Re: Suomalaisen Päiväkirja
Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 6:26 pm
Cool list. I've read about 1/3 of those. I'll add some more from your list. (I'm surprised that Harry Browne's How I found freedom ... isn't in there.)
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Quite a list! Thank you so much. Enjoy these parts of your journal.suomalainen wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2019 6:15 pmRelevant books from my reading list as I've grappled with psychological issues / unhappiness / whatever since 2012, with some sort of descriptor from my reading journal (some are more helpful than others), presented in the order in which I read them.
As I reflected on my mixed emotions during the trip* on our drive home from JFK, I realized, more poignantly than before, that scarcity of experience of Thing A is the very thing that makes Thing A special. For years, decades really, I have chased a vision of a life that would be right, magical, perfect for me - surely I was meant to be a ski/bike/rock climbing bum, surely I was meant to be free. I wanted to be able to do "all these things" - to have a richness of experience unmatched by a normal American life, without the burdens of a normal American life - family, job, money, responsibilities. It would only be with such freedom that I would be able to truly explore life and arrive at my right, magical, perfect life. Instead, I ended up married with children and a job and a white picket fence on a quarter-acre in the suburbs. As a(n over)reaction, I did my exploration in my mind, straining for ways to live a life different from the one (I chose) that I found myself living, and I drove myself crazy thinking that such a right, magical, perfect life had been available to me, only I had done it wrong.We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
This, I think, is what Little Gidding is really about - we spend our youth running around like chickens with our heads cut off, not knowing what we truly want because we lack the breadth of experience and perspective required to know what we want (as against the breadth of available choices). It is only with ceaseless exploration that we gain the breadth of experience and perspective needed to finally able to return to where we started and to see it with fresh eyes, to say "actually, this is pretty good". **suomalainen wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2019 4:39 pm[embedded quote]
Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.
I haven't read his (Mark Boyle) book "The Way Home" so if anyone has, any feedback would be appreciated. Worth reading? There's also a reference to a doomsday book called "The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells. Anyone read that?Finally: are you happier living as you do now? Do you feel that, by living as wildly as you can, you have escaped the stresses of modern life?
Each way of life brings with it its own beauty and challenge. Most of the time, yes, I am happier, and I have mostly circumvented the stresses of modern life. That said, I’ve acquired a couple of the struggles of ancient life. But I think contentment is something healthier to aim for than happiness.
The difference is subtle. Happiness is always something to be sought, something you can have a little bit more of, whereas contentment is happy just being itself. I’ve found that you can be content even amidst struggles and sadness. Contentment enjoys the moment and the feelings for what they are. Contentment doesn’t need anything more, or for things to be perfect. And I have found contentment, more or less.
"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
I've read it (of course). It's the book-length version of http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/ ... wells.html dealing with the physical impacts between 2020-2100 and how we'll feel about it. In connection with the book launch DW-W has also written a bunch of other [long] articles that gives you a good idea of what it contains.suomalainen wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 8:19 pmThere's also a reference to a doomsday book called "The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming" by David Wallace-Wells. Anyone read that?
I don't foresee this happening. Reason being that offspring either are still financially dependent on their parents OR they are fully adult and worrying more about the ramifications of their own actions. IOW, given that my grandchildren are still residents of relatively very affluent region of the world when they are adults, they will more likely feel guilty or defensive about their own stake or stance rather than resentful towards their own affluent elders, even if their elders were relatively more affluent than they are as adults, because contrast between their current situation and that of others in less affluent regions will be much more stark. In fact, much more likely that anybody still in anything resembling a decent situation will thank their ancestors for foresight. I'm not saying this is how it should be. I'm just noting that this is how humans usually behave.jacob wrote:(*) Some of this is starting now with the school strikes for climate change and the various extinction rebellions. This is also a discussion/accusation I think parents and grandparents will be increasingly having with their children and grandchildren.
Yes, totally agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_controlsuomalainen wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2019 1:33 pmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY
As a bit of an update - life's been its usual series of ups and downs in the past month or so since I last posted, but it's been manageable. I thought of writing a brief paragraph of what I've learned so that maybe it's helpful for others similarly situated or of similar constitution:
If you're feeling stressed or tense or depressed or anxious or any other emotion or of being in a "phase" or "state" with similarly distressing or negative connotations, please consider asking for help. Perhaps you need medical assistance (i.e., medication) or perhaps some therapy would be of help. If therapy is an option, let me offer a preview of what it's for: to the extent your distressing emotion or phase or state is not the result of a condition that can be successfully treated with medication or other external intervention, consider the possibility that your distressing emotion or phase or state is the result of a pattern. It could be a thought pattern or a physiological pattern or a behavioral pattern, in each case in reaction to some trigger or stimulus. It developed at some point in your past and, through repetition, has become your default way of doing or being or speaking or seeing things. Therapy, when all is said and done, is about seeing this pattern through another's eyes. Once you see the distressing pattern and you see that it isn't "the way things are" but a thing that was created by you, you begin to see that it is a thing that you can change. You can choose to deliberately replace each on-ramp to the distressing pattern with a different, deliberately chosen thought or action. Do this enough, and you will develop new on-ramps to new, healthier patterns. Just keep working on it, deliberately.
End PSA.