Aphor 2021/05/17 – Happiness 2

Tags

Contentment, Epigrams, happiness, Life strategies

The basic Aphor list and a sublist Aphor Charles Scamahorn 

1. Don’t search for happiness in distant supposed paradises because it only exists within you, and that is where you can search with success.
2. When you aren’t finding happiness within yourself, help others find it within themselves, and enjoy the karmic feedback.
3. You can help others sustain happiness by empowering them to see the good things they are doing for others.
4. An unhappy person seeks personal happiness using his mouth, but the wise one finds it in the productive acts of his hands helping others.
5. You can find happiness in the present moment by sharing a story of a significant event in your life.
6. Tranquility is a state of continuing happiness.
7. Every moment of life contains a potential decision to look ahead and choose what goal you think best and a path to get you there.
8. Possessing something does not bring you happiness until it is helping to do something you value achieved.
9. Having too many possessions creates chaos if they are a pile of unused stuff without a potential use.
10. Living long enough to fulfill your childhood dreams is gratifying if you had the same ambitions then as when you became a senior.
11. Struggling to move toward your goal always has a trace of happiness, even when encountering painful moments.
12. You will always find happiness when doing things you know are helpful to your friends.
13. We must be successfully doing something that challenges our courage to be feeling happy.
14. The quality of your life depends on your ideas, and happiness and suffering are the results of your earlier thoughts.
15. You feel happy when receiving things you want, but you can avoid unhappiness by not hoping for something impossible to possess.
16. If you have an abundance of good things, one option that makes many people happier is to help other people to find happiness.
17. It is easier to be happy when you are healthy, have no monetary debt, and have the flexibility of slack in everything you need.
18. Your participation in society’s adaptation to the environment is helping our living species’ DNA adaptations to the long-term processes of life.
19. When you are in your happy moods, it feels like you are truly living, and it is then you have your opportunities to explore your options.
20. Every person is free to seek their happiness in their way, using their methods, and what they choose has long-term results.
21. Physical pleasures only last for seconds, emotional happiness for a few minutes, and mental contentment for years.
22. It will help you live more contentedly if you choose to do something that makes your life more meaningful, rather than someone paying you for your work.
23. Even in the role of a boss, you can do things that make your workers happier and productive.
24. Practice accepting and enjoying happiness when it is available.
25. When you have a worthwhile goal and enough time and resources to pursue it properly, you can make the world a better place.
26. Without a worthwhile goal that brings some happiness, even a healthy adult will drift toward neurosis.
27. When you have the necessities of life, such as happiness, help the rest of humanity obtain them.
28. You have as much right to be happy as gravity has the right to pull.
29. You are happiest when you are growing toward a more contented maturity.
30. While living a human life, you may choose to believe in assumed perfect happiness soon to be enjoyed in heaven.
31. The happiest people are those who know they are helping all humanity to become more comfortable.
32. A small task well done will bring as much happiness as an occasional big task well done, though small ones are ubiquitous, big ones rare.
33. An easy way to soften your troubles is to help anyone ease theirs.
34. Having absolutely nothing to do is a form of punishment.
35. Your happiness is found while in close pursuit of a goal, and contentment is had when you know you have done your duty.
36. You need only choose to moderate your most extreme practices to be happy.
37. Enthusiasm in pursuit of something worthy of public praise is a sure sign of a happy person.
38. Enthusiasm and happiness are felt during the pursuit of worthy goals, and contentment is yours when about to fall asleep.
39. Your enthusiasm is the fireworks, happiness, the sparkle, and contentment the afterglow.
40. When a person is happy, they can pursue any of their options, but when depressed, they have no energy to seek opportunities.
41. The constant happiness of an Epicurean sage is made possible by his habit of relishing everything that won’t bring personal pain.

Aphor 2021/05/16 – Happiness 1

The basic Aphor list and a sublist Aphor Charles Scamahorn 

1. Happiness is an exhilarating positive emotional feeling in the present moment of social success.
2. The more public the goal of personal success, the greater the happiness, the closer it is to and after completion.
3. Happiness is dependent on making some person happy, and that is amplified from the single you to the more, the merrier.
4. If your progress toward a goal makes another person happy, then you are doubling the total happiness you are creating.
5. You must be alive to be physically happy, but if you record things that make people happy elsewhere or in the future, you share in that happiness.
6. Generating the kind of happiness that is self-centered vanishes as your moment passes away, and its memory goes to the grave when you die.
7. When you are made happy by creating several other people’s unhappiness, you corrupt the world and make it an unhappier place.
8. Personal debauchery in the quest for immediate happiness is a proven path to your long-term suffering.
9. A foolish person finds pleasure in the pompous words of his mouth, but a contented one finds happiness in the practical actions of his hands.
10. You won’t find happiness in a superabundance of stuff but in an abundance of good habits and contented friends.
11. If you are happy and helpful in your relationship with people and dogs, they will treat you well.
12. You will not be happy if you expect people to treat you well as you treat them poorly.
13. If you are waiting for people to be good to you before you can be good to them, you are in for a long wait on your road to happiness.
14. To be happy with the world, you must choose to accept many unpleasant things that impinge on you that are beyond anyone’s control.
15. To be happy, you need to occasionally consider the inevitable sad things and then grieve and move back to your productive life goals.
16. Always we live with the fact that there is only one place and one moment where you can be happy, and that is here and now.
17. There is happiness in doing good things when we know we are doing good things.

Tomorrow is to be a discussion of happiness.

My life has a personal purpose because I am growing a garden and because I am trying to find reasonable ways of responding to the Covid pandemic. When I talk to my friends about these endeavors they seem to appreciate what I am doing, but as far as the people of the world it appears to me they are totally avoiding what has been called for a long time, perhaps centuries, common sense.

To my way of thinking the reasonable and responsible thing to do while we are waiting for a vaccine to arrive is to wash that part of our body where the Covid virus is most likely to get a grip on us. That is the mucus membranes of the nose and sinuses. Those places can easily be washed by using a very mild baby shampoo when washing our face normally and sniffing a little of the soapy water. Ten drops per liter of baby shampoo of distilled water is probably effective and is obviously safe because it has been used when washing babies for decades, and in much greater concentrations. The soapy water doesn’t burn the nose, and it is very cheap to make.

I will be discussing this tomorrow in my thoughts about happiness, and I hope that I get a little positive feedback, so I can feel a bit of happiness.

What do you want? Truth? Beauty? Health? Happiness?

Tags

Beauty, happiness, Health, truth, Utilitarians, What do you want?

Truth is beauty say some. Health is happiness say others. I have for years sort of gone along with Hume and Smith and sided with the Utilitarians and tried to apply those kinds of concepts to them and their kind in the form of kindness. That is, intellectually at least, to treat other people better than I treat myself. That’s a low bar you might claim because I don’t treat myself particularly well.

The Utilitarians claimed they were seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number. That’s okay for a brief statement, but as with all definitions, it doesn’t go far,  and certainly in the case of kindness not far enough. If we are to be kind, must it be limited to those with whom we interact or must it be granted to all humankind, and can we include our personal pets? If we are to be kind to all humanity must that include the as yet unborn? Does it include those who won’t be born for ten thousand years? If humanity is approximately halfway through its population journey, then we have about a hundred billion people yet to offer our kindness to. Is that a realistic use of our time and adaptive energy?

Can’t we just all get along? Apparently not, and I can’t even decide what truth, beauty health or happiness really are. Can you?

Happiness minus suffering equals flourishing

Tags

Annihilation, Eudaimonia, Eudeimonia, happiness, Suffering

Why would we want to define happiness or suffering or flourishing?  Wikipedia’s take is a starting point – Happiness … Suffering … Flourishing (Eudaimonia). The goal of the last few blog posts is to maximize humanity’s flourishing and to do that, in the long run, means to have a large number of humans. By the long run I mean until the very last biological creature we could define as human-derived has gone extinct. Perhaps that will be a million years, or perhaps it will be tomorrow, and because I don’t want it to be tomorrow I have done what I could to prevent World War Three. It is impossible to know, but perhaps I was successful in that last one.

Humanity has always had a problem with excess population because it is part of the Darwinian natural selection process to maximize population and occupy all possible niches. That process creates too many members of a species to survive and thus the best adapted to a local environment are the healthiest and survive the most often and get to reproduce while their less fortunate species members die and don’t get to reproduce. Humanity has been astoundingly successful since the development of agriculture and incredibly successful since the industrial revolution and even more successful with the development of the Haber ammonia fixation process. Without the creation of agricultural ammonia, the human population would have crashed because plants need it to thrive and ultimately even if we live on meat, we eat plants.

  World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

It is impossible for any biological species to live without eating, and thus at some point in the future that near vertical curve must change. However, a robot society can live forever because their energy consumption can drop to zero for long periods of time, and they would only be revived when the environment is propitious.

To maximize human flourishing, which I support because it is my species, we need to survive. The longer we survive, the more people ultimately can live, and we need large numbers of people in the long run, for the living human base population from which happiness can arise and be expressed. The problem becomes, do we want a short-lived humanity with eight billion people at constant risk of a major war, famine, and giga-deaths? Or would we prefer a population that the Earth can support on an ongoing basis for millions of years? A billion people living for a hundred years each times a million years equals a trillion times more opportunities for happiness minus suffering to equal lives of eudaimonia. The math is weird and exceedingly speculative, but the general improvement by moving to a robot-associated society is vast.

If we decide we would prefer the Earth with a long-term sustainable population we can do that either by killing almost everyone, with the survivors living as primitive apes, or we can choose to create a robot-based civilization that will provide an abundance of desirable goods to a smaller population and work out ways of fair treatment for everyone in that smaller group. It is difficult to guess what people living in Eudaimonia would choose for a fair society, but it almost certainly would be better than having 14,185 A-bombs instantly ready to kill every human many times over like we have at present.

Robots can offer us a safe, eudaimonic society if we make them our friends.

Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland – Book review

Tags

Coping with old age., Happiness is a choice, Old age

Debbie has continued her tradition of reading me to sleep almost every night since 1985. That may not have been totally true back in the 80s but I’m certain it’s true since the late 90s. I just asked her if she has a list and she said that there’s not a single source one, but they were written down somewhere. So, I asked her to make a single list so I could see where I’ve been in my dozing off times. One line I remember from years ago is from the Japanese Ainu-aborigine stories which usually ended, after some fantastic adventure, with, “We lived and lived and nothing happened.” Somehow, to my mind, that seems appropriate for a summation of this book that follows seven aging people. Six subjects of the official study and the not-so-old author’s relationship with his aging mother. The author, a professional news reporter, admits that he was violating one of a reporter’s prime directives, “Report the news don’t make the news,” and I sometimes found it difficult to know when he was reporting his subjects’ experiences and when he was analyzing his own personal experiences. It was always mildly interesting.

These people lived and lived and to an outside observer, it appeared as if not much of anything happened. At least not much happened that a healthy person would choose for a life. And yet it did appear that each of these people, all of whom were chosen for this book because they were over the age of eighty-five, did value their lives as they had lived them.

All of them declined noticeably in these older years, and yet they seemed to accept that result of aging. A couple of them didn’t have much desire to continue living and even said they would prefer to be done with life, and yet they didn’t commit suicide. One man did die slightly quicker when he knew that he was in the last week and just quit eating. I don’t know if that’s suicide or just hurrying the inevitable along a little.

I found this book a little more interesting now that I am well launched into my eighties, a quarter of the way through to be exact; and certainly found it more interesting than I would have even a year ago because of my recently diagnosed prostate problem.

This book is recommended reading for those moving into an elder status as it offers some perspective. You are not alone! This is a life story and it has a beginning a middle and an end.

I am no longer seeking happiness.

Tags

"Treat others better than I treat myself.", I'm not seeking happiness., I'm not seeking pleasure., Life is easier when your are healthy., Living life successfully

I was in an extended conversation where we were discussing happiness and how to get it and maintain it. I was attentive throughout the discussion but didn’t participate because happiness seemed like such a desirable goal and my views were very different. Happiness is certainly more desirable than unhappiness most of the time and I didn’t want to be critical of emotions that people feel are desirable. Also, as my present goal is to help people develop more mature lifestyles, it would be counterproductive to begin presenting disturbing ideas. I want to be nicer to people than they are to me and to one another and to bring up my point of view would be perceived as hostile.

My desire is to live a complete life and that includes experiencing the various things that people can endure. Perhaps that is overstating a bit because I do want to avoid the nasty bits, and do seek to avoid automobile accidents and their unpleasant results. As obvious as physical accident avoidance seems to me I do know people who like to live on the edge of an accident because, they claim, it makes them feel more alive. Of course to live on the edge means falling over occasionally and being injured, even killed. I’m willing to take some risks but only if they can be recovered from and if there is a much greater payoff than the worst injury likely. I have a friend who feels wrongly imprisoned, because of a failure to pay a monetary debt, and therefore has refused to eat prison food for two weeks. I have another friend who rides motorcycles in what sounds like very dangerous ways. And others who say they take dangerous street drugs.

People claim they get a happy feeling by doing these things and they consider me weak for pursuing my bland goals of helping humanity live better. That was the stated goal in the title of this blog since the first day: Probaway – Life Hacks ~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully, and at present I have written 3,424 posts with that as the intent. Obviously, I don’t have that many thoughts and there must be some repetitiveness in those posts, but there has been a growth in the ways of seeking a better life. The intent isn’t to force anyone to do anything they don’t see as being to their benefit, but to pull back a veil that they could have easily pulled back themselves. To see what is easily seen by anyone who chooses to look.

“Treat others better than you treat yourself” is the idea I am presently pursuing because to the degree that people can do that they can cultivate the habits of growing in maturity. That is a benefit to themselves as well as to others. When I am more comfortable with that idea and have some memorable examples I will present it to these people who consider happiness as the highest good, perhaps second only to pleasure. For the moment my bon mot is:

“Treat others better than I treat myself.”

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness

Tags

Approaching happiness, Avoiding unhappiness, Contentment, Epigrams, happiness, Unhappiness

Dictionary of New Epigrams

Happiness

1. The continual happiness of a sage is made possible by his habit of relishing everything.

2. A happy person experiences many happy hours and few unhappy ones.

3. The happiness of most people isn’t ruined by disasters but by bad habits.

4. To avoid unhappiness, cease worrying about things that are beyond the power of your influence.

5. Happiness is found in the active pursuit of worthwhile goals, and contentment is found in the sustained achievement of them.

6. Happy people are those producing something that helps them achieve a worthwhile goal.

7. A man is happy when he has a worthwhile goal and the resources to pursue it.

8. Doing a multitude of small tasks often will bring you more happiness than doing a few big ones occasionally.

9. Learn to seek out and enjoy the little things—there are so many of them, and enjoy the big ones as they randomly happen—there are so few of them.

10. The easiest way to soften your few personal problems is to ease other people’s multitudes of problems.

11. A delicate pleasure is had when giving pleasure to others, but it takes a mature personality to know how to practice this simple activity.

12. You will find some happiness if you can find a way to help anyone live better.

13. A normal man needs only to seek moderation to find happiness.

14. Unhappiness is felt in the difference between our expectations and our accomplishments, between what we want and what we get.

15. No one can live happily who regards himself alone and who attempts to turn everything to his own advantage.

16. You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself. (and for humanity if you have a sage-like desire.)

17. When people are unhappy they can’t see their options, but when they are happy their mind is more flexible, and they can see their options and exploit them.

18. Happiness and unhappiness are alike in that the more we practice them, the more skilled we get at living that way.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Happiness

Tags

Contentment, Epigrams, happiness, Life strategies

Dictionary of New Epigrams

Happiness

1. Don’t bother to travel to distant tropical paradises searching for happiness; it’s mostly to be found within you when you find a worthwhile goal you can approach.

2. If you can’t find happiness within yourself, help others find it within themselves; it’s a learning experience with a karmic feedback.

3. You help others to be happy by helping them feel good about themselves and what they are doing.

4. A fool seeks happiness in his mouth, but the wise one finds it in the productive acts of his hands.

5. Happiness is not a remembered thing, but an ongoing living experience.

6. Tranquility is a state of continuing happiness.

7. At every moment of life we can choose paths that will bring us to happiness or other states, and it’s our choice which paths we choose.

8. Possessions do not bring happiness, it is our relationship with them.

9. More possessions are not happiness if they are just an unused pile of unneeded stuff.

10. Living out your childhood goals is wonderful, if you were a very wise child. A mature person may create more mature goals for themselves.

11. Struggling to get to your goal always has a tinge of happiness, even when painful.

12. Happiness is found in doing things you believe are worthwhile.

13. We must be doing something we know to be important to be happy.

14. The quality of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, and happiness or suffering are a result of your earlier thoughts.

15. Avoid unhappiness by not struggling to get something that is impossible to possess.

16. The person who has all of the good things that life has to offer has only one option left to increase his happiness, and that is to help all the people of the world to be happier.

17. You can be happy if you are healthy, own what you use, are not in debt to anyone, and have a little slack and flexibility in all things.

18. Participation in adaptation to one’s environment is the short-term struggle for life, and DNA is adaptation to the long-term processes of life. In that view survival is happiness, or at a minimum it is a chance for happiness.

19. It is when a man is in his expansive moods that he is really living, because it’s then that he can explore his options.

20. Every person seeks their own happiness in their own way and by their own methods.

21. Don’t mistake physical pleasure for emotional happiness and mental maturity.

22. You must choose what it is that makes your life more meaningful than just existing and having a good time.

23. Create happiness for others and enjoy the karmic feedback.

24. Practice accepting happiness when it comes your way.

25. If you have a worthwhile goal and enough time and money to pursue it well, you have an opportunity to improve the world and make more people happy.

26. Without a worthwhile goal and appreciation of others a man will sink into an adolescent neurosis.

27. When you have the necessities help the rest of humanity to have these things too.

28. You have as much right to be happy as the stars have the right to shine.

29. You are happiest when you are growing toward greater maturity.

30. As a living human being you may believe in perfect happiness in heaven.

31. The happiest people are those who know they are helping humanity to be happier.

32. Each one of a multitude of small tasks well done will bring as much happiness as a big one well done. There are lots of little tasks and they are easy to find, but big ones are difficult in every way.

33. The easiest way to soften our troubles is to help any of the multitudes of others cope with their troubles.

34. Having nothing to do is a form of suffering and of punishment.

35. Happiness is in the pursuit of a worthwhile goal, and contentment is in achieving it.

36. Most people need only be moderate in their behavior to be happy and find tranquility.

37. Enthusiasm in the pursuit of something is a certain sign of a happy person.

38. Enthusiasm and happiness are felt during the pursuit of a worthwhile goal, and contentment is to be had when about to fall asleep.

39. Enthusiasm is the fireworks, happiness is the sparkle, contentment is the glow.

40. When a person is happy they can pursue their options; when depressed they have no options.

41. The continual happiness of a sage is made possible by his habit of relishing everything.

Is happiness a behavior that can be learned?

Tags

Avoid shortcuts to happiness, happiness, Happiness is pursuing worthwhile goals, Pursue your own reality

I’ve been blogging about happiness the last few days, and discussing it with my friends, but it seems too elusive to define well enough to pursue as a deliberate goal. If it is just a warm fuzzy feeling then a shortcut is readily available, and that is to take the happy pills that are so popular with the public. I don’t like that procedure because in my world I view happiness as the positive feedback our body gives us when we do things that move the whole of our being toward a worthwhile goal. Taking happy drugs is cheating and gives that positive feedback feeling, but without us doing anything other than dropping a pill, and thus it distorts our relationship with our reality and interferes with our pursuing our true goals. It makes us into phony people, and that is a kind of person that many people I know claim is the most despicable kind of personality. And yet, I can’t remember anyone claiming that people who take antidepressants are despicable people. Hm. What they usually seem to mean by that is someone who seems inauthentic because they aren’t responding to them in a way that fits their personal assumptions of how a person of their peer group should behave. That is disturbing because that makes any person that doesn’t act the way they want into an inauthentic person to be avoided, and that means a person who is of a different culture is inauthentic, or worse yet for me, any person who is “different.” Well, I was considered to be different, even in Berkeley a town considered the most unusual place on Earth, where I lived for fifty years. I pursued my own path to seeing reality as clearly as possible, rather than the common conception of reality, and everyone knew it, and there I was accepted as thinking for myself. That is what I believe is the most absolute form of authenticity, and pursuing truth as based on testable reality is the most pure form of personal happiness.

A conscious pursuing of personal reality is the real path to happiness.