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January 23 - January 28, 2023
our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
“Our life is the creation of our mind.”)
counseled people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance.
Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly,
When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.
Meditation is, however, extraordinarily difficult at first, and confronting your repeated failures in the first weeks teaches the rider lessons in humility and patience.
If bad is stronger than good, then Andy suffers more from separation than he benefits from reunion.
When you extract a splinter it hurts, briefly, but then you feel relief, even pleasure. When you find a fault in yourself it will hurt, briefly, but if you keep going and acknowledge the fault, you are likely to be rewarded with a flash of pleasure that is mixed, oddly, with a hint of pride. It is the pleasure of taking responsibility for your own behavior. It is the feeling of honor.
he was battling the disappointment of success. The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting.
when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination.
this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”
The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels. The winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise any further.
the adaptation principle at work: People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.
Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven.
People who suffer from PTSD are changed, sometimes permanently: They panic or crumble more easily when faced with later adversity.
The first benefit is that rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your self-concept. None of us knows what we are really capable of enduring.
Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.
Children as well as adults who weathered crises while embedded within strong social groups and networks fared much better; they were more likely to come out stronger and mentally healthier than were those who faced adversity without such social support.
a common piece of worldly wisdom is that life’s most important lessons cannot be taught directly. Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us,
giving each one of us an inner world, a world full of simulations, social comparisons, and reputational concerns, the self also gave each one of us a personal tormenter.
We all now live amid a whirlpool of inner chatter, much of which is negative (threats loom larger than opportunities), and most of which is useless.
We ask, “What is the meaning of life?” not expecting a direct answer (such as “forty-two”), but rather hoping for some enlightenment, something to give us an “aha!” experience in which, suddenly, things that we had not before understood or recognized as important begin to make sense (as they did for the square taken to the third dimension).
No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves.
