Grumpiness and old age; does it have to be?

Not if you don't want it to!  Getting grumpier as you get older can be an easy habit to fall into, but not one that helps you much.  With some self-awareness and a bit of effort, life can be more enjoyable for yourself and those around you.  This article has some good reminders and tips on how to do that:

If you want to be a more pleasant person as you get older, say goodbye to these 10 behaviors

     

Reading to change your life...

... for the better. From a Personal Development blog:

12 Good Reads that Will Change the Way You Think, Live and Love

[...] As readers, we not only learn more, but we are also more proficient at deciphering misinformation – our habit of reading gradually improves our judgment. And being able to correctly size up a situation is crucial for being effective at whatever we’re doing.

Speaking for myself, I know my reading habit has sharpened my edge. I’m always enamored when I’m working on a puzzling issue and some out-of-left-field piece of information comes to mind from something I’ve read that helps me put all the pieces together.

So with the importance of reading in mind, it’s time to read or re-read our 12 most popular posts (based on the number of reader views, social shares and comments) from this past year. If you give them a chance, each one of these quick reads has the power to change the way you think, live and love, so you can stay on track to living at your greatest potential… [...]

Some good topics covered here. The authors are Life Coaches. Excellent content, good food for thought. I will be referring to this list again and again.

     

Advice For Your Life

10 PAINFULLY OBVIOUS TRUTHS EVERYONE FORGETS TOO SOON

You know how you can hear something a hundred times in a hundred different ways before it finally gets through to you? The ten truths listed below fall firmly into that category – life lessons that many of us likely learned years ago, and have been reminded of ever since, but for whatever reason, haven’t fully grasped.

This, my friends, is my attempt at helping all of us, myself included, “get it” and “remember it” once and for all…



1. THE AVERAGE HUMAN LIFE IS RELATIVELY SHORT

We know deep down that life is short, and that death will happen to all of us eventually, and yet we are infinitely surprised when it happens to someone we know. It’s like walking up a flight of stairs with a distracted mind, and misjudging the final step. You expected there to be one more stair than there is, and so you find yourself off balance for a moment, before your mind shifts back to the present moment and how the world really is.

LIVE your life TODAY! Don’t ignore death, but don’t be afraid of it either. Be afraid of a life you never lived because you were too afraid to take action. Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside you while you’re still alive. Be bold. Be courageous. Be scared to death, and then take the next step anyway.



2. YOU LIVE THE LIFE YOU CREATE FOR YOURSELF

Your life is yours alone. Others can try to persuade you, but they can’t decide for you. They can walk with you, but not in your shoes. So make sure the path you decide to walk aligns with your own intuition and desires, and don’t be scared to switch paths or pave a new one when it makes sense.

Remember, it’s always better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than the top of the one you don’t. Be productive and patient. And realize that patience is not about waiting, but the ability to keep a good attitude while working hard for what you believe in. This is your life, and it is made up entirely of your choices. May your actions speak louder than your words. May your life preach louder than your lips. May your success be your noise in the end.

And if life only teaches you one thing, let it be that taking a passionate leap is always worth it. Even if you have no idea where you’re going to land, be brave enough to step up to the edge of the unknown, and listen to your heart.

[...]

Follow the link to read the other eight. With lots of embedded links. It's good stuff to remember, not just for the beginning of a new year, but for your whole life through.

     

Distraction as a form of Therapy

These are from a philosophy blog I posted about last week:

Distraction therapy, or ‘shut up and deal’

[...] Sometimes, in the darkness, we need to give our minds a rest, and find a distraction. Games are good for that. It reminds me of Billy Wilder’s film, The Apartment. Shirley Maclaine’s character has tried to kill herself with an overdose. Jack Lemmon’s character finds her, resuscitates her, and then tries to keep her awake and busy by playing cards with her. When she asks him what’s the point in life, he replies: ‘shut up and deal’ – a line she repeats to him at the end of the film, when she has recovered and they’re in love.

One of the few philosophers who understood our need for distractions amid the existential confusion was Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician. He’s a fascinating figure – he was one of the leading mathematicians of his age, he almost died in a riding accident, and then had a sort of near-death experience (known as his ‘nuit de feu’ or ‘night of fire’), after which he became a religious philosopher. But he’s fascinating even if you’re not theist - he’s really the first existentialist philosopher, in that he has an acute sense of the mystery of existence and the absurdity of human endeavour.

His Pensees, or ‘thoughts’, are a collection of brief meditations on existence. Here’s one of them: [...]

Read the whole thing. It actually starts with a letter from a reader, who talks about how his relentless search for meaning of the mysteries of life, lead to great and deep depression. And how he eventually got himself out of it, through distraction therapy, while still remaining a "seeker". The article then goes on to talk about how many of the great minds of history knew this, and how even modern medicine is recognizing it today.

Following a similar theme, another blog post is advice to a teenager, who decided after smoking Marijuana, that life was pointless, resulting in deep depression:

What’s the point in life?

[...] This is exactly what I felt like when I was in late adolescence and early adulthood. And I think it’s a classic psychological journey. It’s the Fall of Genesis. It’s also what happened to the Buddha – happy teenager, then a sudden shock to his world-view, then a period of depression and searching. A lot of us go through the Fall when we’re in our late teens or early 20s. It’s a nasty surprise, not something our parents or teachers told us about, although it’s described in many books.

The Fall is really an awakening. It’s our consciousness realizing that some of the things we believed in are actually a bit of a charade.

When I was 17 or so, I went through one of these awakenings – suddenly, the world seemed a rather sordid and selfish place. Everyone else seemed a bit of an egotistical phony, chasing after their shallow and pointless goals. Getting a career, getting a nice house with a nice lawn and a nice wife, getting a thousand followers on Twitter…what’s the point!

People are like greyhounds chasing after a mechanical rabbit, desperately trying to out-run each other, and if one of the greyhounds stops, scratches his arse and says ‘it’s just a mechanical rabbit’, they call him crazy.

And what lies beneath all the ego, all the desire, all the shadow puppetry? Nothing. The abyss. Human life is a game of charades played over a trapdoor of nothingness, and every now and then the trapdoor opens, one of the actors disappears below, and everyone goes on like nothing happened!

[...]

I didn’t exactly choose to awaken to the emptiness of constructed reality. It was an accidental awakening – maybe through drugs, which can alter our consciousness and make us see things differently. Some people go through similar accidental awakenings through, say, meditation – suddenly everything seems a bit empty and pointless. Or it might happen to them when they first lose someone they love. They notice the trapdoor beneath their feet and think: ‘what’s the point!’

This kind of awakening to the emptiness of our constructs has been called the Dark Night of the Soul. In truth, it happens occasionally through life. It comes with being human, unfortunately, and with being blessed / cursed with consciousness.

So how do we get out of it? How do we discover a sense of purpose or meaning?

People get out of the darkness two ways. Firstly, some people just fall asleep again. Life changes, and they stop thinking such deep thoughts, and get caught up in the game once more. Actually, this happens to everyone. You fall in love, you get a great job, you go on holiday, and things are fun again, and you shelve your inner Hamlet and enjoy the festivities.

There is nothing wrong with this at all. Sometimes the game of charades is a really fun game, and it’s fun to get involved, though unfortunately we often forget it’s just a game and end up totally believing in it and taking it very seriously.

Secondly, some people get out of the darkness by discovering a philosophy or an attitude that helps them through it and gives them a sense of meaning. Their old philosophy – ‘be happy-go-lucky’ - doesn’t quite work anymore, but they discover a new philosophy which works better.

I’ve turned to different philosophies to help me when I’m lost: Buddhism, Stoicism, Sufism, Taoism, Christianity. These are all quite different philosophies, but I think they have a core message to them.

Which is this: We’re here to know ourselves, to discover our nature, and to help other people do the same.

The journey to know ourselves is not an easy one. It involves a lot of wrong turns, a lot of dark forests, steep mountains and sinking swamps. And we meet bad people along the way, fools, liars, egotists, and people who wish us harm. What makes the journey particularly difficult is, when we ask passers-by how to get to our destination, they all give us different directions, and they all seem immensely confident that they’re right.

On this journey, I don’t think you can go backwards. You can’t go back to the Happy Valley of childhood. Frodo and Sam can’t go back to how things were, they’ve got to go forward. You have to go forward. Your consciousness grows – sometimes accidentally, sometimes through education and experience – and then it’s like you don’t fit into the old clothes any more, they feel cramped and ridiculous. That means it’s time to go forward. [...]

There's a lot more, with embedded links too. Pretty good stuff!
     

Who was Epicurus? And more.

This blog page is probably the best thing I've read about Epicurus and Epicurians, it's answered most of my questions:

EPICUREANS

Who was Epicurus?

[...] How can we pursue pleasure as rationally as possible?

Like the other philosophies of the Socratic tradition, Epicureans believed that what causes humans suffering is our false beliefs. In particular, we have many false beliefs about what is necessary for our happiness. We put a great value on some external goods such as status and luxury, because we think they will make us happy. In fact, Epicurus says, many of these external goods are not good for us at all, and the pursuit of them only makes us more miserable.

Epicurus said that, for each belief or action, we should consider the pleasure it will lead to, and the pain, and then ‘measure the one against the other’. Some activities lead to a short-term spike in pleasure, such as heavy drinking, but ultimately lead to pain, in the form of hangovers, sick bodies and damaged relationships. We should restrict our desires to what is necessary and easy to attain, Epicurus says. So actually, contrary to the popular image of Epicureans as libertines, Epicurus and his followers lived quite austere lives, following a simple diet and not having many possessions.

Where’s the fun in that?

The simpler and less complicated your needs, the freer and less anxious your life. If you come to depend on luxuries, you’ll then have to work hard to support your lifestyle – and slaving away in a boring or stressful job is no fun. By restricting one’s desires to what is necessary and easy to attain, you free up more time for the good things in life: friendship and philosophy. It’s a sort of intelligent slacker philosophy that has quite a lot in common with the Idler philosophy of Tom Hodgkinson, who we meet at the beginning of the chapter. There are even some ‘life-coaches’ today, such as Stefan Streitferdt, who teach Epicurean philosophy as a way to prioritise your life and avoid unnecessary stress.

[...]

Don’t the Stoics use a similar cognitive technique?

Yes, the technique was also taken up by Stoic writers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. They agreed with the Epicureans that it’s only in the present moment that we have any control. We don’t control the past – it’s already happened. And we don’t control the future. So the more we focus on the past and the future, the more we are disempowering ourselves. If we bring our attention back to the present, we are re-empowering ourselves, and being more efficient in our use of attention and energy.

We see a similar idea in Buddhism, of course, which developed a whole arsenal of techniques for bringing the attention back to the present moment. And this idea of focusing on the present moment, and our beliefs in the present, has been taken up in the last few years by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) . Both CBT and ACT insist that the way to get over emotional disorders is not by diving into the past and ruminating over all your conflicts with your parents, as psychoanalysis might get you to do. It’s wiser and more effective to bring your attention back to the present, to your beliefs in the here-and-now. As Seneca puts it: ‘What’s the use of dragging up sufferings that are past, of being miserable now, because you were miserable then?’

There’s also something mystical in the technique of focusing on the present moment. It’s telling us that everything we need in life is right here, right now, in our consciousness of the eternal moment. The more we bring our attention back to the present moment, the more we can savour it, appreciate it, and enjoy the strange wonder of being alive and conscious in the universe. We see some of this sense of the mystery and wonder of the present moment in the work of Eckhart Tolle. Here’s a video of Tolle talking about Marcus Aurelius’ use of the technique.

OK, but what if the present moment is actually pretty challenging. What if we’re suffering from a serious or painful illness, for example?

[...]

Read the whole thing, it's good, and there's embedded links too. But as interesting as Epicurian philosophy is, I don't think I would embrace it completely. Like much of ancient philosophy, I find much of it useful, but don't find the whole of it completely embraceable.

But the interesting thing is, the author of this blogpost has also written a book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations: Ancient Philosophy for Modern Problems, which sound quite interesting:

When philosophy rescued him from an emotional crisis, Jules Evans became fascinated by how ideas invented over two thousand years ago can help us today. He interviewed soldiers, psychologists, gangsters, astronauts, and anarchists and discovered the ways that people are using philosophy now to build better lives. Ancient philosophy has inspired modern communities — Socratic cafés, Stoic armies, Epicurean communes — and even whole nations in the quest for the good life.

This book is an invitation to a dream school with a rowdy faculty that includes twelve of the greatest philosophers from the ancient world, sharing their lessons on happiness, resilience, and much more. Lively and inspiring, this is philosophy for the street, for the workplace, for the battlefield, for love, for life.

I enjoyed the reviews by readers, many of whom say that the author talks about many of the teachings of the philosophies of the ancients, along with modern cognitive therapy concepts, giving the old teachings new relevance for our modern lives.

I find that exciting, because I've always been interested in cognitive therapy, and more recently, the philosophies of the Stoics, Epicurians and Buddhists. I've found myself wanting to learn from all of them, to get the best of each without having to embrace their weaker aspects; to in effect, benefit from their collective good, to use as a base in creating a happy, solid psychological foundation for dealing with life. Jules Evan's book sounds like it may be trying to do exactly that, so I'm adding it to my wish list!

Here is an excerpt from the book.
     

The perennial philosophy in philosophy

Aldous Huxley wrote about The Perennial Philosophy that runs through all theologies. It's made me think recently, about the commonalities that run through many philosophies.

Recently, I've posted about Buddhism as a philosophy. More recently still, I've been reading about Epicureans and Stoics, and have been struck by the similarities they share with each other, and with Buddhist philosophy.

I'm not the only one who has noticed:

Buddhism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism

[...] Stoics aimed not at getting rid of emotions (despite the popular caricature of Stoics as Spock-like figures), but rather to channel them in a more productive direction. This was achieved through a combination of logic, concentration and reflection, and eventually evolved into various contemporary forms of cognitive behavioral therapy. (In this sense, both Buddhism — with its various meditative techniques — and Stoicism have entered the realm of modern practices, which can be pursued essentially independently of the philosophies that gave origin to them.) The ultimate goal of the Stoic was apatheia, or peace of mind, which I think is akin to both the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia and the Buddhist goal of nirvana (again, with due consideration given to the significant differences in the background conditions and specific articulation of the three philosophies). And of course Stoics too had a ready-made recipe for their philosophy, in the form of a short list of virtues to practice (nothing compared to the above mentioned panoply of Buddhist lists though!). These were: courage, justice, temperance and wisdom.

I am sure one could continue with this conceptual cross-mapping for a while, and of course scholars within each of the three traditions would object to or modify my suggestions. What I am interested in here, however, is pursuing the further questions of what the common limitations of the philosophies of Buddhism, Epicureanism and Stoicism are, as well as what positive contributions they have made to humanity's thinking about (and dealing with!) the universe.

I am inclined to reject both Buddhism’s and Stoicism’s metaphysics, being significantly more happy with the Epicurean view of the world. I don’t think there is any reason to think that concepts like logos or karma have any philosophical substance, nor do they do any work in actually explaining why things are the way they are. The Epicurean embracing of a materialist metaphysics, instead, is in synch with the development of natural philosophy and eventually of modern science. [...]

Read the whole thing, for a thoughtful comparison of the three philosophies. And for the embedded links, and some interesting comments afterward.

While reading about the Stoics, I came across this informative timeline on the Stoics' wikipedia page:




Since I don't have a lot of leisure time to study philosophy, I decided to cut to the chase and read Marcus Aurelius, who seems to be the culmination of the stoic philosophers. I had read a little bit of his writing in the past, and was favorably impressed, so I've ordered a book of his meditations.

Even though Marcus was a Stoic, he had studied Epicurus. I wondered if one could mix Marcus Aurelius and Epicurianism as practical wisdom for a good life? It seems I am not the first one to ask that question:

Can one mix Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius to create a great recipe for a good life?

It is time to present two of my all-time favorites among humanistic thinkers of the past. Number one on my list is early Greek philosopher Epicurus. He did create a comprehensive and wholly rational recipe on how to attain a maximal state of peace of mind.
My second choice is the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. He did teach how to use self-restraint for achieving tranquility of mind.

These two great men had much in common. Marcus Aurelius was well aware of the teachings of the much earlier Epicurus, even if he belonged to a competing school of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic and Stoicism did compete for followers with Epicureanism in the time of Marcus Aurelius.

Stoics did, in fact, at times pour scorn over Epicurus. However, the fact remains that their philosophy contains very many elements that were taken quite straight out of Epicureanism. Many ideas that were presented by Marcus Aurelius could have as well been uttered by Epicurus or his followers as well. [...]

Marcus Aurelius

I think we are blessed to have so many great minds from the past that we can still learn from. Wisdom we can build on.  I'm very much enjoying all this!


Also see:

"Never let the future disturb you" or Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus on foundations for a good life