№ 802. The Big C

Screenrant

 

№ 784. 2 Small Happy Habits

Wilder Thoughts

 

2 Small ‘Habit Changes’ For A Noticeably Happier Life, By A Psychologist
By Mark Travers,
Contributor. Mark Travers writes about the world of psychology.


A recent study published in the Journal of Macromarketing found that people who practice voluntary simplicity, deliberately consuming less and relying more on their own skills, report higher levels of both happiness and life purpose.

After analyzing a sample of New Zealander consumers, the study found that those who opted for simpler lives reported greater happiness and a stronger sense of purpose. Notice here the usage of the word “simple” instead of “easy” or “convenient.”

This tells us the opposite story from what’s being peddled to us today. Well-being might only take root in a lack of comfort, through the deliberate act of making space for what matters. But here’s the problem: we live in a culture that sells ease as the highest good. Faster shipping, one-click purchases and all such digital shortcuts are serving the same end of smoothening the harsh edges of daily life.

The study, therefore, comes bearing a warning for our AI-powered lives: the more convenient our lives become, the less content many of us actually feel. The good news is, it also comes bearing solutions, suggesting that the route to happiness may lie not in streamlining everything, but in consciously choosing a little inconvenience.

This isn’t about austerity or giving everything up. It’s about deciding that “enough” can feel better than “more.” And when people make that decision, they tend to redirect their time and energy into areas that matter far more deeply: connection, growth and meaning.

Why Does ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ Work?

Researchers categorize happiness in two primary ways. The first is hedonic wellbeing, which is the day-to-day experience of pleasure and satisfaction. And then, there’s eudaimonic wellbeing, which is more about living in alignment with your values, feeling that your life has direction and growing as a person. Hedonic well-being is usually experienced in the short-term, while the latter evolves and, when done right, increases over the long-term.

Interestingly, by embracing voluntary simplicity and stepping away from the clutter of constant consumption, people seem freer to invest in what fuels them on both fronts.

Convenience, as helpful as it can be, also may be robbing us of our agency. When every problem is outsourced or solved instantly, we miss out on the small challenges that give us a sense of competence and creativity.

Experiencing self-sufficiency, whether that means fixing a home electrical issue, cooking for a grieving neighbor or even having a meaningful conversation instead of picking up your phone, can remind you how satisfying effort can actually feel. That satisfaction, research shows, is often what often leads to lasting happiness.

But, there’s a caveat. To find happiness, you don’t need to strip away all forms of convenience. Instead, focus on creating space for what adds to your life, whether that’s your relationships, a sense of purpose or the pride of making something with your own hands.

Here are two small, practical changes that capture this spirit of simplicity in everyday life and can make you significantly happier.

№ 750. Bill Watterson's Speech

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED

Bill Watterson
Kenyon College Commencement
May 20, 1990

№ 749. Meaning v. Happiness

Meaning

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

№ 748. The Ghost Month, Love & Other Monsters

Pacita Abad's 

MY LIFE AND YOUR LIFE, 2002

№ 722. End Game: Retirement

Tanseco

But of course, retirement is only common in the middle class in the Philippines, where you’d need at least P5 million to live comfortably in retirement. Most Filipinos work until old age, but big family units make it easier to pull back from working in your later years.

Big 7 Travel ranked its Best Places to Retire list based on a number of factors, namely: quality of life, cost of living, rent index, restaurant price index, average annual temperatures, the easiness of obtaining a visa or residency, healthcare, hospitality, language barriers, and the range of things to do.

The Philippines, surprisingly, ranked higher than Luxembourg, Ireland, and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the best countries to retire in are Slovenia, Portugal, Estonia, Spain, and Paraguay. But you won’t have to fly halfway across the world for a cozy retirement community when you can find it right here in the Philippines.

№ 712. Success

№ 702. Six Feet Under

The pandemic and its disruptions are finally beginning to recede in the United States, but the vast scale of collective loss the country endured — and that some areas continue to endure — is hard to fathom. “Dying and grieving and losing and surviving are all experiences that we as a culture, as a people, as humanity, are grappling with in such an unrelenting way right now,” Robin said. “It feels like that aspect of the show, while always relevant, has become even more universally so.”

We have been shaken by the presence of death, but life still beckons to us, asking us to find a way to carry on. Ball sees the show as communicating a simple but profound message that remains as relevant now as ever. “The thing is, we die!” he said. “So deal with it, and live your life.”

“Don’t hold yourself back from fear,” he added. “Because you’re going to die anyway.”

№ 692. Trust in the Process

Cracked

“You can have flaws, be anxious and even be angry, but just remember that your life is the world’s biggest enterprise. Only you can stop it from failing. You are appreciated, admired, and loved by so many. 

 

Remember that happiness is not having a sky without storms, a road without accidents, a job without effort, a relationship without disappointments.

 

№ 691. How long will you live?

Performance Excellence Network

 

By Susan Ople

The average life span of a cockroach is one year. But, a cockroach does not know this. It does not scurry into safety at the sight of a giant shoe looming overhead, waiting for the perfect moment to squash it to extinction.

You and I differ from a cockroach. We are born knowing that eventually we will die. Like bread crumbs to pudding, our ashes will comingle with the Earth, thus offering nutrients to earthworms. An earthworm is far luckier than a cockroach. Its life span varies widely, from six to nine years, with the luckier species able to survive for at least 20 years.

That we, humans, are gifted with the knowledge that our umbilical cords come with an expiration date appear to be lost on people who live aimless lives. To wake up each morning and feel that this day is no different than the other is such a grievous error in judgment. Every sunrise is an opportunity to live a day better and more productive than the previous one.

№ 667. The Map You Make Yourself

Medium

 

 

The Map You Make Yourself

By Jan Richardson

 

You have looked
at so many doors with longing,
wondering if your life lay on the other
side.

For today, choose the door that opens
to the inside.

Travel the most ancient way of all:
the path that leads you
to the center of your life.

№ 666. Friendships 2

Preview

 

From the Friendship Files: Milton and Mike

Every Saturday morning for decades, Milton Ehrlich and his best friend, Mike, scoured garage sales near their homes in New Jersey, searching for books, records and antique bottles. But when Mike was in his 70s, he started losing his memory. Once, he wandered off from a garage sale and got lost. The police had to find him.

 

Determined not to lose their weekly date, Milton, who is now 91, began to call his friend every Saturday instead, playing for him their favorite music from the 1940s, including Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn. “Even though, by that time, Mike was having a hard time remembering what happened yesterday, the music always transported him,” Milton said. “He could sing along with lyrics and remember melodies from music that was 75 years old.”

The calls buoyed them both. When Milton’s wife passed away in 2021, after 67 years of “happy marriage,” the weekly ritual with Mike “became one of the last close personal connections in my life,” he said. His brothers died long ago, as did most of his friends. Milton and Mike exchanged only a few words between songs. For the most part, they just listened.

“It was a way of remaining tethered to my old buddy,” Milton said. “We would sit there, our houses about a mile apart in a small suburban town, each of us in our rocking chairs, staying connected to each other through the music of our teenage years.”

Mike died in October and, with him, a library of stories — about the best places to eat in Little Italy, about the clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and about the things you could buy for a nickel at Coney Island, Milton said. He was 90 years old. — Catherine Pearson

№ 665. Friendships

12 Ideas to Boost Your Happiness

 

Amy Pechukas met her friend Al in 2018 when she rented the apartment under his in Northampton, Mass. They didn’t connect immediately. Amy, now 42, worked four jobs and thought Al, 76, was a curmudgeon with questionable boundaries. He helped look after their two-family home and would frequently enter her apartment to check on her two cats and two dogs.

But Al’s peculiar brand of kindness grew on her. “He often pops in for a conversation spontaneously, at times when I need a lift, and we end up talking for hours,” she said. “We go for evening walks and argue about the route.”

Covid brought them even closer. During lockdown, they would meet in the driveway to talk about the virus or politics. Amy made a Thanksgiving meal, which they ate outside on their porch with electric blankets on their laps. They have celebrated the holiday together ever since.

Al can still be overbearing. He has firm ideas about the way things should be done around the home, like the “right” way to rake the leaves. Every summer, he frets that Amy’s elderly cat, who grows lazy in the heat, is on the verge of death.

But Amy feels deep gratitude for their unexpected friendship, and for the constant, unselfish care Al has shown her and her pets. “When my dog got very sick a year ago and needed me to do round-the-clock care for her, I would come home on occasion to find Al in my kitchen doing my dishes,” she recalled. “‘You can’t do everything, Amy,’ he’d say. ‘You’re doing a great job.’”

Though Al does not say it outright, Amy knows he worries she might move out. She recently interviewed for a position out of state, and Al told her several times that it sounded terrible — reminding her that there were other jobs closer by.

“We just have a lot of fun,” she said. “We like to quote movie lines endlessly, we’ll do that for, like, two hours straight. Last winter we went ice skating in the cemetery because it was flooded. Al’s just a good person.” — Catherine Pearson

№ 613. Can't Help Myself

"No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It's programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running...if too much escapes, it will die so it's desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day. Saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do these 'happy dances' to spectators. When the project was first launched it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later... (as you see it now in the video) it looks tired and hopeless as there isn't enough time to dance anymore.. It now only has enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked hydraulic fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time. Living its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out... (Figuratively and literally as its hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like it's actual blood).

"The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fluid in 2019, slowly came to a halt and died - And I am now tearing up over a friggin robot arm.

Kalie Kismet

№ 608. It’s never too Late

Pickles

 

Vera Jiji, 93, at her home in New York with her cello. “It has given me a way to communicate without using words,” she said.

№ 591. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

Pinterest

 

Indeed, he was a proponent of talking openly about dying and grief, something that came with difficulty for many people, he said. “Death has come out of the closet,” he told The New York Times in 1994.

“For so many years people thought that if they didn’t talk about it, death would go away,” he continued. “It was the immorality of mortality. But for the first time, people are willing to acknowledge that living is the leading cause of death, and they want to talk about it.” He counseled mourners with his often-used adage “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

 

Hedgeye

 

After Rabbi Grollman retired from Beth El to focus on writing and counseling, he returned there occasionally to recite the Yizkor, a memorial prayer for the dead, and regularly addressed the congregation into his 90s.

“Obsessing about death can lead to paralysis, while ignoring it can squander opportunity,” he told The Times in 1994. “The important thing about death is the importance of life. Do what you have to do now. Live today meaningfully.”

 

№ 547. "Life is more important than a concert"

№ 543. Then A Bit of Validation

Incidental Comics

 

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’

“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’

“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”

№ 535. I for Ikigai

For a State of Happiness

№ 404. "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

Here's a middle of the week advice: for the laborers who are tired, knee-deep in life's muck; for the aging bureaucrats who are swamped with public summonses and scorn; for the toil of vocation in anonymity, without fanfare and without noise:  "Take your broken heart, make it into art."

"Thank you, Hollywood foreign press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said. You and all of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it. Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we? And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places.

I was born and raised and created in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola [Davis] was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Italy. Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Ethiopia, raised in -- no, in Ireland, I do believe. And she's here nominated for playing a small town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.