‘On Kindness’ by Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor – book review

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Book review, Contmentment, happiness, Kindness, Self-love, Shared watermelon

On page 111, of On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor is:

The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: “If this is self-love, be it so, … Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous.”

This quote is very near the end of this short but dense book about where Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s philosophy overlaps with Freud’s writing and his followers’ later analysis. There was so much argument and counter-argument about what kindness was and is in this book, indeed often within a single sentence, that an American reader must assume the authors’ native language is academic German. At the bottom of the paragraph things become clear again. “People think that they envy other people for their success, money, fame, when in fact it is kindness that is most envied, because it is the strongest indicator of people’s well-being, their pleasure in existence.”

The recent posts on this blog have been exploring the concept of kindness, how it comes into being, what are its effects, how to give it to other people and how to make it grow in one’s self. The assumption, of course, was that kindness was a good and desirable thing, that it was something we would wish to cultivate. That it was something big enough to share with visitors to our garden as a tasty treat, like a fresh watermelon.

The post-Freudians somehow converted kind acts into disguised aggression and made kindness into subverted aggression. Those modern Freudians seem to be reverting to a pre-Hutchenson idea of narcissism. It would appear that helping other people, with no hope of an economic transaction taking place, would be an unacceptable total loss to the giver. The way these Freudians cope with that conundrum is to assume the giver has taken so much that he feels guilty, and he can afford to give a tiny bit back. His payoff is that his conscience is soothed. In fact their supposed guilt is so soothed, the giver can live a perfectly contented life. And, it is that contentment which bothers the nit-pickers so much; it is the apparent unearned and therefore undeserved pleasure of the virtuous that releases the greedy ones’ inner bile.

This line of reasoning leads into an abyss for those with a greedy temperament, but it is easy enough to change to the path which leads to contentment. When a person cultivates the ability to be kind, and that means to help another person grow toward greater physical and mental freedom, they simultaneously help themselves to those ultimate goals. The super-reward is that while doing the kind act they are cultivating the habit and they themselves become the most frequent recipient of the kind acts. Thus the kind person achieves the kind of wisdom which puts them on the path to contentment. They make other people more content and so those people who are successful at true kindness live in a more contented world, and they themselves become more contented.

For an economist a kindness would be maximizing everyone’s profit and so it does.

How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie – review

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Contentment, Dale Carnegie, happiness, Kindness

I can remember when first encountering How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, because it was a transitional month in my life. It was May of 1945, and my father had a new job repairing B-17s at the Fairchild army air base near Spokane, Washington. Although both I and my father had been born in Spokane, our family had been living in Burlingame, California for the previous year.

What was so memorable was that my father bought Carnegie’s book and read chapters of it, perhaps the whole thing, to me and my mother while we were living in a motel for the month. He often read books to us when we were spending evenings in remote places. That month he purchased our new home at 3425 Park Boulevard, but for this particular May I attended Franklin elementary school, 4th grade. I had the same school teacher my father had had when he was a child some 22 years earlier. I remember a snowball fight in that schoolyard, where the boys put rocks in the snowballs – “very funny” – to see a kid get hit by one of those stonies. I remember clearly the school principle coming into our classroom and telling us that President Roosevelt had just died and soon everyone was grief-stricken and crying.

Because our family was reading that book, and I was in a new school for me, my dad wanted me to remember all the kids’ names – it is principle # 3 – and he would ask me their names when I got home to the motel. If ever I had an adolescent rebellion it was at that time; it was a reaction against Dale Carnegie and that book. I remember being disgusted at the manipulative tenor of the book – be nice to people so you can manipulate them and “Win” them and “Influence” them to your will. It seemed it was a tricky way of manipulating others against their conscious will. To me it felt dishonest and being dishonest with one’s friends is the most despicable thing a person can do.

When these thoughts were brought back into awareness, while writing this post, it became apparent that those events were seared into my being more than I have ever realized. It is the reason I have been so ambivalent to a usual rendering of The Golden Rule, “Be nice to people and they will be nice to you.” It strikes me as consciously manipulative of other people and I have a strange need that other people be totally free. We are already so bound up in our own habits that we are already slaves, and it greatly annoys me to see anyone further limited by outside conscious manipulations. I believe in personal integrity, which means to me, to be regulated by one’s own internalized sense of responsibility. Carnegie covers his manipulations under a lovely sugar coating of sweet words but under the coating  there is fraud and resultant hypocrisy.

Recently I have been blogging about “kindness,” which has some similarities to what Carnegie writes about, but there is a difference, and the difference makes  a tremendous difference. Both Carnegie’s methods and my intended applications of kindness require paying close attention to the other person and their needs, but his are personally acquisitive and in a subtle way taking something valuable from the other person. Kindness is just the opposite, it requires understanding what the other person needs to make their life more abundant and helping them to fulfill of their personal potential by giving a kind word or doing a kind deed which guides them more securely onto their personal path. It is clear and obvious when the kind action is performed, but ideally it is such a tiny thing that the recipient of the kindness feels not the slightest need to reciprocate. Kindness isn’t an economic transaction, it is a gift, and there is absolutely no repayment coming back from the other person.

There is a personal payoff however, but it is totally between you and yourself. When you purposefully develop the social graces of being polite, honest and giving to other people you develop those as habits, and habits soon become automatic and you are unconscious of doing them. It isn’t too difficult to develop better and kinder ways of relating to other people, but it is almost impossible to develop better ways of relating to one’s own self. The reason is because your habits are much quicker than your conscious mental processes and they are directing your inner behavior, not your conscious self. By cultivating intentional kindness towards others you develop the habit of being kind to yourself and when you are kind to yourself you become a much happier person.

Learn to be kind to your self and you will become a contented being.

How to be rich in money, power, fame, health and happiness.

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happiness, Health, How to be rich, Money fame power health happiness, The 99% versus 1% and 2%

Today I received a thoughtful email about access to the world’s art online. It got me to thinking about the things monetarily rich people actually get in today’s world that an average person with access to the internet may be denied. Obviously there are all sorts of things very rich people can get that very poor people are totally denied. However, consider what the great majority of people of the world now have access to, and by majority I mean those six billion below the top million people in wealth and above the bottom billion in poverty. This middle group of people go from very well off monetarily to poor but not starving poor. These people already have access to the internet or soon will have, and once on the internet a poor person has access to much the same information as a rich one. Everyone has the opportunity to influence opinion of other people anywhere in the world and the opportunity to sell products as well as ideas. This free-for-all opportunity may prove to be a brief window of time before some individuals discover ways to lock up portions of the internet for the private usage of their customers. A lot of that has already happened, and who knows in twenty years perhaps nearly everything will be pay to view, even presently free services such as Google, Craigslist and Wikipedia. People may get tired of intrusive ads grabbing their screen and attention and opt to just pay a fee to get what they want.

There has been a lot of fuss the last few months here in the US over the upper 1% in monetary wealth, but that 1%’s real power isn’t in the goods and services they can buy; it’s in the power they can buy. The 2nd % can probably buy everything they could realistically want in the terms of personal possessions, but they can’t buy much power and it’s power that the rich really crave and possess. The ruling elite of this world is in that upper million I mentioned at the top and it’s vastly less than 1%. They are the major politicians, the directors of large businesses and the media moguls and that includes some of the famous media people who are elevated by a combination of popularity with the public and opportunity given by those in positions of real power. To rise to the top a person must have a lock on some aspect of power or be in the service of someone who does. So, young person, if you want to make it big you must face facts and join the club – any way you can.

This brings us to what really matters to everyone, health and happiness. Even the richest of us wants to be healthy and happy and to live a long and contented life. At present most normally healthy people who reach age five can, with a little personal care, live to be seventy. If they choose to live within their means they can accumulate a reasonable amount of local money, power and fame – enough for personal health and happiness. Perhaps the most important social items for achieving those reasonable goals are fair laws fairly applied which are willingly obeyed by the local public. When the local social situation is honest, such that everyone knows what to expect and to have legal redress when they have been violated, then it is possible to be happy and even contented.

Insist on and fight for good laws fairly enforced.

Spiritual leaders are leading their followers astray.

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Clergy, happiness, Leaders, lies, Practice, Preaching, Spiritual, success, truth

Why have so many spiritual leaders failed to practice the wonderful things they preach? Perhaps it was ever thus, and those who rise to the profession of telling other people how they should behave have some cognitive dissonance which drives them to do the very things they claim that people shouldn’t do. Today I attended a discussion of the publicly disclosed letters of XXX whose life has been made very difficult by the social misconduct of some spiritual leaders. I was going to link to this site which I have access to, but apparently it is a closed one and so I will just write in general terms. It won’t make any difference to my observations to leave out the persons involved. There is no need to be specific because there have been so many high level spiritual leaders recently who have gotten into serious ethical, even legal, trouble. You may insert your high level clergy person of choice.

A spiritual leader must set a higher standard of behavior for himself than for the people he is preaching to. How can he instruct people to achieve some high level of spiritual or social behavior if he himself has not personally traveled the path to those levels himself? Telling people about a path which has only been speculated about in his mind, but not actually trodden in person and experienced in fact can only create false information. This idea becomes obvious when dealing in concrete reality. If someone were giving instructions about how to get to a particular location, say Timbuktu, when they had not the slightest idea of what it was or what that term was referring to, their instructions would be recognized by everyone as worse than worthless. And yet, the spiritual leaders spin out tales of fantasy lands where everything is perfect. Furthermore, we can get there, if only  we follow their instructions. This is obviously nonsense, because they have not been to these speculated places and they are fabricating them wholly out of liars’ cloth. However, they are speaking to an audience of people who want the specious perfect world to be true, and so they are easily convinced. We humans have a terrific ability to wish something to be true and find the most implausible reasons and justifications for believing it to be true. If we are in a self selected crowd of people who want a particular thing to be true, it becomes easy for any given individual to be swept up in the emotion of the crowd and to believe absolutely unbelievable things; after all everyone else believes them and therefore they must be true.

When a spiritual leader tells his followers things which he has not personally experienced, it is impossible for him to accurately portray what he says. And because there are no tests for the reality of their teaching they can claim anything they can dream up, and the good part of that is that they can dream up something which appears to be really great. When something sounds really wonderful then everyone will want to have it, and the spiritual leader can promise to deliver it to them, because after all he has special knowledge of where it came from. Bunko! This is a case where if it sounds too good to be true then it is a certainty that it’s false. Because they know it is a pure fabrication it is easy for the so-called spiritual leader to violate his own precepts, and that is why so many of them seem to go astray. In their own mind they are doing the right thing by getting what they want, but to their followers they are absolute frauds. It is very difficult for the followers to see the hypocrisy because they very much want to believe the beautiful lies.

What these spiritual leaders want are all the usual things that other people want, and they have found this method of promising fantasies to a willing public as a way to fulfill their personal desires. I have been exploring another path; that of contentment. It doesn’t promise a beautiful fantasy land in some time and space but a real one in the here and now if people simply accept the totality of reality and place themselves into a comfortable relationship with that reality.

Heaven can be here and now if you choose it to be so.

Does the future world economy need humans?

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Billions, computers, Contentment, food, future, happiness, humanity, life, Living, Machines, meaning, population, Purpose, robots, Serving, Sustainable, World

People have been being replaced since the beginning.

Top tier humans have been replacing their goods-producing entities since the advent of civilization. The first replacements were other humans somehow forced into labor either by slavery or by a social arrangement which gave them more goods for their labor than they could supply to themselves. Early on animals replaced some humans by being domesticated and forced to perform physical labor such as plowing fields and hauling materials. By 1500 AD energy was being gotten from falling water, using water wheels, and from wind using wind mills and sails on ships. By 1800 fossil fuel in the form of coal was powering steam engines for lifting, hauling, transportation and weaving. 1900 saw machines doing tabulating of data which was formerly a human mental job. 2000 had computers and their robots taking over the creative work of making new complex machines like airplanes as well as the routine physical manufacturing.

By 2011 untended machines plow and harvest fields, manufacture complex products like automobiles, and wage robotic war within human specified zones. Untended automobiles are now instructed to drive from one point to some distant point through complex environments. The creation of food and goods, and the waging of war which was formerly done by human workers is now being done, in some locations, wholly by machines. Even the most human of work, the creating of new and useful things, is being done by machines. This trend is presently accelerating, and if it is as successful as it appears it is going to be, then the need for human physical labor and mental input will end. The top tier humans will no longer have need for human workers and the robots will do everything they need done.

Who will be the benefactors of hyper-modern robot technology?

The top tier humans have always been the primary benefactors of all of the progress made by human ingenuity, but most of humanity is presently enjoying considerable benefits of it also. There is a temporary abundance of food which permits a lower percentage of humanity living with hunger than ever before, and most people have at least some access to the high-tech world.

The cheap and long term benefit of technology, for most people, will be in the form of entertainment. Once that information has been created, packaged and stored and the machines to view it in place, the entertainment can be provided virtually free to anyone and almost without cost or consumption of further energy to power the system. A separate issue is the price of food. Food will continue to rise in price as the population grows and arable land remains constant. The price of technical devices will continue to drop as their creation is done by machines and they are made permanently failure proof. The distant future may witness massive numbers of humans starving to death while watching high quality surround sound 3D HDTV.

The need for humans is fading away.

The most human of all activities, that of humans motivating other humans to do things, may fade away. Even the actors in the entertainment industry, and politicians in the motivation industry, are being replaced by super quality animation. Androids are being made which simulate living people who are approaching being indistinguishable from real humans. Also, because entertainment can be stored, over the years there will be far more available than can ever be witnessed. Netflix already has a hundred thousand titles and enough movies for a lifetime of near constant viewing. Interactive games may come to the rescue and displace overly formulaic and rigid movies, and they are infinitely extensible in time. However, humans themselves become mere extensions of the entertainment machines and the machines have no need of humans. The stored memory doesn’t need humans, the machinery for presenting the stored data doesn’t need humans, and thus as this technology matures, humans themselves are no longer needed for creating or providing the entertainment to other humans. The need for humans to exist to provide the goods and services to make human society function has vanished.

Why feed billions humans when they don’t contribute to society?

If people are not contributing to the goods and services wanted by other people then their reason for existing, for all of those other people, vanishes. Humanity then exists only for the purpose of consuming goods and media but not for helping other humans. That doesn’t seem sustainable as a reason for existence. In the past people existed for other people, but in this Robotic New World, robots exist to fulfill people’s needs, and humans are superfluous consumers of food and energy. The need for human workers evaporates and with that the need to maintain billions of them. This trend bothers me!

Humans derive their life meaning by serving other humans.

I am a human and as a human I want humanity to maximize its vitality and contentment. But, how can we be contented if our lives have no purpose?  In the really long run, say trillions of years, the struggles of humanity become absolutely meaningless, but in the ten year, hundred year or even thousand year future I can imagine personal and human impact and meaning. Many individuals and societies more than a thousand years gone are still having real effects on our daily lives, so it is easy to imagine that some things we are now doing will have an impact in that time frame.

To talk in terms of permanent human aspirations, or even trillion year plans is clearly absurd and to talk of thousand year projects requires planning for very general types of things. A hundred year plan is clearly doable and is done in many engineering projects and ten years is within most individuals’ personal striving. When looked at in this more limited way we can choose to do things which are helpful to other people and that is what gives us personal satisfaction. We should do things for other people which we can comprehend as being meaningful to them and to ourselves.

The robots may serve us but we gain contentment by serving each other.

The Quantified Human Project can help you.

Tags

Contentment, happiness, Health, human, Quantified, Self

Find out how you can be all you can be.

Ordinary humans, such as you and I, do an acceptable job of taking care of ourselves, most of the time. If we didn’t we wouldn’t survive, and since we do survive it is proof positive that we do perform satisfactorily. But most of us know we could improve everything about ourselves and our self-care and thus live healthier and thus longer and probably happier lives more in keeping with what we really want. Hugely profitable self-help industries have been founded on the promise of helping us to live better in all sorts of ways – exercise, diet, psychiatry, religion, drugs, clothing, cosmetics and surgery, to name only a few. Perhaps almost every human activity beyond basic survival is oriented towards improving oneself in some way and of course even survival is seen as an improvement over non-being.

Modern technology to the rescue of humanity, once again.

A new wrinkle now enters the self-help arena, at present mostly limited to medical self-monitoring devices called for the moment The Measured Life. These devices will, in my humble estimation, soon develop into the biggest thing to develop out of the computer-driven era. This will be bigger than HDTV, the personal computer and even the cell phone, although it will probably be seen as an extension of the cell phone. Lots of things are now becoming extensions of the cell phone besides portable spoken communication – cameras, movies, and the internet itself with all its perks. But this new medical self-monitoring device creates a new possibility: it is self-awareness of one’s personal environment which is linked to the cell phone. With self-awareness people can successfully modify their own habits and with that ability they can modify who they are. What could be a more important event for humanity than that? People can come much closer to living up to what their genetic endowment and their physical and social environment offer. Those people who get set up with this new technology first will get a burst of advancement over their peers, because they will be able to program their own habits to respond more appropriately to the world around them.

Accelerated learning of what you want to learn.

What this technology will soon provide is a device which monitors your environment and your every action. When that is developed to its full potential it will permit you to monitor more accurately how you are responding to things which are coming your way, and when you can do that you are controlling your own habit formation. Habits are the automatic actions which come about through our previous experiences and our responses to those experiences. When we control those inputs and outputs we control the person we become, and the more accurately we can monitor those things the better able we are to form our new person.

You choose who you will become by choosing your habit formation.

We become the habits we choose to fold into our personality structure. In the past we learned these things by paying attention to what was happening and responding appropriately as we saw fit, but often we were distracted by the vast variety of things which were happening. Also, we were barely aware of what already learned habits we were bringing to the moment, and these affected the way we responded to these then new situations. Also, we were inexperienced with this new development and our habit learning for that event was that of a beginner rather than an expert. Thus our existing habits, good, bad and ugly, are from previous learning experiences that are not as effective as they could be and they can negatively affect what we learn from new experiences.

The problem for almost everyone is that they only learn in the present moment and they do very little reviewing and intentional modification of their habits. Some people do do these things, like politicians rehearsing speeches and public responses, and actors preparing a personality, and athletes rehearsing specific actions to anticipated challenges, but most people don’t do any rehearsing – they just live. But that will change with the advent of these new devices.

The people with these new enhanced devices will learn new habits and that will soon change who they are. Those who get connected early will become more successful, and everyone will be forced to get connected soon or fall hopelessly behind their peers. With the advent of these new self-monitoring devices each individual becomes the person they choose to become. With these devices you can review your past experiences, decide on better responses, rehearse those responses and thus become the more effective person you want to be.

A more vital self-aware new world is unfolding at this moment.

July 4th in Bend, Oregon, with Pets on Parade.

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4th-July, Bend, Butte, Deschutes, Drake, happiness, Oregon, Parade, Pet, Pilot, River

It was a spectacular day here in Bend, Oregon. The 4th of July has a tradition of exuberance, since 1923, in the form of parades, public spectacles on the beautifully landscaped embankment of the Deschutes River, which flows right through the center of town, and wild fireworks from the top of the extinct volcano Pilot Butte. One peculiar aspect of this event is the highlighting of the local animals in the Pet Parade. There was a bountiful supply of animals of all sizes, shapes, species and decorations but especially of dogs. Nearly every person and animal was sporting some kind of patriotic red, white and blue decoration. Some wore it like clothing, some had it painted on and some with towed wagons with kids and one was tricked out as an aeronaut supported by colorful balloons.

There were a lot of American flags and patriotism displayed. These photos only give a suggestion of what many people were seeing and feeling.

Here comes the Pet Parade July 4th, 2011, Bend, Oregon.

Bend, Oregon - Lots of kids, pets, flags and patriotism

Bend, Oregon, dogs on parade on the 4th of July, 2011 with American flags.

Bend, dogs on parade with flouncy red, white and blue collars and cool princess specs.

The Bend, Oregon, 2011 4th July parade included a flying dog, lifted by balloons.

After the parade, down by the Deschutes River in a pond known as Drakes Park I saw these boys observing their reflections in the rippling water, Narcissus like. It happened in an instant and I was lucky to get this shot.

Bend boys touching their reflection in the Deschutes River - Drake's Pond.

Bend people were happy today and actively contented.

What is the meaning in life? Contentment?

Tags

Contentment, Escahatology, happiness, Happy, Healthy, life, meaning, Progress, Purpose, Ultimate, Wealthy, Wise

Happy, healthy, wise and wealthy sometimes leads to contentment.

The big four human quests are happy, healthy, wise and wealthy, but these are usually considered mundane quests and the ultimate life quests are set into a higher plane of eschatology or the journey of the soul. I have been puzzling over the various possibilities of what life would be like if there is no meaning to one’s life and the relationship of that idea to contentment. Is it possible to be contented with one’s life and the complexities of the universe around us if there is no ultimate purpose to anything? What if all the myriad of purposes of our daily lives and those we let be imposed upon us by society are nothing more than temporary things which evaporate when our thoughts shift to some other idea and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, beyond these things?

An alternate reality.

What if after a night’s sleep we awoke to a new day totally free of the impositions of our previous hopes and fears and lived simply with an immediate interaction with the universe as it presented itself to us? Wouldn’t we be filled with the terror of emptiness for only a few moments, and then reawaken to a world where our personal being just interacts with the problems which present themselves to us? And wouldn’t that simple direct interaction with what is, be enlightenment and contentment? Contentment is the acceptance of what is as being what should be. Once we can accept what presents itself to us, and simply say yes to our mutual existence, we can be far more than happy, we can be contented. Contentment is the state toward which we ultimately strive, even if we haven’t been fully aware of that as a goal.

How can we be content in a world filled with sorrow?

Sadly, there are many things in the world which are repulsive, and there is a vast amount of unnecessary suffering. Innocent people and other innocent things are slaughtered for food, power or sometimes for sport and sometimes simply the mindless venting of viciousness. Can I be contented with a world that has these qualities? I hesitate to say, yes I accept those things, but if I have no power to affect them in any way, why should I hesitate to say yes? On the other side of the world the tiger kills and eats an innocent lamb, or the warrior who represents a spite-filled nation kills an innocent child, but I have no power to affect these things. Should I hesitate or condemn the universe because these things happen? Is my acceptance of personal contentment, which includes the entire universe, somehow degraded if I condone atrocities, which is part of the universe? Am I being somehow remiss for being contented, or even happy, or even healthy, or possessing some form of wealth, when some other conscious entity is deprived of these things? Being worldly-wise seems innocent enough, and wisdom keeps the person out of many difficulties which others fall prey to, but it can ignore the suffering of others located in some distant time and place.

Because I can not control everything my relationship with contentment must be limited to that part of the universe with which I can interact and influence. I cannot do everything, nor should I be expected to, but I can do something, and the ultimate goal is doing those things which I can to bring about more human contentment.

Contentment for humanity in the very long run.

At some time in the distant future humans will no longer exist, and a postulated intelligence could look back upon the entirety of human moments in time and measure up the totality of human contentment. From that remote point of view it seems that maximizing that quantity of universal contentment is the goal toward which my personal contentment should be directed. I should be doing those actions which will not only maximize my personal contentment but ultimately the contentment of as many people now and in the future as is possible. This is a striving far beyond happy, healthy, wise and wealthy of myself or even the whole of presently existing humanity. Those four things are only needed to some personally acceptable level so I can move beyond them and then to find contentment with the world which actually exists around me as an individual.

What is my ultimate goal and what is yours?

I cannot give people contentment. I can give them moments of happiness by doing some kind act, I can give them a boost in their health by guiding them into health-giving behaviors, I can give them some small bits of wisdom if they are ready to receive it and I can give them some suggestions on how to improve their worldly possessions. These are all desirable things and everyone wants them, but even if they dedicate their entire time and effort to obtain them and finally have them all to the maximum available they still will not have contentment, because contentment is of a different dimension. It is a state of mind and the emotional acceptance of the world as it is and one’s relationship to it.

Heaven is where one is content with things being as they are. It can be here and now.

Food doesn’t bring contentment – it’s being in control.

Tags

Contentment, Discontentment, eating, Feasting, Gluttony, happiness, Unhappiness

Obesity is caused by eating too much food is in the news today. Apparently it is another really slow news day, but the upside of that non-news may be that another war didn’t start today. That would be news, but who wants it, other than the media, whom live on reporting other local people’s suffering. So that’s the positive side of human fat. Not much.

Why do people eat so much when it makes them heavy and unhealthy? It would seem that people eat because it makes them happy. I enjoy eating and apparently everyone else does too, but overeating creates an unpleasant feeling which lasts for hours. I know, I have over-eaten at holiday parties several times. One time, I felt so bad I had to leave and walk for half an hour trying to regain my normal comfortable feeling. During that walk I promised myself that I would never do that again, and I haven’t, at least that badly.

Eating too much makes one’s stomach hurt, and makes one feel logy for hours, so how can a person be happy if they hurt? How can they continue doing things which they know will bring them pain? And if they are half conscious, why do they keep eating when they know it will bring on short-term pain, medium term crummy feeling and permanent poor feeling physically from carrying excess weight, and the final nails into their self-esteem, the social and psychological condemnation. Many people of this world have chosen this unpleasant life path voluntarily, so there must be an explanation.

If food doesn’t bring pleasure beyond what the body needs and therefore wants it must be a mental habit or a psychological need that drives them to keep eating, or more probably an interaction of both. If food is felt as a release for some psychological suffering then it would be more sensible to address the pain directly and solve whatever problem is causing the overeating. The root cause of overeating would be a discontentment with their relationship with themselves and the world around them. Overeating is a way they are coping with this imbalance and trying to bring it into balance. It brings them closer to where they want to be. Big is important and in control. Eating puts one into greater control of the world around them because it makes them bigger.

We all know that obese people are in fact even more dependent upon the world around them for support than normally sized ones, but that may not be the way it feels from the inside of people. There is a primal feeling of control when one is bigger than those around and conversely there is a primal feeling within the smaller people when in the presence of big ones that because they are smaller they are less significant. Since, both of the people in this social situation have this inbred feeling it becomes even more powerful. There develops a respect for the physically bigger person which they haven’t earned by their physical actions, because they are incapable of them, but because of their mass. Bigger is better. It’s a primal thing.

People eat because it gives them the contented feeling of being in control.

Here is why you should invest in capitalism and contentment.

Tags

Capitalism, Contentment, happiness, Socialism

Why are some people unhappy with Capitalism?

Capitalism is unsatisfying to many people, even though it provides an abundance of goods and services at an affordable price to nearly everyone. The other economic systems have provided fewer goodies, and if the quantity and quality of goodies is the measure of life satisfaction, then those people living under those other systems would be even less contented.

People living within a capitalist society appear to want the goods available because they frequently go into voluntary debt to the money lending banking system to obtain them. Once enmeshed into that system, they are compelled to work and earn money to pay back their borrowed money plus interest to the system or be ostracized and deprived of much of their worldly goods, which they bought with the capitalist credit.

Most people choose to work for the available better products rather than voluntarily live at a lower standard of living, with fewer goods or of lower quality. As a rule of thumb most people live ten percent beyond their annual income almost until they near retirement. By that time, if they have been consistently employed, they usually own their home, with the mortgage paid off. So, by their old age, these folks have paid off their debts and can finally enjoy themselves.

If, from the beginning of their earning years, they had always spent ten percent less than they made, in only ten years they would have had a capital base equal to a whole year’s salary upon which to build a substantial money-generating income which would then equal their previous 10% privations, but without further effort.

Capitalism can build contentment for some people.

Capitalism is capable of building contentment for those people who are willing to invest some of their earnings into their own capital building, but it consumes the income of those people who spend more than they make. The consumers are forced to spend their time working until later in their lives to pay off their debts, but after a while the investors’ capital has grown and they gain more and more free time as the years pass. After the first few years of slight privation, they have an investment which will give them a security which the overspending worker doesn’t have, even though he is working full time all his life.

A socialist might hope that the government sponsored social system which he has paid into with his labor will take care of him in his sickness and old age, and perhaps it will, but perhaps it won’t. If that system hasn’t created as great an abundance of the goods and services as some other, there will be fewer of these things for him to have. Therefore, he will be forced to live at a lower standard of living and of contentment, if he considers contentment to be the possession of goods. Contentment is a feeling and belief that one’s relationship with the world is as it should be. But, that can’t be the case if he can easily see others who live in abundance while he, who has worked all his life, lives in relative poverty. People choose to be capitalists by their own spending and investing behavior when young, and likewise people choose to be victims of capitalism if they choose to spend money which they must borrow. Those who have an abundance of earned goodies feel they are right with the world and that is contentment.

Capitalism is good to investors and bad to over-consumers.