The depths

It's amazing how easy it is to be horrible, even when your intentions are so good (from your own perspective). So easy to slip back into the patterns we're used to, so easy to forget why you're here

Committed

I feel renewed, entirely committed to my goal. I want to raise the happiness of all people (let's say, 10%). I don't know how we're going to do it, but we'll get there. Today I am certain.

"... I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land..."

Wasted time?

I often reflect on my 4 years spent at UCSB, and typically shake my head in disgust for "wasting" so much time during such an important developmental period of my life. I could have been learning from the smartest, developing my intelligence, competing with future world leaders, and building valuable connections. Instead, I squandered it by enjoying the beach mindset, trying to "excel" at parties, and generally spending more time on myself than necessary. Sometimes I try to shift the blame to others (or simply justify the decisions I made) by telling myself that they made me think that such things were important. It's hard not to resent myself and others sometimes.

But today while I was writing a reflection paper, I realized that I should be very thankful for that influence, for the influence that led me to question what the most important aspect of life was. Is it success? Accomplishment? All of these things are meaningless in the long run (given that in the long run, we're dead). It was this type of questioning that was the seed of my happiness fixation, for which I am extremely thankful. I truly believe that after much searching, I've found the true meaning of life, and have discovered the best way to live it (regardless of whether I actually execute it...)

So maybe it wasn't wasted time at all. Maybe I need to be more thankful for my friends who taught me selfish enjoyment. Their intuition was that there was something deeper there, and indeed there is.

The present is all we have

I had a "eureka" moment in the shower the other day concerning the nature of time and happiness. More of just a thought blurb:

Many people think that the recommendation to "be happy in the present" is based on the fear that we could die at any moment, or that we might not wake up to appreciate the day tomorrow, and is therefore a rather negative or shortsighted way of looking at things. In business speak, you could say that this strategy is risk averse -- life in the future is not guaranteed, so we should value happiness today over (non-guaranteed) happiness in the future.

However, saying that we have to be happy and love today is not being risk averse or dark; it requires the realization that the present is the only moment we are capable of happiness.

Again, just to repeat, it requires us to understand the fundamental truth that the present moment is the only one in which we can experience happiness (or anything else for that matter).

We can think of countless times when we thought we'd be happy in the future ("ooh, I'm going to have a delicious dinner with friends tomorrow"), and then later on, we actually were ("ah, it's so great to have dinner with friends"). Because we were excited about it when we thought about the event, we mistake that excitement for actually experiencing future happiness. In reality, we were thinking about the event, which made us happy in the present moment -- we did not, however, experience future happiness. This entire paragraph is really just getting at the fact that we can't experience anything but what we experience in the present moment.

But what are the implications for our happiness?

Basically, we should stop worrying about the future and trying to be happy then, because it's simply not possible. By the very nature of our existence, we can only experience happiness in the present moment. So why not make that happiness happen now? And then now? And how about now? What about... always?

It's a matter of first pausing our endless thoughts about what we "should have done" or "what we're going to do to be happy in the future," and then simply being thankful for the wonder around us.

It's about realizing that we're here, in the present, and that's how it always will be. Once we understand that, it's a matter of saying: "I want to be happy now, because it's great to be alive!"

There's no better time than the present...

Business school apps

Business schools force applicants to write several essays per application in an attempt to figure out who has the greatest "leadership potential." A lot of the essays end up reading like corporate mission statements; with topics like "Tell us about a time you displayed leadership" and "Tell us about a challenging situation and how you handled it," it's hard to imagine getting any responses that aren't heavily imbued with marketing-speak and big, fancy business words.

Most of the time these things are a chore, although it's a good process to double check that I'm really doing what's right for me right now. Every once in a while though, I get to write about something I care about, instead of just figuring out inventive ways to boast about past accomplishments. Here's an example of one I actually enjoyed writing. I guess you could call it, "In defense of happiness"

(Please keep in mind that there was a 500 word limit, so I wasn't able to make anywhere near the number of arguments I wanted to make, but this will have to do)


Essay 2: Please tell us about a time when you defended your idea.

Late one evening, just hours after she returned from spending six months in London, my friend invited me over to catch up and say hello. During our conversation, she mentioned that she had just started to take interest in meditation as a tool for developing happiness. This piqued my interest because I began a similar exploration over a year ago, and it resulted in profound changes in my life. When her skeptical father questioned if being happy was practical, I countered with an impassioned argument for pursuing happiness.

My ideas about happiness are heavily influenced by my experiences and my readings on Buddhism. Happiness is much deeper than brief moments of joy or pleasure; it is a mindset, not a state. When happy, we perceive events in a calm, neutral manner and respond in ways that express love and compassion towards others. If a person is happy, she will be strong in the face of hardships both large and small; neither losing her wallet nor the death of a family member can disturb her positive outlook. To these Buddhist concepts, I add an element of entrepreneurialism; to make a lasting impact, we must be tireless and creative in our efforts to clear obstacles to others’ happiness. Furthermore, we must control our emotional responses by eliminating negative emotions like anger, hate, and sadness, and always work to make the most calm, rational –and therefore, effective—decisions when addressing problems.

Her father argued that in solving life’s problems, negative emotions like anger and sadness serve an important role. If, for example, a person were to commit a terrible crime, anger is useful because it drives people to find and punish him– a happy person will be slow to action. To this I replied that we can still respond positively, and then take rational, calm steps to prevent a reoccurrence. If we are too quick to anger, we might forgo better judgment. Responding positively does not preclude action; it guarantees that our actions will be well thought out.

He then argued that sadness has value because it lets us appreciate happy moments through contrast. To this, I countered that if at each moment we had the power to choose if we feel happy or sad, we would invariably choose to be happy. Emotions are not a zero-sum game in which the bad must always balance the good. Instead, with effort we can choose to shift our mindset to the positive sphere of emotions, and express negativity less and less.

On a larger scale, my discussion with my friend’s father and his intransigent defense of anger and sadness awakened me to a difficult problem. Despite the obvious benefits of being happy, many people vehemently defend their negative emotions, simply because they are comfortable with them. The perseverance required in my own personal journey to find happiness pales in comparison to the energy needed to help others realize that happiness is a good choice, and that we are making choices every moment of our lives.




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Yeah, so I can see a bunch of things I want to change, but I'll leave it as is. I guess writing is never really finished, just a passable work in progress

(my favorite road on a long ride in Japan)

If I had a restaurant...

As I sat down to eat my lunch, my mind raced, searching for something interesting to think about. When I looked at how colorful my food was, I thought, "If I had a bunch of time and money, I'd open a restaurant." Because of the wide variety of colorful vegetables and copious whole grains, I thought I'd call it "WholeSum," and it'd follow my philosophy of eating and only have 4 seasonings (salt, soy sauce, miso, olive oil) and I'd play off the name and incorporate some silly mathematical puns into the decor and serve reasonably priced organic food that was fresh picked, preferably from an urban garden and....

Then I caught myself and thought, "so basically, I just want to force my personal philosophy onto others in the form of food. Hmm...." I then thought about all the times I've had conversations with food nuts about the restaurants we'd open, and I realized that we all did that; we all just want to express our values and have diners come lavish us with praise and bathe in our brilliance. "Ah, that Jeff is so right!"

How adorably egotistical. : )

A small epiphany about poverty

As I was preparing yet another business school application essay, I caught myself making an assumption; I suggested (incorrectly) that poverty is an easily addressed problem, because it is a simple lack of resources. It's just a matter of figuring out how to get the resources from the rich areas to the poor areas.

Now, I don't actually believe that, but I caught myself thinking it for a moment as I brainstormed the essay. Then it made me think -- that's a pretty common misconception, isn't it? I think it has implications in charitable giving. I have no evidence to back this up, nor the initiative to do the research, but I think that people donate to poverty-related charities in large amounts in part because it seems like a very effective use of the money. Why? Because poverty appears to be a simple problem of unequal distribution of resources. I have a lot, you have very little, so I'll give some to you and this problem will go away.

Of course, this simplistic thinking ignores the fact that charitable giving is non-sustainable and can often have the adverse effects of creating dependence and causing abandonment of productive activities. Then when charitable giving drops in an economic downturn, or when the program the poor people were receiving aid from is shut down by the government, things are worse than they were before, because while they were receiving charity, they reduced their self-reliant productive output, and now have to scramble to raise their incomes or face dire consequences. (To give a rather simplistic example to counter some simplistic thinking)

People are probably more hesitant to donate to causes like drug-user clinics because there is a natural suspicion that the money will not be as effective in solving the problem, in part because it's not a simple equation of more -> less. They also know that it's a more complex problem, involving various difficult-to-control factors, such as addictive behavior, socioeconomic inequality, and education. On the other hand, overseas poverty appears to be simple; just send the dollars (or food, or clothing, or whatever) where they don't have enough! There isn't as much questioning of efficacy of the program, because it's somewhere far away, and because the expectations are lower for immediate resolution of the problem because the donor thinks "it probably hasn't been solved yet because other people aren't as generous as I am!" (well, maybe I shouldn't be that cynical... It's a joke!)

But really, it's just like gangs, drugs, crime, or any other seemingly intractable social ill -- it can't be solved by just throwing money at it, however logical that solution may seem...