Nietzsche on Hardship
A beginners guide to Nietzsche . Nietzsche talks about how great effort and suffering is needed to achieve anything truly meaningful. Certainly I think that only those who have overcome great suffering have a strong personality and a true inner. On a different note, Nietzsche went insane near the end of his life, there is a thin line between genius and insanity.
Interesting that Nietzsche feels the soma of alcohol and the soma of christianity are similar, both just dulling the pain and reducing the energy which overcoming the problems gives us.
That which does not kill me, makes me stronger
Twilight of the Idols Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Memory .vs. experience .vs. happiness.
Brilliant talk by Daniel Kahnemanan a psychologist and Economics Nobel laureate, about how the peculiar structure of our memory biases how we think of happiness.
Our memory tells us stories, that is what we get to keep from our experiences, is a story.
...
We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant.
After the talk in Q&A he talks about how a big study has shown above US$60k annual income people do not become experientially any happier, though their "remembering self" remembers them as happier...
Reading through his biography it is fascinating that even though he is a psychologist he got a Nobel prize in Economics, for inventing behavioral economics.
Estimating what will make us happy…
Daniel Gilbert talks about human cognitive bias when evaluating options. Our minds are tuned to differences, we are really bad at evaluating the absolute value of things. That is why a menu always has a very expensive bottle of wine at the top, so the one below it looks reasonable in comparison... Unfortunately classical economics does not take this into account at all - it is just at odds with basic human nature!
I like that he highlights how mass-media makes us even more foolish by constantly focusing and highlighting the rare but spectacular events. Fact of the matter is we are all much more likely to die in a car-crash or drown in a swimming pool then to die in a plane crash or a terrorist accident (for Europeans & N.Americans in any case). Yet we do not fear cars and swimming pools anywhere near as much...The Price of Happiness.
Benjamin Wallace goes through trying the most expensive foods, Kobe-Beef, white truffles, the most expensive of wines, US$30,000/night hotel rooms, US$800 jeans, nano-particle soap... As you might expect it turns out most of them are not that special. What I think he misses though is that when you buy expensive stuff it is mostly for personal feeling of status, you are buying the overall experience not really the actual product.
Still a humorous look at how foolish human status seeking is when you look at it rationally.TED: Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness
Memes : Viruses of the brain
Dan Dennett talks about ideas as mental viruses. He presents a very interesting idea: "The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.". He speaks lucidly on why modern western society is a threat to fundamentalist Islamic and other traditional cultures. Dennett is one of the primary philosophers of our time, he is absolutely brillian, a great pity this talk is so short (15 minutes) he deservers at least an hour for this topic... I really need to get around to reading a few of his books
TED : Dan Dennett on dangerous memes
Too much choice makes us unhappy…
Barry Schwartz talking about something I noticed a good while ago, there are too many choices in our modern world, this results in all of us using up too much mental energy on trivialities like choosing from 15 different types of toilet paper. The modern world, and the internet especially just seems to multiply our choices daily. Past a certain amount of options, choosing anything becomes harder and harder resulting in choice paralysis. Furthermore the more options there are, the more likely you are to get buyers regret. He also states what I have discovered myself: The secret to happiness is low expectations. The higher your expectations towards a person, a product, an experience, the less likely they are to be met, the more likely you are to be disappointed...
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