KPAO by Dave Cortright

Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic — resources

I recently gave a talk titled Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic (which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post). Executive summary: good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Individual achievement only makes up at most ⅓ of overall happiness.

I included a resources slide at the end, but wanted to put that list hear so it's easier to access, and because I can more easily make changes to it in the future. (I already added one resource that I left off the original list.)

• Triumphs of Experience by George E. Vaillant (or just watch Robert Waldinger’s TED talk)
• The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven
• The Blue Zones series (especially …Happiness) by Dan Buettner
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Habits of a Happy Brain by Loretta Graziano Breuning
• The Awakened Ape by Jevan Pradas
• The Mindful Geek by Michael Taft
• The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker (or just read his blog)
• The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
• The Selfish Gene, et al. by Richard Dawkins
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
• Social and Emotional Learning from resources such as CASEL or RULER
• The Mask You Live In (movie)
• Room to Breathe (movie)

Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic from Dave Cortright

Humans are coquivores, and the only remaining extant species

This blog post deserves more in depth research and citations, but there is a lot of evidence supporting the fact that humans (and our extinct predecessors) are not omnivores, herbivores, or carnivores like other mammals, but rather a brand new classification: the coquivore. We cook our food, and as the book Catching Fire opines, it is what allowed us to become human. Cooking unlocks more nutrients from the food, and reduces the amount of work that the body needs to do to process the food. That energy was used to grow our big brains.

Some of my favorite words: specious, facile, insidious, ostensibly, purportedly

specious—superficially plausible, but actually wrong

facile—appearing neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial.

insidious—proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects

ostensibly—apparently or purportedly, but perhaps not actually

purportedly—as appears or is stated to be true, though not necessarily so

What can we—the people—do about the government shutdown?

I sent this to all 3 of my congressional representatives over the weekend. So far I’ve received one response, and it was boilerplate. Disappointing. 😕

Regarding the government shutdown, I understand that you are on the side of reason. So asking you to do all in your power to help bring the government back up and working is unnecessary; you are already doing that.

My question is: How can we—the people—help you achieve this? I believe Mitch McConnell is the primary impediment here. Should I contact his office (even though I am not his constituent)? Sign a petition? Encourage the entire government—and especially those forced to work without pay—to go on strike? How can we help America move beyond this? Thank you for your service.

F*** the Buddhist monks; meditation, compassion and fulfillment for the rest of us

I am finally getting in the groove of meditation and realizing that the way it is portrayed by them is misleading. Or the more compassionate interpretation: maybe they actually believe their portrayal.

Here's how I perceive it. In order to get to inner peace and a higher plane of existence, it takes many years of meditative practice studying with older, wiser monks who know the secret. And yes, I do believe that a lifetime of bad emotional hygiene can make for slow progress when it comes to unlearning old bad habits and learning new healthy ones. Emotions come and go but by a lot of time and training, you can get to a inner peace and fulfillment that is the steady state background over which blips of emotions appear and then pass like leaves in the wind.

Here's what meditation is for me: it is the complete absence of judgement or thought about the past or future. It is immersing oneself in the presentness, taking in the full fidelity input from the senses and embracing the feelings that come—whatever they are—without judgement, but never clinging to any; that drops you straight back into the thinking mind and out of the present. In my mindfully present state, I do allow thoughts to come, but I let them go immediately. It's inevitable to have a thought—especially about a particular sensation.

Speaking of which, I don't really like the word mindful. Mind to me implies brain which implies thinking. And yes, I know the mind/brain encompasses both thinking and feeling components. But I prefer to avoid any possible coloration of the meaning of the term. I think awareful might be better. Or senseful.

The biggest impediment to doing this is our previous conditioning about emotions. For our whole lives we have been judging and therefore trying to manage our emotions. I suspect even the most emotionally healthy people out there still have some creeping emotional judgements. Try to take away the thinking and when an emotion comes up, our thinking brain jumps up and wants to judge it. think about it, manage it... all of the things that it is good at doing. It's a hammer and every thing it encounters looks like a nail.

The other difficult thing to overcome for many of us is separating toxic emotions from healthy ones. The key here is that a healthy individual is entirely responsible for their own emotional health. When people expect others to take on management of their emotions, it becomes an unhealthy enmeshed/co-dependent situation. Unentangling that knot is very difficult.

In summary: a meditative—let's say senseful—state is available to us all. It doesn't require closed eyes or mantras. It can be had anywhere you are. It just requires you to have already cleaned up an emotional clutter and baggage you might have picked up along the way, and to be completely accepting without judgements of new emotions as they come up.

What about you? Embrace your sense of agency!

I think all of the protagonists in Moving Pictures’ 1982 hit “What About Me” are suffering from learned helplessness and if they would only empower themselves with a healthy sense of agency, they wouldn't need to blame the world around them for their perceived deficiencies. Or maybe it’s just me victim blaming. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Well, there's a little boy waiting
At the counter of the corner shop
He's been waiting down there, waiting half the day
They never ever see him from the top
He gets pushed around, knocked to the ground
He gets to his feet and he says...

What about me? It isn't fair
I don't have enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

Well, there's a pretty girl serving
At the counter of the corner shop
She's been waiting back there, waiting for a dream
Her dreams walk in and out; they never stop
Well she's not too proud, to cry out loud
She runs to the street and she screams...

What about me? It isn't fair
I don't have enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

More than you give...

Take a step back and see the little people
They might be young
But they're the ones that make the big people big
So listen as they whisper:
"What about me?"

And now I'm standing on the corner
All the world's gone home
Nobody's changed, nobody's been saved
And I'm feeling cold and alone
I guess I'm lucky, I smile a lot
But sometimes I wish for more, than I've got...

What about me? It isn't fair
I don't have enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more...

What about me? It isn't fair
I don't have enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more, you just take more
You just take more than you give

What about me?
What about me?
What about...me?

The most profound concept about life that I have ever encountered; Your [thinking] mind is a tool.

This is the most profound concept about life that I have ever encountered.

Your [thinking] mind is an instrument; a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down.

80–90% of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but—because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature—much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

—Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”

To use a nerdy analogy, your thinking mind is like the One Ring [to rule them all] in Lord of the Rings. When used, it gives you extraordinary powers, but it also comes at a cost. We all need to practice taking the ring off and just being in the present moment here and now without any of the thinking, judging or analysis that our thinking mind does so well.

Nation’s Federal Buildings to Keep Flags at Half-Mast for Remainder of Trump Presidency

WASHINGTON (DC) — Admitting that there is “pretty much a regrettable disaster every day,” the administrators for US Federal buildings today announced that—for efficiency’s sake—they would just leave their flags at half-mast for the next two years. “We initially lowered them in remembrance after the death of former president George HW Bush. But then we realized that—with this administration—there is a tragedy happening almost daily. If there is even one day back to full mast, you can practically guarantee there will be some awful event that will require the nation to mourn and reflect upon the next day. Whether it’s the treatment of asylum seekers at our borders, yet another criminal conviction or resignation of some key player in the administration, or even just a run-of-the-mill mass shooting, there will always be something to commemorate with a lowered flag." They went on to add that they might end the run early in the not unlikely case that Trump is compelled to leave office prematurely.

 

(satire)

Sturm und Drang around “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is unwarranted

2018 and suddenly the Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is in the crosshairs. And sure, I get it, from a particular viewpoint it can appear sinister (like if Bill Cosby were singing the ‘wolf’ part.)

This Quartz article does a good job of going in-depth on on the song, and points to a tweet thread that I think completely nails it. In a world where meanings can be unclear and subject to interpretation, why not choose the sex positive and empowering one?

[The song is] about a sexually aware woman worried about slut shaming… If you think “Baby It's Cold Outside” is creepy, you are robbing the woman in that song of her agency. You are the problem. [source]

Also, this is a pretty funny take on it: 🤣

Twenty years from now, kids listening to "Baby it's cold outside" are gonna find it really, really weird.

We're gonna have to explain that it has to be understood in the context of its time.

You see, it used to get cold outside.

— Zi Teng Wang (@Zi_W) December 10, 2018

The Dalai Lama on negative self-talk

In a meeting between the Dalai Lama and a group of American psychologists in 1990, one of the psychologists brought up the concept of negative self-talk. Since there are no words in Tibetan that translate into low self-esteem and self-loathing, it took quite a long time for the psychologists to convey what they meant. But this wasn’t a translation problem. It was a problem of conceptualization. Self-loathing? People do that? The Dalai Lama was incredulous. Once the Dalai Lama understood what they were saying, he turned to the Tibetan monks in the room, and after explaining what the psychologists were suggesting, he asked, “How many of you have experienced this low-self esteem, self-contempt or self-loathing?”

Complete silence.

Here was a psychological state of mind so ubiquitous in our culture that everyone experiences it from time to time, if not every single day. Yet the Tibetans—trained since childhood in the art of a mental exercise they call meditation—acted like they were being told about some alien life form. The Dalai Lama turned back to the psychologists and asked a simple question: “Why would you ever let your mind get like this?”

Excerpt from The Awakened Ape