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Life Outlook
Balancing; Work / Family / Personal interests / Friendships
Dealing with emotions and logic
Accepting reality Vs dreams and desires
I, like most people have always wanted happiness for myself, family and friends. It is strange to talk about something everyone wants, yet most people are hard put to define. It is even harder to know when you have achieved a degree of happiness without a working definition. Nonetheless, whatever the definition, happiness has always been my objective.
There have been periods of time when I was happy. They were short in duration and I cannot say for sure what happiness level was achieved. But at the time I was tranquil and content. There have been many more times when happiness was something far off I could point to. "If I had ??? money, I would be happy." "If my children would come home after school with enthusiasm for something they were involved in, I would be happy." Happiness as the light at the end of the tunnel, is something we can work towards. Sometimes, our unhappiness defines happiness as anything that does not make us unhappy.
What for children if not to bring happiness into our lives. Watching those little tots give and demand unswerving love provides a high degree of happiness. Of course, it requires work to maintain, feed, cloth and house them. With necessities taken care of, "entertainment" becomes the next priority. And if you are the breadwinner, time to enjoy all this become all to important and scare at the same time.
Achieving happiness is an overwhelmingly personal, private, even solitary undertaking. It is requires an infinite array of choices and the power to move among them as if you were sampling or grazing your way through life. Abundance and freedom can bewilder as well as liberate, and many people revert to William James's view that "happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion." And while the premise on which Jefferson's pursuit of happiness was based -- that some human beings must be masters and others slaves -- has become outrageous to us, his conviction that happiness can best be found in selfless service remains a driving motive in many lives.
Today the notion that "abundance" and freedom ensure happiness no longer meets much articulate resistance. The competitive pursuit of wealth requires the stamina of youth and can be haunted by the fear of age and death. "Men easily attain a certain equality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire. . . . They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die." Many people appear afflicted by this "strange melancholy . . . in the midst of their abundance."
And so, it is easy to understand that happiness is fleeting at best. And maybe the best is then to avoid sadness and despair. Rather than trying to appreciate the half full cup, we should see the half empty cup as a means to achieve happiness. For the half empty cup represents what we have yet to do. It provides the motivation and objective we need to at least view the happiness at the end of the tunnel as long as we know we will never truly reach it.
Balancing; Work / Family / Personal interests / Friendships
With everything that is required of us on a daily basis, it is hard to keep the scale balanced properly. Like the demanding shopper who gets more attention, the trials of life cause us to spend more time in activities contrary to our desires, and sometimes our needs. The errant shopper may only buy $5 worth of goods, but gets 100% of the salespersons time. In a likewise fashion we invest our time, many times, on low value activities. Forgetting the big picture we delve into sub-optimization of the task at hand.
The balancing act depends on the individual's personal, private, and environmental values. The job may require 60 plus hours per week while the spouse needs time coverage from the children. Friends and interests fall to the side as priorities change. Priorities, imposed on you, don't necessarily represent your desires. Given enough time, desires are sometimes forgotten, or opportunities for fulfillment are passed. One day you turn around and ask; what happened?
Dealing with emotions and logic
When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on. When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes.
Feeling, however, is a private process, an inner process. It involves your perception of all the changes that are taking place in your body during an emotion. The feeling of sadness involves your perception of these changes in your body. You may have the sense that your body has slowed down, has less energy, feels ill. Your thought processes also change. The production of new images slows down, your attention may be concentrated on a few images. By contrast, when you experience joy and elation, you become able to create images more rapidly, and your attention can be proportionally shorter. You feel quick, not stuck.Emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes. Let's say you are trying to make a complicated decision. If you try to do a cost-benefit analysis, it may take you forever to decide whether to do A or B. However, if you have previously been in similar situations, and if you have been either rewarded or punished by the choices you made in those situations, then emotional memory may help you with your current choice. That help may come in the form of a gut feeling or, more subtly, in the form of a non-conscious bias that leads you in a certain direction. And we know this because if you're deprived of those emotions then, lo and behold, rather than being sort of a coolheaded reasoner, you become a rather poor reasoner.
Don't denigrate the fact that emotions can play a role in how you normally operate. One can fall into the trap of being hyper-rationalistic -- emotional memory can have a very good tempering effect. And don't interpret reason as separate from emotion, but as part of a continuum. Both reason and emotion are part of our life mechanisms.
Where does logic come into all this?
To separate the two would be foolhardy. Can we say that it is the engine or the transmission that drives the car. Without either the car does not move. So with us human beings. One without the other does not get us anywhere. We would have trouble with the simplest of mathematical calculations if not for the emotional direction we choose in determining which formula or calculation to apply. Even in arithmetic there are many ways to solve a problem. What guides a person to choosing one way over another. Experience and repetition certainly play a part in the decision. But when they cannot be easily employed it is the emotional reactions we remember, albeit subconsciously, to past direction. Accomplishment retains a positive lingering feeling in contrast to failure and frustration.
In an attempt to get the best possible mix of emotions and logic we try to mediate or consciously understand what each is contributing to the desired motivated direction. We use "gut" feelings, some call "instincts" to apply our logical selves to the task at hand. The stakes are great. Success is rewarded with a positive high. Failure is met with sadness and depression.
Accepting reality Vs dreams and desires
People admire the individualist willing to leave society behind to discover their true self. But they do so from a distance. For every lonesome cowboy, for every adventurer willing to fly solo across the Atlantic, for every monkish worshiper of solitude, most people, are only too happy to find in faith, family or subdivision the security they needed to get through the insecurities of life.
People live in a community of conformists within lonely crowds. The organization men wear gray flannel suits. The women are stunted by the feminine mystique. The children, rebels without a cause, grew up absurd and emerge uncommitted. Ruled by a power elite, the affluent society is shaped by hidden persuaders.
None of this is true anymore. Institutions that once provided the security people craved have transformed before our eyes. Corporations that offered lifetime employment now compete to lay off workers, unprotected by weakened unions. Government, once controlled by the sturdy WASP establishment, is increasingly led by conservatives, who detest government. Suburbs have merged with the cities from which they offered the promise of escape. The family is no longer a haven; all too often a center of dysfunction, it has become one with the heartless world that surrounds it.
People are looking inside themselves for the certainties their institutions no longer offer. They do not need to escape from society, because society has escaped from them. People may not have a clue about how to survive on the prairie in front of an open campfire, but they are pretty much on their own when it comes to finding a mate, rearing children, choosing a career or planning retirement.
We may appear as conformist as ever, one mall indistinguishable from one another, entertainment strikingly homogenous and coffee, though much improved, still remarkably uniform. But deep inside, we the people are exploring a new frontier. Though we still believe in God, uphold the family and love our country, we increasingly decide which God best suits our temperament; and which family structure works for us.
The willingness of some people to see good in everyone renders them "spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone." There is a connection between a sunny temperament and rootlessness. When people are responsible for shaping their world, they learn that, since no one can credibly claim to have all life's answers, it pays to treat everyone with respect.
Were you the reader able to follow all of this?
Perception is the reality we deal with. How we are perceived Vs how others perceive us. Does perception follow reality or reality adhere to perception. Do all the witnesses at a crime scene agree on what happened? How come a person gets fired because others believe him to be uncooperative. The truth is that perception has a greater affect on your actions than then the reality which caused the situation in the first place. The fact of an occurrence is not as meaningful as the reason for the occurrence. The reason explains the value of the occurrence. And based on this we react. So although stocks may lose 50% in value, is a fact, the reason for this is reality.
Most of us would rather be doing something else. But without a choice, we must suffer the indignity of hopping to the desires of someone who has the income vote over us.
Hard to explain but helping others is more of helping yourself. Airline instructions for an emergency require you to place the oxygen mask on yourself before placing one on the child next to you. It makes sense. Only when you are strong and capable can you help others. In reverse, by helping others, you become strong and capable. Consider what you have to go through to be able to help your child with their homework.
Helping someone overcome their own problems, sometimes personal, is the best way to help oneself. The solutions that are developed many times have as much applicability to yourself as the one you are helping. No one should underrate the value of recognition. When we help others, we are recognized. That recognition is not only valuable for our standing in the community but it also has a personal and positive affect on our psychic.
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