On Anxiety

Consumed by anxiety? Give it a day or two

The problems you’re experiencing today seem fraught and important, but that’s mainly because you’re so narrowly focused on the present

By Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 15/09/17

Extracts:

“The next time you’re consumed by anxiety – which, given the headlines, is probably this minute – you might borrow a tip from the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, author of the excellent new book ‘How To Be A Stoic’. In a recent podcast, Pigliucci described how he used Google Street View and Google Earth to create a slideshow that starts with an image of his own home, then zooms out, out and out, until it shows the whole planet. He consults it when feeling overwrought. You couldn’t hope for a more vivid illustration of the Stoic “dichotomy of control”, which urges us to restrict our attempts to change things to those actually in our power, instead of making ourselves miserable railing against those that aren’t. (...) You are – not to be rude – a tiny part of the cosmos. That doesn’t make you powerless. But it does mean you’re almost certainly stressing about things that will, without doubt, remain majestically unaffected by your stress.

If you ask me, such perspective shifts are even more powerful when applied to time. The problems you’re experiencing today seem uniquely fraught and important, but that’s mainly because you’re so narrowly focused on the present. This is, of course, the reasoning behind the old suggestion to ask yourself if your worries will matter on your deathbed, or in a decade, or even next week: they probably won’t. But you can do better than “probably”, as the psychology blogger David Cain points out, by turning your gaze backwards rather than forwards. Because it’s an undeniable fact that every single problem you’ve ever had is currently solved, with the exception of today’s small handful. “Every heart-twisting crisis, every fearsome responsibility, every breakdown of confidence or hope, everything I ever thought I couldn’t handle” – all sorted. “Every single disaster has inevitably given up its emotional hold, except that thin leading edge of the two or three things that are really bothering you right now.”

(...)  Most of what troubles us turns out to be tolerable, or even wonderful, or just never happens at all. Next time you worry that something’s going to ruin your life, it’s worth remembering that if you’d ever been right about that before, even once, your life would presently be ruined.”

Kafkaesque

What makes something kafkaesque?

On the Importance of Hobbies

If you want to be abetter person, find something to do outside of work

By Alex Preston, on Quartz, 12/06/2016

Extracts:

“As a child, I watched birds. While other boys threw themselves into communal sports or sealed lifelong friendships at sleepovers, I spent my weekends alone on the quaggy, wind-barracked reaches of South Coast estuaries, or dragging my long-suffering family around the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Arundel. I pursued birdwatching with the bloody single-mindedness that only a child can muster, and my life, and the lives of those around me, were shaped by my obsession.

Now, attempting to find a way to live as a thirty-something, no longer willing or able to indulge in the hedonistic follies of my twenties, birdwatching has again filled a hole in my existence. Whereas once I identified myself by what I did – my job – now I’m defined by a pursuit that is willfully unproductive.

I spend hours sitting in bird hides these days. Often I am alone; sometimes there are other birdwatchers there with whom to share brief, sublime moments of connection as a bird drifts into view, is identified, noted, and departs; once my daughter came with me, but was bored after 10 minutes, and I had to take her home. Then, alone again, I sat and watched as the hours crept by, until the day grew dark and I could go home. For me, birdwatching has provided the answer to a conundrum that haunts modern life: how to fill our days.

Our hobbies tell a great deal about us and our world: about how we choose to present our lives to others; about the burdensome, expectation-freighted nature of free time; about our slippery relationship with the exigencies of productivity in late-capitalist society. Hobbies are a corner of our existence over which we have the impression of control, a sphere in which we feel we can achieve a kind of mastery usually denied to us in our wider personal and professional lives. In All the Names, José Saramago says that hobbyists act out of “metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world.” (...)

Aldo Leopold, in “A Sand County Almanac”, put it beautifully, and it’s a quote I shall take with me, along with the wellington boots, the binoculars and the Collins’ Guide, each time I go birdwatching:

“Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry – lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an ‘exercise’ undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”

On Being Practical

Don’t do what you love for a career — do what makes you money

By Catherine Baab-Muguira on Quartz, 16/10/2016

Extracts:

“ (...) Coming out of grad school eight years ago, I made a deeply unsexy career choice: To work full time for money, not passion.

I know, I know — it’s not exactly the stuff of magazine covers. And on one level, this approach goes against everything our culture tells us we should do with our careers. Everyone from your graduation-commencement speaker to your parents’ neighbors to your best friend will likely urge you to use your talents to pursue your dream job no matter what.

And what could possibly be wrong with urging people to do what they love? What kind of monster would urge people to consider a petty little thing like financial security? Let’s face it: No one has ever designed an inspirational poster of an eagle soaring of a canyon with the caption, “Actuaries make decent money — lots of stability, too.”

But there’s something to be said for financial stability. Eight years ago, I was married and living with my in-laws. I had $300 in my checking account, no health insurance, and $22,000 in student debt. All of which highlights the first caveat about this pursue-your-passion business: It’s probably much better advice for someone who’s born rich, or holds a tenured academic position, than it is for the rest of us 99 percenters. (...)

And are we really so sure that the best thing to do with passion is attempt to monetize it, anyway? Why assume it’s easier to turn passion into money than it is to turn money into passion? Why not side hustle for love, and keep the filthy hands of commerce off our art or beloved hobby?

What if you don’t have a grand passion, anyway? Lots of people don’t. Hell, just keeping the lights on is a tall enough order for a vast majority of people.

Beyond the basic flaws of a philosophy that urges emotion over practicality, there’s a strong, proactive case to be made for choosing a career based on money. Here are just a few of the things I’ve come to realize over the course of my career:

1. Working for money gives you a welcome clarity of purpose. If you’re like me, and you spend a lot of your time wondering about life’s big questions (and spilling La Croix down the front of your shirt), then it’s a humongous relief to have total focus in at least one arena. Working for money is like a tropical-island-screensaver of the mind. You always know what you are doing. There’s no confusion.

What’s more, it’s worth considering the motives of those who want to convince you to work for love, not money. Maybe they’re clouding the issue so they can pay you less than you’re worth.

2. Most of life’s problems are intractable. Money is that rare problem that’s possible to (mostly) solve. Say you’ve got a difficult relationship with your Mom. That’s something you may eventually learn to cope with, sure. But because you’re dealing with the wild variable of another person, this is not a situation that you can really solve for.

Money is different. Pile up enough of it and you can drastically alter your circumstances, eliminating the worry of sudden medical bills or, eventually, your kid’s college tuition. I’m not saying it’s easy — far from it — but it is possible.

3. The sooner you have money, the less money you need. Every dollar you save and invest in your 20s and 30s becomes many dollars because of compound interest (and what finance types call “time in market”). All this means that, if you do your saving now, while you’re young, you won’t have to sweat this crap all that hard when you’re in your 50s, and retirement is closer at hand—or at least, should be.

4. Likewise, if you work for money now, as opposed to passion, you’re generally in a better position to pursue your passion later on with no financial stresses. Imagine being able to paint or sing or act or write lyric poetry about your cat and not worry about how to pay the rent, like some lucky trust-fund kid. This is my dream, reader, and maybe it’s yours, too.

5. Financial independence is an inherently rational goal — the “fuck off fund” carried to its logical conclusion. To a greater extent than most of us want to admit, you’re only as principled and independent-minded as your bank account allows you to be. So if you really want to be free, not just from one bad relationship or one bad work situation, but to do what it is you really want to do, you need the dollars first and foremost. (...)"

On Male vs. Female Bosses

On Evil

What is evil? by Hannah Arendt

"Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial. She expected to encounter a cold calculating monster (...). Instead what she found was something far more shocking. Eichmann was an altogether innocuous and seemingly normal little man - in some sense, he was a cliché, a stereotypical bureaucrat, a sort of sleepwalker in life, a person who refused to comprehend the weight of his crimes. (...) What Arendt found was a man that was thoughtless, that never stopped to put himself in someone else's shoes; someone with an unquestioning sense of obligation to authority, who all his life had been a follower, a person eager to fit in. He suffered from blind allegiance and self-deception about the morality of his actions. This made Arendt rethink the concept of evil. What she encountered was the banality of evil, an everyday sort of evil: a bureaucrat eager to do his job - one who lacked empathy or perspective."

On Being Smart II

Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy

It’s a paradox: Shouldn’t the most accomplished be well equipped to make choices that maximize life satisfaction?

By Joe Pinsker on Apr 26/04/2016, The Atlantic

Extracts:

“There are 3 things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life. (...)

Joe Pinsker: One of the premises of your book is that people may have a sense of what will make them happy, but they approach those things in ways that don’t maximize happiness. Could you provide an example of that disconnect?

Raj Raghunathan: If you take the need for mastery — the need for competence — there are two broad approaches that one can take to becoming very good at something. One approach is to engage in what people call social comparisons. That is, wanting to be the best at doing something: “I want to be the best professor there is,” or something like that.

There are many problems with that, but one big problem with that is that it's very difficult to assess. What are the yardsticks for judging somebody on a particular dimension? What are the yardsticks for being the best professor? Is it about research, teaching? Even if you take only teaching, is it the ratings you get from students, or is it the content that you deliver in class, or the number of students who pass an exam or take a test and do really well in it? So it gets very difficult to judge, because these yardsticks become increasingly ambiguous as a field becomes narrower or more technical.

So what happens in general is that people tend to gravitate toward less ambiguous — even if they're not so relevant — yardsticks. People judge the best professors by the number of awards they get, or the salary that they get, or the kind of school that they are in, which might on the face of it seem like it's a good yardstick for judging how good somebody is, but at the same time it's not really relevant to the particular field.

And those yardsticks are ones that we adapt to really quickly. So if you get a huge raise this month, you might be happy for a month, two months, maybe six months. But after that, you're going to get used to it and you're going to want another big bump. And you'll want to keep getting those in order to sustain your happiness levels. In most people you can see that that's not a very sustainable source of happiness. (...)

If you were to go back to the three things that people need—mastery, belonging, and autonomy—I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been met. It’s the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. (...)