Filling your time with passion

OK. You know you want to live with passion. But what you have is a 8+ hour a day job, the chores of cooking, paying the bills and visiting your wife’s boring relatives. Where is the time left for living fully?

First of all, you must establish what is really important to you in life. It is incredibly easy to take more and more responsibilities and “things to do”. But there are some natural limits. Fortunately, also some cures.

1) Often, if we think of things as “chores”, we dawdle. We delay. We read the newspaper. We do anything to push the view of the unpleasant task to behind our mental horizon. This is called resistance, and it is very natural. However, we often waste more time procrastinating than the job itself would cost. Train yourself to stop procastrinating, and your productivity will jump. See also Mark Forster’s book “How to get everything done – and still have time to play.”

2) Every activity can be unlimited in perfection. Do you want to have a shiningly clean house every day of the week, or are you content with doing the dishes daily and vacuum cleaning weekly? Of course one can say that everything is important, but you can always look to which level of activity is sufficient. Then schedule the time for that. Perhaps it even helps in that time to try to work as fast as possible, do a match with your previous personal record. This makes the activity more fun, challenging and productive.

3) Set a limit to the number of things you want to do. Don’t disperse yourself too much. If you have a major hobby but cannot spend at least half an hour-45 minutes a day doing it (except in emergencies) you are cluttering yourself too much. Arnold Bennett in “How to live on 24 hours a day” even recommends having 3-4x1.5 hour a week for concentrating on an interest.

A second problem for many people is: but I do have some time, there is just nothing interesting to do in that.

To these people (to which I often belong myself too) I must say that knowing what interests you demands that you spend time in finding it out. It almost never “pops out of thin air” while you are moaning in your chair about the undefeatable boredom of life. There are plenty of self-help books which recommend courses of action to find your passion, whether that is in a job or in the rest of your life. And often passions flow from one field of interest to another. Better to get started on a 7 than waiting till a 9 drops on your head. And be aggressive about trying new things.

The only criterion that I would give for a good passion would be that it involves more than being a spectator. The more creative you can be, the more you can learn, the better it is. So even if you have a passion for soap series, it would be much better not to spend all your spare time in watching soaps. Make a soap-related website, write a book on the structure of soaps, think of your own soap-series, whatever. As soon as one is not only a consumer, but also a kind of producer, your expertise and passion will soar.

Tomorrow I’d like to tie up some loose ends, and perhaps find new ones…

Eric-Wubbo and The Meaning of Life

In the previous sections I wrote –and along the way, discovered- that a good life should include some choices to keep the body in a good shape. Eating, sleeping, exercise, but also having contact with other people, learning/exploring, and studying/modifying your thoughts and regulating your habits and emotions would be necessary for optimal well-being. This, however, is not enough.

After all, if all one does is surviving, one can spend one’s time to the end of his/her days, but this may not result in much progress. While evolution takes care that some development occurs, even in fishes, which are not known for their particular service to arts and sciences, in human beings, who in most Western societies do not have to spend all their time on survival and procreation (the latter due to legal and practical limits), one has to choose what one does after one has done the “day’s job”. Just learning and socializing may be good for the body, but it would seem pointless in the end. Just as more sports would lengthen life but take time and therefore not lengthen the time of life outside sports, “maintenance” should be a part but not the whole of our remaining time.

The meaning of life… Even Monty Python could not answer this question convincingly. Of course philosophy without observation does not give much useful info.

But if we look experimentally, to people who have, by societial standards, both been good for society as well as relatively happy people, we see that they often had a purpose or a hobby or something that they really liked to do. Edison liked to invent, Rembrandt liked to paint, Franklin liked to improve living, Einstein liked to discover the laws of nature. Or, perhaps better put, they loved to do these things.

So after the work is done (or hopefully, on work where you can use a large part of your passion), the people who follow their passion would seem to be most happy in the end.

Still, we must look at the “practical constraints”.

First, while some people are naturally passionate about many things, or already have found their passion, many of us do not have a passion to speak of.
Secondly, being excited about something does not always do us good. Just as we developed a predilection for sweet foods when that sweet food was ripe fruit, this predilection will lead us astray (and to caries) if we overindulge in the artificial sweets that nowadays are rampant throughout our society. So while passion is good, a passion for eating candy or for computer games might not benefit you or others much.
Third, there are other things to do than following your passion. There is administration, washing, cleaning, etc. How to set borders there?

It seems that there is still something left to think about… Perhaps for tomorrow.

Rule by reason, rule by feeling?

All our impressions come to us via our body: this contains the senses. While signals may originate from within the body, the body is the medium that transfers them to a specific part of the body, the brain, which processes these signals. The two remaining parts of a human are the thoughts and emotions. Except that they originate and are “sensed” by the brain, what can we tell about them? And how do they affect living well?

When studying the emotions one comes to the conclusion that their goal is to propagate the body’s genes (and thereby the emotions themselves). Fear protects the body against external harm by avoiding danger, anger allows one to obtain needed resources even in the face of opposition, sadness saves energy and makes one avoid situations which are not pleasant or that are unproductive (depression being the ultimate result of the feeling that nothing you do matters), and joy reinforces the body that the current situation is good, and makes us actively seek out opportunities for repetition.

Where does that leave the mind?

In all probablility, some animals do not need a mind since their world is simple and predictable and reflexes suffice. However, especially for large, long-living animals the environment may change, and also they have more possibilities to affect the environment. Being preprogrammed to deal with such changes is practically impossible, so the human brain has evolved the power to store and remember and combine concepts encountered. Where emotions are not directly roused, the mind finds the link between the current situation and emotions (if applicable) and therefore guides action. In contrast with what you see on "Star Trek", where the Vulcans have abandoned emotions in favour of ratio, the ratio in itself is not enough to take decisions since it cannot intrinsically tell us what is good or not good. Without emotions to bring the message home, even a question of "It is good that I cross this busy freeway without looking?" becomes impossible to answer, since something is only rational in the respect that it achieves a goal, but the goals themselves (or rather, their value) cannot be determined by the ratio. And even if a rational creature would decide that survival is a good idea, the extra energy and impetus given by emotions would help in reaching such a goal, so emotions would evolve anyway.

One could say (as Mattias Alexander has said) that we evolved on the savannah and our current “reflexes” and emotions have been adapted to a world that no longer exists. So while (in his case) walking poorly might have been a natural reflex to the unnatural circumstances in which humans live today (and are only very slowly evolutionally adapting) one needs knowledge and the mind to steer the process and complete what the emotions were needed to do: ensure optimal survival and procreation of the organism.

Does that leave no place for emotions except as default parameter settings to be tweaked by the mind after it has deliberated the situation? Not entirely. Our brains are built in such a way that we often obtain knowledge without being conscious of it. In experiments where volunteers had to repeatedly choose cards from one out of two stacks, most were found to pick more cards from the stack with the highest average, even though they were not conscious that this stack was better, or even that they were picking more cards from it! Often, other learning processes precede those of the rational mind, and complex decisions can certainly not be reasoned about with full certainty, because logical laws and absolute facts are seldom available. In this case, we should trust our intuition instead of ratio. While rational thinking may be good for solving a math problem, buying a house or choosing a job are so complex that intuition and feelings are necessary. Feelings also give feedback on how well your body thinks you are doing. Ignore them at your own peril.

The lesson of today and yesterday are thus:
1) the mind and emotions are intended for the well-being of the body, especially for survival / reproduction.
2) Thoughts can be unreliable because of fallacies. Investigate the most important or persistent thoughts on reality.
3) Emotions can be unreliable since we do not live on the savannah anymore and the world is quite complex. The only way to investigate them is to use your thoughts.
4) Pure rational thinking is good for problems with few unknowns and lots of absolute laws. For complex problems on which little data is available, intuition should be chosen. Preferably use them both, when conflicting ratio should prevail when your reasoning is fool-proof (as in careful mathematics). In any case it might be good then to investigate your intuitions and feelings to see which information they bring.
5) Your feelings may not always be right, but they do give you information. If the information is correct, you profit, if it is not, use your thoughts to try to modify your feelings so they are based on a more correct version of reality.

Of course, philosophy is not of much use unless it is applied. Next time I hope to look at living again, and choices.

The Wholy Trinity

Usually when people talk about health, physical health is meant. When your physical health is not good, you are in pain and/or incapacitated to do certain things (above the natural limits of humankind, such as not being able to lift 1000 kg in one hand). However, mental and emotional problems can have exactly the same effects, and should therefore be considered too, next to diet and exercise, to find the right way of living.

All of us know that all people need some food and some sleep. Most of us know that regular exercise will make life longer and healthier. However, the cross-correlations between body and mind are less clear.

First, (aerobic) exercise and even talking walks makes the mind sharper and protects against dementia, as research has shown. So bodily exercise can improve the mind.

However, not all health can be attained via the well-known physical channels of diet and exercise. In one experiment of a mad German king, where babies where fed and given drink, but their nurses were not allowed to hold them or talk to them, the babies all died. Therefore it seems necessary for emotional as well as physical wellbeing to have contact with other people, “strokes” as psychologist Eric Berne would call them. Pursuing (and giving) strokes, that means, social interaction, should therefore also be part of a “healthy diet”. As in food and exercise, there would be an optimum which might be different for each person. Schizoid persons apparently do not need strokes, the rest of us should find a good level.

Some mental diseases can fortunately be treated by drugs, since mental diseases are brain diseases and so actually physical diseases. However, it appears that some of them also respond to cognitive therapy. This suggests that optimal mental health might benefit from “mental exercises”.

For a part, this is already known. The health of rats in cages where they could have both social contacts and play/explore was optimal, probably people need novelty and exploration/ learning as well as the strokes. So this would be an extra ingredient for mental health. However, cognitive psychology shows that we can go even further than searching for a more stimulating environment: we should also go and study and possibly change our own thoughts.

One’s thoughts and feelings have a tremendous impact on one’s life. One of my father’s siblings was a very morose and complaining man; he always complained (and probably believed as well) that “the world was against him”. Outside the fact that he did not gain much happiness with this lifestyle, he also did not gain a good job (he remained a clerk while his brothers were promoted to be bosses of something), nor much money. However, a cognitive psychologist worth his fee would have asked him what were the proofs before and against his thoughts.

After all, many of our thoughts are biased. For the curious, I’d recommend the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns, which lists common fallacies people use in their own thinking and thus in their own life. Overgeneralisation (everyone hates me), focusing on the negative (I hurt my toe – my whole week is ruined), fortune-telling (she will say no), black-white thinking (if this presentation is not perfect, I’m a total failure). There are more fallacies, and while most of the examples here sound obviously wrong, you’d be surprised when investigating your own thoughts how many would not stand up to careful analysis.

Investigating and checking (and adapting) one’s own thoughts is therefore a key to not only more happiness but also to more realistic thoughts, which enable you to deal better with the real world than if your thoughts were distorted.

Next time I hope to go further into the relationships between body, mind and emotions, hoping that a synergy is achievable.

A job for you

Yesterday evening it occurred to me that basic needs, such as sleeping and eating, are commonly extended with protective measures. Internal and external factors can endanger us, be it gems, warfare, criminals or natural disasters. What use is building a nice house if it is blown away by a wolf? One could say that protection is the second layer. However, this realization also gave me a second insight.

Next to eating and sleeping, people need protection from dangers that could destroy or incapicitate them. Dangers can take many forms: violence, bacteria, accidents, fires, criminals and floods.

In general, many of these dangers are so rare or powerful that, in contrast to eating and sleeping, we do or can not take care of them ourselves, but have created occupations. Firemen protect against fire, soldiers and policemen against evil people, doctors, pharmacists and nurses against disease. Of course, occupations also exist for the “lower” level: people who take care of feeding and food provision, such as farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers. This leads to the insight that in general each occupation provides for a human need.

In contrast to the food/sleep layer, the protection layer is only necessary on relatively rare occasions. People spend some resources on them, as a sort of insurance. That does not mean that all protection is necessary; for society it is always a balanced question how much resources should go to security. After all, it is impossible to control everything and everyone, a very safe society is also a very expensive society, see for example the enormous costs of modern healthcare. In general, the level of protection is determined by society. For private matters, such as insurances, people must judge themselves whether the precautions are worth the costs.

Probably there is some optimum: in a deprotected society, individuals may not live long enough to contribute, the uncertainty that your machines may be stolen tomorrow would discourage investment in larger things and increased efficiency. In despotisms and kleptocracies such as Maharadjah-ruled India this was the unfortunate case. However, in a hyperprotected society, nothing new can happen and no growth/development is possible since all effort is spent in maintaining the status quo, like in ancient Sparta. The optimum is probably somewhere in the middle, but its location should be judged by different criteria than safety.

Speaking of doctors and nurses, we should also consider the functioning of the individuals. A human life which is spent in paralysis and pain is not only practically useless for the human in question, it is also bad for society. Therefore we could probably state that optimal health (or workable health, since optimal health would be as expensive and impossible as optimal protection) – workable health therefore should be a reasonable goal of all living human beings, as long as they have a chance of obtaining it.

Health is commonly defined as something physical, but it has two additional and interwoven aspects: mental and emotional health. I hope to expand on this subject tomorrow.

My new philosophy

In the musical “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown” there is a cute song by Sally, Charlie Brown’s little sister. It is called “my new philosophy”. Apparently, Sally’s philosophy changes every other minute, giving a short but whirling show in which even simple concepts like “No!” are elevated to philosophical status. However, recently I found out that I too needed a new philosophy…

After all, I was wondering myself what would be the right way (or the right ways, or right-like ways) to live. And I realized that “right” and “wrong” are only applicable to goals. If you go to Amsterdam, that can only be right or wrong according to your intention whether to go to Amsterdam or to Paris.

So what would be a good direction to go? Philosophers and theologicians have debated these questions for centuries. However, using just “reason” or a vague God they had little data on which to make a decision, leading to either indecision or to awkward and inflexible lifestyles. It seemed clear to me that one needs an “experimental” theology or philosophy of life.

If one considers the activities by humans (life is a stream of activities and choices), one finds out that much time is spent in only a few pursuits: eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet. This is also biological necessity; if one doesn’t do that, one will not survive. Considering Darwinian selection of religions/philosophies, one of the prime concepts would therefore be surviving.

In practical applications this would mean to firstly take care of the body: sleep well, eat well. For eating, one should not eat too much, eat balanced and healthy food (vitamins and fats and carbohydrates and proteins, note the diet and read a good, preferably scientifically-based book), and take care for things such as teeth. So eating well and sleeping well would be the prime directives. This seems to be a good basis to start.