More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 14 - July 15, 2020
they spend their lives in the permanent present, a forever feeling of right now. At times, this is a desirable state of consciousness; indeed, for meditators, it’s the ultimate aspiration.
The portability and accessibility of our work has created the impression that we should always be available. It’s as if we’re all leading lives of anti-flow, of chronic interruptions and ceaseless multitasking.
email comes at unpredictable intervals, which, as B. F. Skinner famously showed with rats seeking pellets, is the most seductive and habit-forming reward pattern to the mammalian brain.
Humans may pride themselves on their ability to swing from one task to another and then back again, but task-switching isn’t really a specialty of our species, as reams of studies have shown. According to Mary Czerwinski, another attention expert at Microsoft Corporation, we don’t process information as thoroughly when we task-switch, which means that information doesn’t sink into our long-term memories as deeply or spur us toward our most intelligent choices and associations. We also lose time whenever we switch tasks, because it takes a while to intellectually relax into a project and build
...more
No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, “learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.”
the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it.
The trouble with happiness is that it can’t be sought directly. It is only a precious by-product of other worthwhile activities.
It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again.
Alas, that’s what adulthood is supposed to be about: “an overcoming” or (better yet) “a disciplining of a developmentally appropriate insanity.”
happiness is an unfair thing to ask of a child. The expectation casts children “as antidepressants,” he notes, and renders parents “more dependent on their children than their
“For a child growing up,” Phillips writes, “life is by definition full of surprises; the adult tries to keep these as surprises, rather than as traumas, through a devoted attentiveness. But sane parenting always involves a growing sense of how little, as well as how much, one can protect one’s child from; of just how little a life can be programmed.”
the relationship between parenting and happiness rank among the most negative in the social science canon,
to fully experience it requires something terrifying as well as exalting: opening oneself up to the possibility of loss. That’s what Vaillant realized about joy. It makes us more vulnerable, in its way, than sadness. He’s fond of quoting William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence: “Joy and woe are woven fine.” You can’t have joy without the prospect of mourning, and to some people this makes joy a difficult feeling to bear.
Especially in parenthood, where loss is inevitable, built into the very paradox of raising children; we pour love into them so that they’ll one day grow strong enough to leave us.
Joy and loss are part of the inherent contradictions of gift-love.
“It’s not a full happiness. It’s not a full sorrow. It’s a full parenthood. It’s what you have when you have kids.”
Not everyone wants children. But for many—especially those of us who don’t have the imagination or wherewithal to create meaning in unconventional ways—having children is a way to exploit our potential, to give design and purpose to a life.
To be happy, one must do.
we enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time.
More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves.
Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids.
