CPA 2blog's List: fave

• Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.^[1]

   

  According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.^[2]

   

  Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the moment, present, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.

• Finding a relationship post-college is an arduous and often humiliating process that involves many strategies, the majority of which require the user to subject him or herself to uncomfortable and what some might say are unseemly situations.
• But after some time – perhaps six months, perhaps a year, perhaps, even, two years, the presence of a partner can feel much less exciting than it used to, and the thought of spending time with another person or some fantasy being might become a very compelling one. But being in a long-term monogamous relationship requires a sort of sacrifice and that sacrifice is one of romantic contact with anyone other than your partner. And when your partner feels less exciting, and the thought of one outside the relationship becomes more exciting, what’s left is a feeling of being trapped, indefinitely (as the goal of long-term monogamous relationships is to stay together forever, not some limited time span), in a less than ideal situation that will never be as exciting as you might perceive an encounter with someone else.
• But if not love or a genuine, positive companionship, the loneliness and the resistance to putting oneself back on the dating market and the development of dependence and the sincere belief that one’s life would probably be incomprehensible without the other often keeps people bound. Because being single can be lonely and full of excruciating moments such as the following: waking up and realizing that all you’re going to do today is eat breakfast, get dressed, go to work, eat lunch, come home, eat a Hot Pocket or whatever, look at the internet, and go to sleep, the whole time feeling acutely aware of how far away a romantic interaction feels; days without prospects that stretch into remorseless weeks, then months, until you notice that when someone touches your arm as some sort of polite gesture you’re highly – almost inappropriately – aware of it; any slight sense of a prospect you scare off with overthinking and awkward pauses and wrong sentences; and nights spent clicking through dating websites, amazed by how each profile seems to say the exact same, boring thing. Amazed by how even the pool of potential prospects seems unsatisfactory.
• The person you once pined over and were thrilled about and with whom all your interactions felt so easy and graceful has turned into a difficult, staunch, adversary who has suddenly become many things that you do not want to deal with because dealing with them means a step into extreme discomfort, hours of talking and attempting to see the world through someone else’s perception.
• Eventually you start wishing that things were easier, because “relationships shouldn’t be this difficult” (naive), and you start noticing attractive potential-if-you-were-single mates walking past you on the sidewalk, for example, and one day you realize, uncomfortably, that when you commit to a person in a relationship, you commit to their problems, and that it is not feasible to think of one’s problems as simple equations, as ‘obstacles’ that can be concretely overcome.
• Your partner’s so-called ‘issues’ are so closely connected to your partner’s personality that they’re actually informing it – both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts. That sometimes the same ‘issues’ that make you insane also fuel positive aspects of your partner’s personality. And so ‘solving’ a problem in effect turns into trying to ‘change’ a person. Which, as it is well-known, can be an extremely difficult and contested issue to navigate.
• Hurray ( : Reading Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' changed my entire perception on relationships. All the difficulties, the challenges, the energy-vacuum of repeated conversations... I no longer form immediate opinions about the relationship but think about what I can improve, and all the nasty parts of relationships I cherish because of the good changes that can come of it. This must sound nuts? Rilke just expressed it so beautifully... that young people, or lovers, should gather love the way we gather honey, the way we build careers...
  
  Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. - Rainer Maria Rilke
  
  Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. - Rainer Maria Rilke
• Very succinct, but now I feel worse. "Humankind cannot stand very much reality." T. S. Eliot

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• The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

• I felt confused, to some degree, by everything—but in a delayed manner, in that I seemed to be repeatedly realizing that I felt confused, instead of feeling directly confused.

• Read the New York Times piece, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Feel exposed and humiliated.
• Date people who you know you'll never be able to love. See someone for three months for no other reason than because it’s winter and you want to keep warm by holding another body.
• Eventually all these nobodies will make you crave a somebody. Have a real relationship with someone. Go on vacations together, exchange house keys, cry in their arms after a demoralizing day at work. Think about marrying them and maybe even get engaged. Regardless of the outcome, feel proud of yourself for being able to love someone in a healthy way.
• Think of yourself at twenty and hanging out with people who didn’t mean a thing to you. Think about writing papers, about being promiscuous, about trying new things. Think of yourself now and your face looking different and your body feeling different and how everything is just different.

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• I was mistaking sincerity for honesty — a young man's mistake, really. And I could not access honesty, because that would have called for courage. I needed to tell her what I really thought: that we were in my bed, in my apartment, that it was clear she hadn't heard a word I'd said since ball scratch No. 1 and ball scratch No. 2, and that she couldn't stop herself from insulting me and my family, all because her sensibilities were offended by the thought of my fingernails coming in contact with my own scrotum. And me — feckless, cringing me — the only work I was doing was working to access a more believable tone of voice.  
• The only thing that matters in love is courage. Everything that's good about love is borne out of it. The truest revelations of self require it. There is no honesty without it. It takes courage to put the needs of another above your own. You can't tell the most important stories about your past, can't reveal your imperfections, without it. You can't see the flaws in your own expectations of love without being brave enough to admit they are misguided, damaged, even boneheaded, then do the work to adjust them to the love you come to discover. It is courage that allows you to step into the jaws of trust.

• Most importantly, he made me feel like the most important person in the world because he was always eager to be with me.

• He would always make fun of me when I was little and would order something in a quiet voice that made me seem so unsure of myself, when he would order so that basically the entire restaurant could hear. He taught me to be sure of myself and proud of whatever I do. And something that I just realized recently is that what I am most proud of, is to have been his sister.

   

• I asked my girlfriend: How did your dad show your mom that he loved her? Her response: "Ceaseless appreciation of everything she did for him. He treated everything she did as if it were a surprise, as if it were the first time he'd ever had her chili or smelled her perfume. He noted every routine kindness. And he loved her the same way, consistently, even when she got fat."  

• And tell her something. Deliver the message in person. Avoid texting, cellphones, e-mails. Walk to your car, drive across the city, find a parking spot, go into her office, suffer the niceties and small talk of her inane office workers, greet her, pull her to the side and tell her that you were thinking about how much you love the way she looks in her underwear. She'll know what you did to get there, that it meant something to you. She'll understand the geography you crossed to get to this point and apprehend the pure outlines of your desire.   

• In economics, laissez-faire (English pronunciation: /ˌlɛseɪˈfɛər/ ( listen), French: [lesefɛʁ] ( listen)) describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies.

   

  The phrase laissez-faire is French and literally means "let do", but it broadly implies "let it be", or "leave it alone."

• Egalitarianism (from French égal, meaning "equal") is a belief of thought that favors equality of some sort. Its general premise is that people should be treated as equals on certain dimensions such as race, religion, ethnicity, sex, political affiliation, economic status, social status, and cultural heritage. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status.^[1] In large part, it is a response to the abuses of statist development and has two distinct definitions in modern English.^[2] It is defined either as a political doctrine that all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights^[3] or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people or the decentralization of power. An egalitarian believes that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.^[4][5][6]

• The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled "The Tragedy of the Commons," written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.^[1]

   

• If you can keep your head while all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
   If you can trust yourself while all men doubt you
   But make allowance for their doubting too,
   If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
   Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   Yet never look too good, nor talk to wise:

   

  If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,
   If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim,
   If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;
   If you can bear to hear the Truth you’ve spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
   Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
   And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

   

  If you can make a heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on a turn of pitch-and-toss,
   And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;
   If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
   And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

   

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
   Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
   If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
   If all men count with you, but none too much,
   If you can fill the unforgiving minute
   With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
   And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

   

  – Rudyard Kipling

• Giving equal voice to scientists on both sides makes it seem like there is a hearty debate within the scientific community, even though there is actually an overwhelming consensus.
• False balance can sometimes originate from similar motives as sensationalism, where producers and editors may feel that a story portrayed as a contentious debate will be more commercially successful to pursue than a more accurate account of the issue. However, unlike most other media biases, false balance may actually stem from an attempt to avoid bias; producers and editors may confuse treating competing views fairly — i.e., in proportion to their actual merits and significance — with treating them equally, giving them equal time to present their views even when those views may be known beforehand to be based on false information.^[28]

• The ability to study climatic patterns has been critical to the debate over the phenomenon called "global warming." Some scientists believe—and some ice core studies seem to indicate—that humanity's production of carbon dioxide is leading to a potentially dangerous overheating of the planet. But skeptics contend there is no evidence the warming exceeds the climate's natural variations.

   

   

  This paragraph puts scientists against skeptics, as though both are on equal grounds of knowledge, when in reality the scientists (even in 1992) have far more reason to believe that humanity is causing temperatures to rise than skeptics have to disagree. Additionally, putting “global warming” in scare quotes implies that the phrase is lacking in legitimacy.^[30]

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• If parenting does not help a child make money as an adult or increase her chances of a lasting marriage, there are still a few areas where parents can make a difference. Parents have a good chance of passing on their religious and political views to their children, for instance. Studies also show that parents can, by small degrees, cause their daughters to postpone having sex. (Huzzah!) And they can lower the chances that, as teenagers, their kids will wind up in jail. But the biggest effect of nurture, it turns out, is on how children perceive their parents.

   

  So you can greatly increase the chances of your children voting the way you do, going to your church and thinking fondly of you. But that's about it. "Instead of thinking of children as lumps of clay for parents to mold, we should think of them as plastic that flexes in response to pressure—and pops back to its original shape once the pressure is released."

• That is Mr. Caplan's first bit of good news. The second is that if you are a reasonably well-adjusted and happy person, your kids probably will be, too. All of which means that parents don't need to invest nearly as much time and energy in parenting as they think they need to. "You can have a better life and a bigger family," he says, "if you admit that your kids' future is not in your hands."

   
• With the economics out of the way, Mr. Caplan tries coaxing parents into taking their hands off the wheel. "The first step to happier parenting," he observes, "is to abandon 'recreation' enjoyed by neither parent nor child." Your daughter hates ballet class and you hate schlepping her there? Drop it. Planning to travel hundreds of miles for a family vacation that will make everyone miserable? Try a "staycation" instead. Get take-out food, he urges, and hire a housekeeper. But above all get a nanny—even if she doesn't speak fluent English or have a driver's license. Your life will be easier, and your kids won't be any worse off—they may even turn out better, since you'll be setting a better example by being less anxious.
• In study after study, researchers find that parents are consistently less happy than non-parents. No matter how you control the sample, if you have two identical people—one with a child and one without—the parent will be 5.6 percentage points less happy. Mr. Caplan bravely acknowledges this problem but is never able to say clearly what, exactly, the benefits of parenthood really are. Kids, he says, are "ridiculously cute" and "playful," and "they look like you." And in any case, everyone loves grandchildren. Maybe. Maybe not. Your mileage may vary.
• It would be better for all of us if Americans had more children than they currently do. (The average college- educated woman today has just 1.7 babies over the course of her life, which is not enough to sustain America's population in the long run.)

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• Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way, the way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and communality of their ways.

   

  – Carl Jung in The Red Book^[29]

   
• From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages—wherein the more the state is 'worshiped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed;^[37] this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.^[38]

• Endings. A simple and classic way to end humorous writing is with a call-back. That means making a clever association to something especially humorous and notable from the body of your work. I would give you an example of that now, but I'm still having concentration issues from the French fry.

   

• I suppose my point here is that the real culprit I see is not sex-specific, but rather a growing focus in society on the self above all else and a lack of ability to balance. We are driven by the media, by each other, and by our own selfish wants to consume, consume, consume. As a society, we glamorize extremism--so many of us want to be skinniest, tallest, prettiest, wealthiest, have the most sexual conquests, have the biggest engagement ring, have the most friends, drive the best car, have the most attractive partner, be the coolest. We live in a society in which advertisement is king and packaging is what sells--in the grocery store, in the mall, and, now, in each other. How much money, time, and effort do we spend on how we appear to others versus on who we actually are inside? How many of us have decided that "loving and accepting ourselves" means that we no longer need bother with introspection or self-correction?
• I suppose my point here is that the real culprit I see is not sex-specific, but rather a growing focus in society on the self above all else and a lack of ability to balance. We are driven by the media, by each other, and by our own selfish wants to consume, consume, consume. As a society, we glamorize extremism--so many of us want to be skinniest, tallest, prettiest, wealthiest, have the most sexual conquests, have the biggest engagement ring, have the most friends, drive the best car, have the most attractive partner, be the coolest. We live in a society in which advertisement is king and packaging is what sells--in the grocery store, in the mall, and, now, in each other. How much money, time, and effort do we spend on how we appear to others versus on who we actually are inside? How many of us have decided that "loving and accepting ourselves" means that we no longer need bother with introspection or self-correction?
• I suppose my point here is that the real culprit I see is not sex-specific, but rather a growing focus in society on the self above all else and a lack of ability to balance. We are driven by the media, by each other, and by our own selfish wants to consume, consume, consume. As a society, we glamorize extremism--so many of us want to be skinniest, tallest, prettiest, wealthiest, have the most sexual conquests, have the biggest engagement ring, have the most friends, drive the best car, have the most attractive partner, be the coolest. We live in a society in which advertisement is king and packaging is what sells--in the grocery store, in the mall, and, now, in each other. How much money, time, and effort do we spend on how we appear to others versus on who we actually are inside? How many of us have decided that "loving and accepting ourselves" means that we no longer need bother with introspection or self-correction?
• I suppose my point here is that the real culprit I see is not sex-specific, but rather a growing focus in society on the self above all else and a lack of ability to balance. We are driven by the media, by each other, and by our own selfish wants to consume, consume, consume. As a society, we glamorize extremism--so many of us want to be skinniest, tallest, prettiest, wealthiest, have the most sexual conquests, have the biggest engagement ring, have the most friends, drive the best car, have the most attractive partner, be the coolest. We live in a society in which advertisement is king and packaging is what sells--in the grocery store, in the mall, and, now, in each other. How much money, time, and effort do we spend on how we appear to others versus on who we actually are inside? How many of us have decided that "loving and accepting ourselves" means that we no longer need bother with introspection or self-correction?

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• Unfortunately, political correctness makes this an unfair fight. Can you imagine The Journal (or any media outlet) publishing an article titled Where Have The Good Women Gone? Of course not. It's not that the author will be accused of misogyny; the article would never be written or published. So Ms. Hymowitz's piece is just another example of piling on men, who have two hands tied behind their backs. Men really do need to organize politically and fight back: make it as uncomfortable for women to write something like this as it currently is for men to write something anti-woman.

• They are looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults, "what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are," and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.

   
• It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a "quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.

• What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.

   

  Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky.

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