Using the Well-Being Score to improve your life.

Examples of preplanned super-success.

I haven’t met anyone who compares to Ben Franklin as a person functioning at that level of human development. And yet, if someone studied this Well-Being Score method of guiding their life through their youth and college years, they might come close. 

I haven’t met John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, but on a reading of his childhood ambitions, it is clear that as a child, he had his eye on advancement to the highest levels and laid out a plan to get there. 

Another person, who was the daughter of immigrants politically complaining by marching in the streets of Berkeley, told her mother, while still a child, that she didn’t want to be a person outside picketing the decision-makers; she wanted to be inside making the decisions. Kamala Harris then laid out the strategy for climbing the ladder and is now Vice President of the United States. 

The pinnacle of success can be sought and attained.

All three of these people were born to relatively successful but not unusual parents, and it was using their abilities and forethought that brought them to eminence. They realized at an early age that to reach the top level of achievement, they needed the skills and experience of what this series of posts has been calling a Well-Being Score of 20/20. All of them, while young, had published things that were considered philosophically sophisticated. See #1 Happy +5 for a description of that worldview. Note that this was an intellectual worldview for an adolescent and not an already completed accomplishment.

Most humans choose the middle road to success.

When we drop down the Well-Being Score two levels to #3 Happy +3, we can read the world view of the kind of success sought by ordinary people. It would be the kind of success that would make most people’s parents proud of them. This 12/20 Well-Being Score is the kind of success that one will attain if they do well in school, get a job with an established business, and perform as expected. If a person aged twelve read this strategy, it would prepare them for achieving what people consider a wholesome life.

Individuals can choose a life of unconstrained exuberance.

If we drop two levels more to the Well-Being Score #1 Happy +1, we will meet people seeking rebellion against the constraints of the restrictions placed by others, society, or the world in general. The goal is to get high and live with unconstrained exuberance and freedom. Then, to rant at reality and destroy all that impedes them. 

Lifestyle is an individual choice.

Each of these proposed lifestyles is very different. It is unlikely that a person who has infused a Well-Being Score lifestyle of these values when leaving college will ever shift even a single level. However, these styles are intentional and can be changed at any time in life, but it will most likely happen about the age of eighteen. 

Aphor 2021/05/21 – Life

The basic Aphor list and a sublist Aphor Charles Scamahorn 

1. Life is showing up, paying attention, participating, and death is not being here, with no awareness and no engagement.

2. Life is an endless chain of adaptations of which some work, and some don’t.

3. A good life flows through most of the problems and enjoys the sum of the results.

4. A contented life is helping other people cope with their problems.

5. A child is soft, warm, and needy, a geriatric life is stiff, cold, and needy, and those in the middle are tough, struggling, and broke too.

6. Love tells me that you are irreplaceable, but Epictetus says everything is just a member of a category and is replaceable.

7. The great tragedy of life isn’t to lose something but to cease loving it.

8. Our life force always urges us to go somewhere and do something, but where and what we must choose.

9. To cope with this problem that is confronting me, or that other one, or to seek this person’s company and avoid that one’s is stressful.

10. So much of our life is provided for by usually benign forces totally outside of our control that we should often pause and say thank you to it all.

11. Every approaching moment is a new opportunity to live exuberantly with new possibilities.

12. We are all embedded in our reality, and that gives us opportunities to do things that are not available to anyone but us.

13. Choosing to love what you encounter externally teaches you how to love what you experience internally.

14. Every day, look at various things and say, “I don’t need that to be happy.”

15. Just before you begin a new and possibly difficult task, put a smile on your face, run jubilantly in place for a bit, and put a charge of enthusiasm into your voice.

16. Your life is most meaningful to those who love you, so always treat them kindly and with respect.

17. Life will deliver us into some crises, but we may prepare for these with forethought, proper habits, and some slack.

18. Your body lives in the present moment, and your flexibility of action is in the coming moments.

19. The essential purpose of your existing life is to find a meaningful purpose for your future life.

20. If you practice foresight for your actions, you can live contentedly, and by avoiding life-risking situations, you may live long.

21. Life for most people is a long preparation of learning things they will never use, so set your goals and know well what you will use.

22. When you have a goal and definite ways to get to it, you will enjoy the unexpected detours along the way.

23. If in doubt about a coming action, send your body on a mental trip through the problems, and if it says, no, I can’t endure that, don’t go there.

24. Life is an absurd comedy for thinkers and a painful tragedy for feelers.

25. Life becomes purposeless for those who have everything, but helping others persevere is a stable occupation with eternal purpose.

26. When struck with a glimmer of despair, turn to another person and engage them in a conversation that will make their life meaningful.

27. Life, since the beginning, has been struggling with an infinity of problems and finding survival by repeating what works.

28. The immediate goal of your life is to participate as fully and appropriately as possible with what is happening.

29. The world behaves in agreement with natural laws, but ultimately, she kills you and uses your constituent parts in other ways.

Lifehaven – The time is ripe.

I posted the following article on May 13, 2011, but nothing has happened!:

Some things about the future can be known with a human degree of certainty, but others cannot be known even generally even with mathematically perfect knowledge of every fact. In the case of long-term survivability of the human species, and of our planet our foresight is clouded. There are so many variables and therefore we should be cautious, and prepare for the probability of unusual events. Here is a list of thoughts which should be obvious:

Doomsday guiding principles.

The following list was influenced by the book: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by N.N. Taleb. His book is based on experiences with the stock market and its relationship with unpredictable future events, but it serves well as a guide for this problem.

1. We should avoid taking chances where we might get seriously hurt. – And its flip side:
2. We should take chances where there is little risk of injury and there is a potential for scalable rewards (rewards increase faster than the risk or effort).
3. We may mitigate the worst of catastrophes effects by thinking through to the after state beforehand, and making preparations now for that after state.
4. We can make a list of events that will trigger a positive feedback loop of events that lead toward catastrophe and watch carefully for those precursor events.
5. We can prepare for the knowable consequences of an event rather than worry about the exact timing of an event with an unknowable probability.
6. Often it’s not easy to know the right thing to do or not to do, but it is usually easy to identify what is a bad thing to do or not to do.
7. People have difficulty imagining what they have no experience of — like the future — but, when it comes to really important things, like Doomsday, we must not be stupid.
8. Just because we haven’t gotten whacked yet for being stupid about preparation for a Doomsday event doesn’t mean we should keep being stupid.
9. We must be made aware that preparing for possible events stabilizes the present situation by giving purpose, and direction to our current behavior.
10. History is dominated by unexpected events, and we have trouble admitting that obvious fact and preparing for unusual events, but this event is now becoming critical and the time is ripe for Doomsday.

Those are some guiding principles which can be considered before Doomsday arrives. They are not predictors of Doomsday, but they are indicators of ways to think about it, and prepare for it. They are so simple a child can understand them. But it is for responsible adults to apply them.

Positive feedback stresses leading toward catastrophe.

Here is a list of things which might bring about a positive feedback in which case each passing cycle aggravates the situation, and brings us ever closer to Doomsday:

1. Population increase is exponential unless there are limiting factors. In the case of humans — at present the top predator species — the limits on population are famine, infanticide, and homicide in its many varieties. There is one other, and that is universal fertility control, which is impossible in the present world.
2. Resource consumption of limited materials. Our high tech society has many demands for common, and strange materials, some of which we may be or become dependent upon without even knowing it. For example the red in your monitor comes almost exclusively from a single rare earth element mine in south China. Who would know or care until it becomes unavailable, and it is too late to correct the dependency? There are probably many other things equally obscure, but absolutely necessary for continued high tech civilization.
3. Farm land consumption, and its becoming insufficient to maintain the population, because it has been depleted through overused minerals, lack of fertilizer, water erosion, wind erosion, sea level flooding, over building with housing, and highways, and abandonment. All of the above are now in constant play, and with our huge population. Farm land is being consumed instead being cohabited with, and will soon be exploited beyond its carrying capacity, and collapse.
4. Biological threats. We tend to worry most about diseases which attack humans because they are easy for the media to make visibly horrible, and they are a real threat. However, a biological attack on a major cereal crop would certainly bring modern society to great stress, and although it wouldn’t kill everyone directly many would die.
5. Aggressive groups, and their leaders can always find reasons to come into conflict with others. This has happened thousands of times in written history, and there is little to limit to the aggressive impulses of people. But, when resources are in short supply successful agitation by this type of leader becomes easier.
6. Appropriation of other people’s property and goods comes into play when there are not enough resources especially food resources to sustain everyone. People are hesitant to rob and kill other people so when this type of appropriation behavior is organized it is a strong indicator of bad times ahead.
7. Warring states spending their time, energy, and resources means that they are not producing food, and other necessities; thus they precipitate even worse shortages, and this becomes a positive feedback in its most vicious form. Large scale famine is the result with great population reductions. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse — War, Famine, Pestilence and Death — in that order.
8. Modern weapons brought into the feedback loop offers the potential to multiply the carnage a thousand times over, and there are many states in possession of these weapons. The end result of a major war will be a total collapse of civilization in the affected zones. In a serious confrontation this means the entire Northern Hemisphere, and some of the Southern Hemisphere.

COMBINATIONS OF OVERSTRESSED FACTORS AGGRAVATING EACH OTHER.

The problems listed above are to some degree independent, but as stress accumulates, and each one becomes more powerful, they will tend to interact, and cascade toward a total war.

1. If one central node fails, others which are linked to it will probably weaken and together they will precipitate a progressive collapse.
2. Population increase demands more food is needed and if supplied soon means more population demanding even more food until something happens to break the cycle.
3. Resource consumption means there is less of the quality resources to exploit, and what remains is of a lower quality, and is more difficult and expensive to acquire.
4. Conflict means rapid exploitation of all readily available materials by all contending parties, and this precipitates a long term loss of productivity, and the losses after the conflict must be made up from a depressed condition.
5. If there is an atomic war the losses will be profound, and the recovery will be restarted from a very depressed condition.

WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW?

1. Learn to enjoy living at a low energy consumption level.
2. Limit explosive population growth!
3. Shut down CO2 production!
4. Move to a CO2-absorbing economy.
5. Remove atomic weapons from the world!
6. Realize that all of the above are politically impossible.
7. Put Lifehavens in place to help regenerate a new world.

The time is ripe for Doomsday. So prepare.

My life in chaos, fire, and smoke.

Tags

Bend Oregon, Chaos, Forest fire smoke, Park construction, Road construction, Thinking in the jaws of creation.

Here is my house prepared all summer for a forest fire.

A park, which I requested, is being built with lots of noise.

Across the street, a ditch is dug through solid lava rock.

They use this enormous jackhammer to break the stone and jaws to lift it out.

Controlled chaos! That’s my roof ^ to the right. That Cat was noisy!

Here’s a ditch and the equipment used for moving lots of rock and dirt.

Then came the smoke from the many fires out West obscuring Pilot Butte.

That’s Debbie and me on our daily walk. The N-95 masks helped.

Later Pilot Butte is visible, so it’s not as bad as it could be but still quite poor.

I sit in the unused equipment and ponder.

Progress is being made and a rock garden appears.

All of this chaos and progress happened in front of my house.

 

What in a human life is worth doing?

Tags

Create permanent things, Creating human value, Lasting value, Pantheon, Titanic

Everything we want is obtained from our environment and that is created by our personal choice and paid for with our personal wealth of time, energy and available resources. It is from the reserves of our energy that we have created with our own efforts the things of this world.

The best use of what we have acquired for our own use is to create something useful to others who can use it many times over. These uses will always be in the future because the present moment is already past and is part of the fixed environment from which everything else springs forth.

We as living creatures will soon die; that is an inevitable aspect of all living beings, but many of the things of the present moment will exist for a long while and some of them can be of such a nature that they will exist for a very long time, and be of use for helping others to live better lives for as long as this potential thing that we create continues to exist. Therefore, we can exert the same personal energy into something that has a potential for lasting for a very long time, as opposed to putting the same energy into some transient thing which will vanish in a moment. What we should be doing in the present moment is to create things that are more likely to be useful permanently.

By that chain of thoughts the Pantheon in Rome, which has performed its function for housing the living public’s idealized gods for nearly two thousand years, was a better use of resources than a grand ship like the Titanic, which only served its purpose for a few days before it failed and killed most of the people on it.

These are examples used for illustration of the essential point.

It is possible to use one’s personal resources to create things of more lasting value to oneself and to humanity.

My life’s ambitions?

Tags

Candide, Gardening in Bend Oregon, My pleasantly ordinary life, Voltaire

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”  “You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”  “Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”  The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.  Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:  “There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”

That is the concluding paragraph of Voltaire’s book Candide: or, The Optimist and Candide.

That is my feeling at the moment, with one small caveat. I would replace the meal they had “eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” with eating my recently most favorite food, rhubarb chutney made by Debbie from our homegrown rhubarb brewed up somehow with vinegar and spices, and my personally created Chuckie-butter chopped (not stirred) blend of 45% butter, 45% sunflower butter, and olive oil. These things spread over a thick well-toasted multi-nut bread are fantastic.

I do cultivate my garden and here in Bend, Oregon at 3,600-foot altitude, that means starting my garden in my south-facing window by mid-March.

I coped with the snow problem seen under the fence by planting 70 quarts of dirt in yogurt containers in my south window.

My pleasantly ordinary life is punctuated with gardening, conversations, and trying to outsmart Covid.

What is a good life expectancy for the human species?

Tags

10000 years future, humanity's future, Remote future, Ten thousand years future, What is humanity

It may no longer be relevant, but there is at present a normal life expectancy for species of our size. We became fully human about 80,000 years ago, probably with the selection of members of our species who spoke well, using syntax. It was about that time that fully modern humans began their movements out of Africa, met with the Neanderthals and Denisovans and interbred with them. They had spatially separated for some 400,000 years but were still interfertile. The ability to use syntax was a gene that was so conspicuous it became widespread and ubiquitous in the mixed group. These people are now us, and our differences are more cultural than genetic, and the key thing is that we all learn to speak languages easily when young.

With ways of controlling genes, humans will probably choose to create special humans for special tasks. The question isn’t a moral one; for future people it will be a practical one similar to our disdaining genetically modified organisms (GMO), but finding those products to be better than natural ones they will soon become even better and accepted. The same process will drive the human species itself to be modified to fit perceived needs. Some of those needs will be very strange to us if we project our thought out ten thousand years, and the creatures will probably not look even vaguely human to us. We probably would not even be interfertile with them, although they will consider us to be their ancestors, very primitive ancestors, but they had to begin somewhere.

Since we are exploring where humanity might go and what they might become, it is necessary to plan for a world that will permit them to come into existence and for them to evolve to meet their needs. Or, we might choose to prevent them from coming into existence. One immediate problem is for us to use natural resources in such a way that they can be recycled in the future. That might easily be done by slightly sorting our garbage and burying it in concentrated forms for easier recycling. If we are planning for ten thousand years of recycling it is different from just dumping our garbage into the ocean.

We might choose our planning of the future to be double our present age, and that could be set at 80,000 years. We would then plan to recycle things for that time period. Our present rate of losing much of our natural resources for reuse will eventually bring on a great depletion of something critical for continuing a hi-tech civilization. Maybe we are already running out of critical natural resources.

Perhaps I am being too optimistic in my life expectancy plans for humanity and instead of 80,000 years 80 years is more realistic.

 

 

The challenge this week was to identify turning points in my life.

Tags

A log raft, Decision making, San Francisco Bay adventure, Turning points in life

It appears in retrospect that I chose to be the person I became. At my core I still feel like I’m inhabiting the same body as when I was in fourth grade in Burlingame, California, in 1944. By that time I was conscious that I was a human being and I liked science and art. Fortunately, my parents chose to live in a duplex only half a block from one of the finest libraries in the world. It was easy to discover interesting books in that library but I don’t remember any thought-out decision points ever being made there.

About that same time my friend and I walked down to the San Francisco Bay, where the day before we had discovered a wooden raft. We had thought about it back home and decided to take that raft out on the bay the next day. It was a nice day, no wind, and the water was calm. The raft had some poles, so we pushed off and poled our way about a hundred yards out when a policeman began yelling at us from shore. We obediently came back in and he drove us home. It was all very friendly and polite with no guilt involved, and just the recommendation that we have an adult with us when we go out again.

I suppose there were earlier decisions I made, but this one was in the form of a discussion with a friend. The dangers were considered and compared to the experience to be had. It seemed like a good idea to us nine-year-old boys to go out onto the San Francisco Bay and see what would happen. What could possibly go wrong?

Two years later, while living in Spokane, Washington, I can remember deciding to do things and doing them, but that event on the Bay was memorable because of the thoughtful discussion with my friend.

Most of the time we just react with what seems like the right thing to do without any analysis of the potential problems.

What is a good life?

Tags

Absolute belief, Feel good hopes, human survival, Relative understanding, Spiritual survival

Doing something you think is important and worth doing constitutes a good life. We, or at least I, feel that I would like something I do to last longer than my consciousness and my physical existence.

It appears that many people are enamored of their children and grandchildren for the realization that something important that they did will live after them. There is the realization that whatever it is that they do won’t last forever, but that it will last long enough for them to be remembered. That is the personal wisdom of our being, and the knowledge that our personal experience brings to us, but for many people, it isn’t enough.

Many people I know have a personal conviction, based wholly on hope alone, that they have a personal spirit that exists outside their current physical and psychological existence, and that that spirit being isn’t temporary, but will last forever. Therefore, they can do things that this spirit being approves of and thus when this current physical existence dies and rots away, they will be living forever with and within a greater and grander being.

I know several people who can rant rapturously on this subject. They believe, they know with absolute conviction that they are right, and therefore will live forever in perfect bliss. All they must do in this life is to please their spirit self and endure the difficulties of this existence. I am more comfortable living in this world with the realization that it is temporary, and that if I want something done that I and I alone can do, that is what I should be doing. That is a good life, for me.

That is the difference between relative knowledge based on testable experience and absolute belief created from untestable hopes.

 

Cleaning your sinuses may save your life.

Tags

Cleaning your sinuses, Immunity without sickness, Keeping Coronavirus mild, Surviving Coronavirus

Keeping social distance can not be tolerated for long, and will only slow, not stop the coronavirus from eventually getting through to all of us. Keeping a really clean environment will slow it a bit, but the viruses are ubiquitous and will eventually find you and me. Keeping our fingers off our mucus membranes sounds great, but watch a group of people and you will notice that they touch their faces every couple of minutes. I do.

In other words, yes, I’m repeating myself, you will get exposed to the coronavirus and will a couple of years from now test positive for having had the disease. It may have been so mild you thought it was just a sniffle or a passing allergic reaction to some obstreperous plant. It will, like the common cold, just become a background disease we learn to live with.

How can we develop an immune reaction without getting seriously sick?

Getting a vaccination will be the easiest way to become immune, but that is unavailable now, and the disease is doubling every couple of days in places like New York City. These eruptions are going to be popping up all over the world for the next couple of months. How can we stay healthy when nearly everyone around us is sick, and those who aren’t sick may still be carriers of the disease? I have found a way to suppress coronavirus that seems simple and easy to do. In fact, it is obvious once you understand what’s happening. It’s like washing your hands, as the authorities repeat endlessly, to keep from getting sick. But, the disease doesn’t begin in your hands, it usually begins in your sinuses and gets deadly when it reaches the lungs. The obvious thing to do?

Wash your sinuses with something that kills coronavirus!

Watch for symptoms of the onset of coronavirus disease. Itching in the sinuses will be one of the first indicators, followed by a fever. But the fever is your body’s attempt to warn your immune system to get busy looking for nasty things to destroy. That fever appears when the disease process is already moving beyond the surface infection in the sinuses and into your body. You want to wash your sinuses as soon as the itching appears, or even sooner. When you suspect coronavirus is in your air, it’s time to do the washing of your sinuses. Once you are set up, it can be done in fifteen seconds. Sitting here right now typing this post I have three separated spray bottles touching my left arm and could do a nasal spray with any of the three in five seconds. They are from experiments I have been doing. Two are small pocketable bottles with a built-in spraying function. One of these little ones is a “Saline Nasal Spray”. It costs a couple of bucks, but you can fill it almost for free. The advantage is that you can wash your sinuses any time in a couple of seconds. The mist sprayer I think is best for home use held 2½ cups of sprayable household cleaner. It squirts out about 1/8th of a tablespoon of mist with each squeeze. I like it because it is easier in three squeezes to get plenty of working fluid into my sinuses.

The working cleanser is HIBICLENS. It is used by doctors for surgery preparation.

After carefully cleaning the spray bottle and letting it soak in hot water for an hour and cleaning it again, I rinsed it again with distilled water and then filled it with two cups of distilled water. To that, I added 40 drops of HIBICLENS Antiseptic/Antimicrobial Skin Cleanser. I had performed several more dilute experiments earlier and I didn’t have any reactions to them. HIBICLENS is what doctors use before surgeries, so I assume it is better than the dish and clothes detergents I tried. Those will probably work but will require more dilution to not be annoying. Also, if you can’t get a mist-sprayer, sniffing the fluid out of a teaspoon or your cupped hand works, but make the sniffs very short to prevent the mist going into your lungs.

I held my breath while spraying my sinuses and then snorted a few times back and forth to distribute the HIBICLENS. After about ten seconds, I blew my nose several times to clear it. I then sprayed in some mild “Saline Nasal Spray” and then blew that out too. It is all a lot easier than it sounds when you have the two bottles ready to spray and a Kleenex to clean up the nose drool.

At the first itching of coronavirus, sniff into your sinuses 1/4 teaspoon of a solution of 40 drops of HIBICLENS in two cups water.