More choices does not make us happier

By -
What makes a person happy is knowing the right thing to do, and doing it. When someone is disoriented, and does not know the right thing to do, giving them more and more choices only makes them more and more miserable.

Fifty-inch plasma screen TVs cannot cure spiritual emptiness.

Comments

  1. Keshav Srinivasan10:04 PM

    As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, "Of that Brahman which is immortal, imperishable, and eternal, and which is *the foundation of the only true happiness in the world*, I am the source."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Samson Corwell10:05 AM

    I've never believed that more choices makes people happier. But I don't see any reason to believe that knowing and doing the right thing equates with happiness. It seems to counter the whole "The right thing is not always the easy thing." expression.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:17 PM

      'It seems to counter the whole "The right thing is not always the easy thing." expression.'

      No: the easy thing also does not equate with happiness.

      See Keshav above.

      Delete
  3. Keshav Srinivasan3:52 PM

    The Hindu philosopher Vedanta Desikan said that all material goals have seven doshas or defects:

    "1. alpa - their end results are trivial
    2. asthira - they are transient and impermanent,
    3. asukara - not easily obtained, they require much effort and are time consuming.
    4. asukhavasana - ultimately ending in grief and disappointments.
    5. dukhanvita - accompanied by disappointments and supported only by struggle.
    6. anucitam - incompatible with our essential being.
    7. abhimana-mula - they’re based upon a false sense of self and lead to further perpetuation of this delusive sense of identity."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ken B12:34 AM

    Richard Speck died a happy man.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Silas Barta8:35 PM

    This was my point in The Pain of Hard Choice -- going into materially-worse states (jobless -> jobless and trapped in an elevator) can give a measure of psychic relief because it becomes much easier to decide on a course of action.

    For some problems, one might not even know what they are doing wrong, and what progress toward a solution would look like, which can be really stressful and frustrating.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more