Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Secret #3, Become Love

This is a continuing effort to provide to my readers the secrets to a happy, fulfilled life as outlined in the book Five Secrets You Must Learn Before You Die. This is secret number three, and like the other "Secrets" it's not really a secret. This one is to Become Love. It should be no surprise to anyone that love is connected to fulfillment and happiness, however, I think this secret as put forward in the book is more interesting than I had expected.

The message is that it isn't feeling love that is important, but choosing to be love. The emphasis is on the choice to be a loving person, the day to day voluntary decision to act in a way that is loving. This is put forward in a three stage process, choosing to love yourself, loving those close to yourself, and then loving everyone.
Loving yourself is essentially a self-esteem issue as put forward here, thinking of yourself as worthy of being love, and someone who is capable of giving love to others. The method for getting there is altering your self-talk, consciously being aware of the thoughts and feelings towards yourself that are negative, and then consciously deciding to have more positive thoughts.
Loving those close to you is essentially a suggestion to make the relationships you have a greater priority in your life. Essentially that very, very few people wish they had spent less time with their loved ones or wish they had been less kind and loving to those close to themselves. However, many people wish they had put more into a loving relationship and less into their career or material things. If you consistently make decisions to work rather than spend time with your family, or consistently spend money on nice things rather than on experiences with those you love, you are probably making a mistake.
Loving everyone is as it sounds, being kind, forgiving, loving to all the people you meet. Consciously deciding to think the best of people, to help them out, to forgive their faults as a default position. The reason for this is not just that it is a nice thing to do, but that it results in love returning in your direction. The love you get is equal to the love you give.

So far I have not been surprised in any way by the make up of the secrets. They are commonly known as the way to live your life. What stands out to me is that it is the application of these commonly known principles that is important. The book seems to me to basically state that you know how to live a good life, but so many people simply don't do it. We don't do it because we are distracted, busy, unthinking, or afraid. If you want to be happy you have to pay attention to your own life, what is going on today, and then decide to make any changes that are necessary. Self-knowledge, mindfulness, courage and application are the keys. If you know what you love to do, if you know that those around you feel consistently loved by you, if you spend time doing what you love, this book is useless. If you feel confused about what you want, if you wonder whether you are doing enough for those around you, if you think that there's something that you should do but are not doing it for some reason, then this book can be summed up by the words, "Do something about it."

Friday, June 26, 2009

Leave No Regrets

Secret number two is the deeply insightful Leave No Regrets. This is pretty much self-explanatory, if you regret that you haven't done something, go do it, and don't wait around as that might result in it being too late. This seems a pretty straight forward piece of advice, if something bothers you enough to effect your happiness, go do something about it.

The book emphasizes that those interviewed did not tend to regret things that they had tried, but regretted things they had not done. At least this group of people didn't dwell on failures, they dwelled on not having tried in the first place. One thing I wonder about is whether the results from a large survey of bitter and miserable people would have similar results in that they regretted not having tried things, or whether the happy group's experience with risk was better because they had generally succeeded? The other question I have is whether the imagination of a dream is better than the actual dream? That what we dreamed we might have done is better than the reality of doing things, and so when we don't do things we feel worse than failing at a dream.

The book seems so far to largely be an exhortation towards courage in life. Those who are happy and fulfilled late in life are those who knew who and what they were and took risks to get there. This group when asked whether they wish they had taken more or less risks indicated that they thought they should have taken more risks. Again, I wonder if that is due to their experience with risk? I have talked to extremely happy and contented people late in life, and they did tend to be brave and go out and do extraordinary things. But I've also talked to terribly miserable people late in life and some of those took risks that didn't work out (joining the military being an important one of those).

The book does give a couple of caveats to this exhortation towards taking risks in order to leave no regrets. The first is that the risks they are talking about are not physical risks, but emotional risks. This book does not suggest a lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in war zones. What it suggests is that when you think of something that you wish to do, that you are called to do, that has the risk of public embarrassment, or failure, or disappointment, do it. Failing at your dream is less misery inducing than not trying a all.

This leads to the second caveat, that regrets will occur. You will fail, you will not do things, circumstances will occur that mean that life is not just as you would wish. One of the qualities of this group is that they dealt well will failure. One of the ways to leave no regrets, is that when something goes wrong one accepts that, one feels good that at least an attempt was made, and then one lets the regret go. This quality that mitigates the second caveat seems to me to be vitally important, if you don't regret things when your risks don't work out then taking risks is actually a non-risk situation. If you reap the rewards when things go well, but don't suffer the consequences when things go badly, you should try as many things as possible.

So far the book has given two "Secrets" that are known by everybody, they are common knowledge. Be true to yourself, find out what you are meant to be and then do it. Leave no regrets, if you will feel badly if you didn't try something, try it as failure is less painful than regret for those for whom failure is less painful than regret. The problem I have with the book so far is that it does not give methods for finding out who you are if you don't know it, and it doesn't give methods for accepting and dealing with regret and failure. What the book does do is remind people to think about these things, to take time to contemplate what they should be doing with their lives, and then to go do them.

What I have found in this book so far are two things, one about myself and one about other people. With regards to myself I have found that what I do is generally in line with this advice on how to be wise, happy and fulfilled but I still wonder about whether there is more to life than this. It leads me to think that perhaps I need to be more mindful and appreciative of what I have, and possibly that I should go to Asia and have an adventure sooner rather than later. With regards to other people the book has led me to the position that perhaps most people go through their lives unaware of themselves in a way I simply can't imagine. This concept that most of humanity is just blundering through their lives blind to themselves, acting simply out of habit or cultural rules, not thinking, questioning or searching, is frightening. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I am unimpressed by the cognitive abilities of humanity on average, or its concern for its fellow man at a distance. But the fact that such a book as this exists, and might be useful, has increased my contempt for people en masse.

Am I happier than most people but simply someone who questions and searches for more happiness at an even greater rate? Is my caricature of most people as sheep, doing what is habitual, buying what they are told is cool, doing what they are told is interesting, believing what they are told to believe, even more true than I had thought?

Tune in over the next few days for the Third Secret, which is even less surprising than the first two.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Be True To Yourself Part II

The post before this one explains about a book I am reading on what you need to know to be wise, happy and fulfilled before you die. It has five secrets, the first being Be True To Yourself. I discussed what this might actually mean in the previous post, and most interestingly received an excellent comment.

I know have listened through the section on being true to yourself, and essentially the idea is that everyone has something that they are meant to do, and if you do that you will be happy and fulfilled. In practical terms the advice is to take time on a regular basis to evaluate how your life is going, what you are doing, and then to see if your life consists of you doing the thing that you are supposed to be doing. A number of real life examples are given of people who realized what they should be doing, did it, and then were happy. There are examples of people who always knew what they should be doing, and other examples of sudden changes in understanding, and then examples of people who did not follow their True Self and were unhappy. So, the advice is to think about what feels right for you to do on a regular basis and then try to do that.

There is no mention of people who simply don't know what they should be doing, who have no calling, who don't have anything that consistently is rewarding as a primary thing in their life. I have always enjoyed reading science fiction books, I like walking in pretty places, listening to music, drinking beer with friends, and seeing new places. Essentially my calling, for me to be true to myself, I need to have as many vacations as possible. This hardly seems to be news, or insight, or great wisdom, or perhaps it is?

My friend Dade in his response to the last post wrote, "The danger in pursuing happiness, it seems to me, is that, if you pursue it, you are by definition, unhappy." Now, I have deliberately pursued happiness to great effect when faced with possible misery, I would say there's a good chance that the pursuit of happiness has saved my life. I also have actually really enjoyed the pursuit at times, the exploration of eastern philosophies was enormously rewarding. I don't think searching for happiness means you are automatically unhappy, you might be (as I am) trying to get happier from a position of general contentment. I am interested in moving from saisfaction towards bliss. But perhaps this pursuit can also be counter-productive, that there is a law of diminishing returns in the search, that after a while good enough becomes more and more comfortable, more contented, more happy. Perhaps what I will learn from this book is that I am already doing the things that are wise, and what I should be doing is being relaxed and comfortable with where I am, and reaping the rewards.

When I picture what would be a great life for myself, it looks a lot like the life I am living, but simply with more end results. That is that the things I am doing, if continued will eventually produce what I am after. The only problem is the pressure I feel to do them faster and better, but that just isn't really me. A great example is music. I love to perform music for people, if they are willing. One of my dreams is to be a good enough musician that this can happen casually, easily, and often. I would love to be able to choose to play in public as much as I would like, to be able to play with good musicians without embarrassment. This requires another 2000 hours of solid practice, probably more. But I am not driven to practice for several hours a day, sometimes I don't want to play at all. So I feel guilt, or pressure to practice to get where I want with music. But devoting myself to a single task has never been me. I putter, and switch between things. But that's OK, maybe I'll be where I want in music in five years instead of one or two, and the journey will be more pleasant.

So the lesson that I have gotten from the book so far is that I'm doing all right, I should just relax and smell the roses a little more, if I feel so inclined.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Be True To Yourself

I have started to listen to an audio book called The Five Secrets You Must Learn Before You Die. I am up to chapter three in which the first secret is divulged. The basic thrust of the book is that some people when coming to the end of their lives are happy and content, and feel like they have lead a worthwhile and fulfilling life. Other people in the same circumstances are bitter, angry, and regretful about the course of their lives. The author maintains that the former group have developed wisdom, that they have worked out what is important and then used that knowledge to achieve their state. He then has set out to identify such wise people, interview them and from this take out what is the wisdom we really need to know.
The method used to identify these wise people was to ask 15,000 people to pick the one person in their life they considered to be happy and fulfilled. They received 1,000 responses and eventually interviewed 235 people from North America. They decided that all of those interviewed should be over sixty after some interviews as apparently all three of the interviewers could sense an increase in wisdom in general after the age of sixty.
This book relies on a number of assumptions. First, that wisdom is identical with being happy and fulfilled, the author even says that these two factors are in his opinion the basic drives of humanity (in contrast to Freud's pleasure/pain axis.) Second, that wisdom can be identified by the not-necessarily-wise. Third, that those over sixty are more likely to be wise than those younger than sixty, that is that people increase in wisdom rather than stay the same or decrease. Fourth, that there is wisdom that can be transferred from these older, wise people to younger, foolish people. Fifth, that this wisdom applied will result in bein happy and fulfilled. Essentially if you think that people identified by others as happy, fulfilled people over sixty know how people should live, this is the book to read.
I have some problems with those assumptions, in that basically I think they tend towards a correct position but are not axiomatic. I think you can be wise but unhappy, happy but without fulfillment, I think some people (perhaps many) become less wise over time (I think if you ask a six year old what is important in life you often get better answers than from a sixty year old), and I think it likely that there will be nothing in this book that isn't generally thought to be wise (I think we all know what wisdom is, the trouble is the practical aspects). But still, I bought this book for a reason as I think there is a lot to the basic premise.
By the way, in the preceding four paragraphs I think I pretty much gave every single important piece of information provided in the prologue and first two chapters, and then gave some analysis of it as well. The author has a tendency to repeat himself and find himself deep and important. He also seems pretty obsessed with death, harping on the urgency of finding all of this out because we could be dead at any point. His position seems to be that what really matters is how you feel about your life on your deathbed. I think it unlikely that that moment is any more important than any other moment.
So, Chapter Three finally lets us in on the first secret, Be True to Yourself. This is also referred to as Following Your Heart and Knowing Yourself. This is as far as I have gotten so far in the book and I wrote this post specifically because I wonder what this means? It seems to me trivially obvious that in order to be happy you have to know what makes you happy, and then do it. Likewise, if fulfillment actually matters then you should know what will make you fulfilled, and then do it. This isn't very helpful stuff. It seems to me that everyone knows these truisms, but the trick is working out what makes you happy, or fulfilled, before vast tracks of time have passed. How do you know yourself? What is yourself? How do you know when you know these things? What do you do if what is true to yourself, following your heart, is simply impracticable? There are many, many situations that I can conceive of that would lead me to feel happy and fulfilled, just that the path to get there would make me feel less happy than I am at the moment.
Finally, I have an issue with the author's belief that human beings need meaning in their lives, that they need a connection to infinity, that what they are and did mattered. I think that is something that lots of people want, many people find, but it also the antithesis of the philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism (destroying the ego) the admonition of Jesus to be humble, and the wise teachings of the Tao Te Ching:

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

This is particularly true because there is no meaning other than what we make up. If you require meaning, but know at the base there is no meaning, this will lead to difficulty.

I hope the book continues to interest me, and if it does I will try to continue to post here about these five "Secrets", then you can be wise for $19.95 less than I.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Suicide is Selfish?

I have seen in a number of places over the past week or two the claim that suicide is selfish, sometimes referred to as the ultimate selfish act. This is not a big public debate, but rather one of those random coincidences of several people saying a similar thing over a short while. This is something that really pisses me off, and I will explain why.

The reasoning for suicide being a selfish act is that it is something done for oneself, and it results in other people suffering. When someone commits suicide (a rather repugnant term for it as it suggests a crime) the person who kills them self does it to solve their own problem, but the result for other people is negative. Those who care about the person are saddened by their death. In these terms suicide is selfish, but then under those circumstances almost everything we do is selfish.

If you have money, if you don't give your money to someone else then by this definition of selfish, you are selfish. Someone else would be happy by getting money, you didn't give it to them, therefore you are selfish. Eating that pizza, having a house, driving a car, all selfish acts. By this definition of something being selfish, that you do something for yourself rather than others, almost everything that anyone does is selfish. In order to not be considered a selfish person under these circumstances one would need to be a saint of the highest order.

I don't think this is what people mean when they make the statement that suicide is selfish. I think what they mean is that suicide is particularly selfish something that rises above the basic definition. The meaning is that suicide is egregiously selfish, that the harm to others is very large, and the benefit gained is relatively small. This, I believe, comes from the school of thought that thinks suicide is "The easy way out." This school of thought is that those who commit suicide generally don't have insurmountable problems, their situation really isn't intolerable, or even extremely unpleasant, and that suicide is an easy thing to do. These are appallingly wrong.

When someone is depressed enough to commit suicide their situation is horrendous. Suicidal people don't just decide to do it in one day. It usually takes months or years of thinking about it, of worrying on the problem, of living in literal misery. I have experienced major depression, and I'll take someone breaking my leg with a baseball bat to the experience every single time. To be depressed means that nothing provides pleasure. Food has little or no taste, you have no sense of humor, nothing is funny, nothing is beautiful, nobody really cares for you. You feel entirely isolated, alone, incompetent, ugly, useless. If you have not experienced it then all I can say is that it is worse than you imagine. Whatever you are imagining of what it is like, it is worse than that. It isn't the situation that you are in. It isn't finances, or the loss of a loved one, or unemployment, or any other life situation. It is that and the complete inability to be happy, and the certainty that you will never experience happiness ever again in your life.

As for suicide being the easy way out, this is nonsense. The human body comes equipped with a desperation to remain alive. The basic instincts are entirely built around the survival and reproduction of individuals. That shot of adrenaline, the panting, desperate fear that happens when you just avoid a car accident, or when you slip near a large fall is built into a person. Someone who wants to kill themself is not free from these instincts. The thought of dying is terrifying. Someone who points a gun at their own head feels the same fear that someone who is getting a gun pointed at their head feels. Someone about to jump off a bridge feels the exact same fear of heights that someone who has slipped and is hanging on for dear life feels. Could you break your own leg deliberately? How hard would that be for you to do? Standing there with a baseball bat, feeling the adrenaline pumping, imagining the pain, the sound of it, worrying about whether you'll do it right or whether you'll have to try twice.

Being depressed to the point of suicide is an appalling situation. It's as bad as chemotherapy, but without the hope that you might recover. One of the most egregious things about depression is the hopelessness. The hopelessness is so prevalent, so enormous, that a leading reason why very depressed people don't commit suicide is the belief that they'll screw it up, that they are so useless that they couldn't even do that right. Most suicides happen as people are getting better, because at that point they have the motivation and self-belief to do it.

Committing suicide is an act of extreme willpower, an act of enormous physical courage, in my eyes the same as a war hero risking gunfire to rescue a fallen comrade. The goals are different, he outcome different, but the act of will required is the same. It is not easy to commit suicide, is diabolically hard. It is the willful denial of all the dreams and hopes you ever had for your life. It is an act of physical courage. It is hard, really hard. In fact, it is so hard that the only reason I am alive is that it was too hard for me to do it. I know for an absolute fact that I am too much of a coward, too mentally weak to do it. I remember standing in a grocery store simply weeping in misery because I didn't have the strength to kill myself. I know for a fact that suicide is not the easy way out.

What the thought that suicide is selfish really comes down to is that those who hold the position think that themselves, or the relatives and friends around the person who kills themselves, are more important than the person who commits suicide. Their misery as a result of the suicide is more important than the misery of the person who was depressed. That their happiness is worth the other person suffering by living. It is a position that holds the person who commits suicide in contempt. It assumes that they know the position of the person who is depressed better than that person. It assumes that they can evaluate the situation better, that they have thought more about the consequences, that they love the person more than they are loved. This is all bullshit. Nobody knows more about the situation than the person who is depressed.

When people undergo chemotherapy, or get very sick, or lose someone they love, they are often very sad or miserable. Anyone with any empathy feels pain because of what they are going through. But we don't deride these people as selfish because their situation hurts us. We are sympathetic towards them, we wish their pain to end. We don't call someone crying in public because they are frightened of dying from the cancer they just contracted selfish, even though their misery and fear hurts us. Depression is a disease that nobody asks for either.

The opinion that suicide is selfish makes me very angry. It is deeply ignorant, a hold over from times when mental illness was contemptible. The belief shows contempt and a complete lack of sympathy for someone in a horrendous situation. But most of all, it is a deeply selfish position, a position that puts one's own sadness at the death of a loved one over and above the release from misery of the loved one. My feelings are more importnat than your feelings.


Who does this opinion effect? What is it for? It doesn't effect someone who has committed suicide, they are dead. The expression of this statement is for two groups of people, those thinking about suicide, and those who will be around someone in that situation. The results are that it adds to the guilt that a person thinking about suicide will feel, it adds to the loss of self-esteem, it confirms that the person is useless and awful. For those around someone with intense depression it relieves responsibility for helping them out, it relieves the guilt (I couldn't stop them from being selfish), it allows us to love the person a little less which helps the pain.

The statement, in my opinion, reaches the level of being evil. It hurts those in the most need of help, and if it helps anyone, it does so only by denigrating others and supporting the worst in people.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Update with Point?

The house has been sold! Whoopee for something being over, if not for no longer having that nice house in Portland with all the fond memories that went with it. Part of the house selling process was that today a piece of paper came with the amount of money we received as a result on it. While looking at it I had two reactions, first I checked to make sure the number was within the expected range, the second was to think, "It's just numbers."

Now, I know that it isn't actually just numbers, these numbers stand for a value. But that value is so arbitrary, so seemingly removed from fairness, or logic that it has no set value. At the same time it is a fraction of the value of a regular house in London, and the amount that ten average Bangladeshis earn for their entire lifetimes. What it means to me is that I get to live in my own house which has plumbing, electricity, heating and cooling and furniture, eat unbelievably amazing food, dress like a king, and still save money so that I become even richer.

What do I do with these riches, and my life in general? Not much. I take care of the house but not in a way that anyone would think justifies my existence. We live like college students. I have produced an excellent dog. I try to improve at music, but not enough to be great, because that's really hard. I have started a novel, and am writing it extremely slowly but hope to speed up at some point. I think about things a great deal. I wallow in decadence. From time-to-time I go abroad and see different places, which is a wondrous thing. But I don't do a lot.

But not doing a lot is fine. This is good enough for me, and my wife says that she is the happiest she has been. That's the key, good enough is exactly that, good enough. There are people who say that good enough isn't good enough. Those people are idiots. Life is about getting to a place that is good enough, and then noticing where you are.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Lingua.

Hot sun and humidity. Unlimited access to alcohol. A pet demon. A wandering mind. Music and swearing in the background, the sound of spreadsheets.
Blue eyes in wrinkles, laughter or squinting?
A physicist philosopher suggests there's a 20% chance we are in some sort of computer simulation. Would that make computer simulations reality?
There is nothing so magical as sunlight sparkling on water. Or perhaps giggling. I think any religion based on the holy giggle would get my attention. On the other hand, The Holy Giggle sounds deeply terrifying. Punctuationmatters. But spellin's for losers.
Do any of you ever feel the need to run amok with two sharp, somewhat persian looking knives? No, me either.
Did you know that The Beatles were the second best album selling band between the years 2000 and the present? I find that hopeful and encouraging, still after all these days all you need is love, rent, and nourishment.