still. And why is this such a big deal? for the 2 dozen people who actually read my blog?
I have read several books lately, so that seems like a good place to get back on track. Ready? Set? GO!... okay... GO! NOW. no no no, seriously, now...
One of the most interesting books I finished recently is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I posted at length (and got in an accidental fight with yoshimi over) an article he wrote for Time about how happiness for parents is lower than childless couples. I am not trying to drag that up again.
He fancies himself as clever and writes that way. For example he goes on for a page (humorously) about how everyone with a PhD in psychology must eventually write "the Sentence". The Sentence must begin with the words "Human beings are the only animals who...". So what is Gilbert's Sentence? Here it is:
Humans beings are the only animals who think about the future.
But his book is not about that so much as about how we do it so badly. Why, he asks, can we envision the Golden Gate Bridge, the iPod, and Wal-Mart, and suck so bad at envisioning what will make us happy in our own personal futures?
This is a fair question. And he spends the book answering it. Not a fair question you say? Then why do so many people get divorced? Changes careers? regret not having kids? The point is we think we know what we will want in the future, but that vision is never perfect.
He offers several reasons for this. We view our future selves through the prism of our own limited experience. Our brains, for many different reasons, do not present us with an accurate picture of the future, nor past, nor the present for that matter. Just as we view the world differently than other people we know, our future selves view the world differently because they are essentially different people. Here is how he defines "realism".
realism: The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.
He strongly endorses a very subjective view of the world, as you can see. This is something I have always struggled with. On the one hand this is a no brainer. I hear a set of facts and come to one conclusion, Sean Hannity hears the same set of facts and comes to a different conclusion. This is because of our different experiences, attitudes and beliefs (and the fact that he is a dick). At the same time, I have difficulty believing that, through subjectivity, every view point is valid. I can not come to the conclusion, no matter what intellectual ponzi games I play, that flying a plane into a building is a moral thing to do. And yet obviously some people think that it is the most moral thing you can do. Where is the line? This is idea of subjectivity has been weighing on my mind lately, and I hope to return to it later. In the mean time I will wrap up by providing an excerpt from the forward of Stumbling on Happiness, which I really enjoyed.
What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.
Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly.
[snip]
[J]ust about any time we want something-a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger-we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
Yeah, yeah. Don't hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. ... They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn't good enough for them.
You can read the forward to the book here
So obviously I am stalling. And if I am stalling that means blogging has become important to me. Because I avoid anything that might make me feel better about myself with a religious zeal. And yet here I am stalling still. And why is this such a big deal? for the 2 dozen people who actually read my blog?
I have read several books lately, so that seems like a good place to get back on track. Ready? Set? GO!... okay... GO! NOW. no no no, seriously, now...
One of the most interesting books I finished recently is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I posted at length (and got in an accidental fight with yoshimi over) an article he wrote for Time about how happiness for parents is lower than childless couples. I am not trying to drag that up again.
He fancies himself as clever and writes that way. For example he goes on for a page (humorously) about how everyone with a PhD in psychology must eventually write "the Sentence". The Sentence must begin with the words "Human beings are the only animals who...". So what is Gilbert's Sentence? Here it is:
Humans beings are the only animals who think about the future.
But his book is not about that so much as about how we do it so badly. Why, he asks, can we envision the Golden Gate Bridge, the iPod, and Wal-Mart, and suck so bad at envisioning what will make us happy in our own personal futures?
This is a fair question. And he spends the book answering it. Not a fair question you say? Then why do so many people get divorced? Changes careers? regret not having kids? The point is we think we know what we will want in the future, but that vision is never perfect.
He offers several reasons for this. We view our future selves through the prism of our own limited experience. Our brains, for many different reasons, do not present us with an accurate picture of the future, nor past, nor the present for that matter. Just as we view the world differently than other people we know, our future selves view the world differently because they are essentially different people. Here is how he defines "realism".
realism: The belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.
He strongly endorses a very subjective view of the world, as you can see. This is something I have always struggled with. On the one hand this is a no brainer. I hear a set of facts and come to one conclusion, Sean Hannity hears the same set of facts and comes to a different conclusion. This is because of our different experiences, attitudes and beliefs (and the fact that he is a dick). At the same time, I have difficulty believing that, through subjectivity, every view point is valid. I can not come to the conclusion, no matter what intellectual ponzi games I play, that flying a plane into a building is a moral thing to do. And yet obviously some people think that it is the most moral thing you can do. Where is the line? This is idea of subjectivity has been weighing on my mind lately, and I hope to return to it later. In the mean time I will wrap up by providing an excerpt from the forward of Stumbling on Happiness, which I really enjoyed.
What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.
Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly.
[snip]
[J]ust about any time we want something-a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger-we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
Yeah, yeah. Don't hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. ... They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn't good enough for them.
You can read the forward to the book here