“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. “ “I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” The first paragraph is from the play Man and Superman (1903) by Irish playwright, critic, and political activist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). It appears in the eloquent, thought-provoking (and lengthy: more than 11,400 words!) dedication, “Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley,” of the play. The second paragraph comes from one of his speeches (found in George Bernard Shaw: His Life and His Works by Archibald Henderson). Interestingly, as the Internet has a tendency to do, the first and second paragraphs are erroneously combined, as if they were one thought written by Shaw. This cobbled-together quotation, taken from two completely separate works, appears in dozens of books, all — of course — without proper attribution. American actor Jeff Goldblum is quite fond of this quote and often recites it (most recently, for example, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, February 15, 2019) as if it were one long paragraph, perpetuating the mistake.

Historically, he writes, colleges and universities aimed to imprint capital-C Culture—especially a familiarity with a nation’s great texts and intellectual traditions—on young people. Today, however, students more often are seen and see themselves as consumers who are buying diplomas in order to signal their employability. In this model, the values that animate higher education are job preparation, skill building, and networking, not intellectual engagement or humanistic fulfillment. The University in Ruins

Many people here say they're rich in things that aren't included in any official measure of poverty. Things like family and faith. So they're understandably a bit bitter about how they're often seen from the outside.

To Martin a liberal education meant “the kind of education which setsthe mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests.”

Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks,who defined it as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellencein a life affording them scope.”15

while you can plan days, weeks, and months out—you can only get things done today

The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.

But in the new full-blown capitalist version of evolution, where the drive for accumulation had no limits, life was no longer an end in itself, but a mere instrument for the propagation of DNA sequences—and so the very existence of play was something of a scandal.

The purpose of this secular knowledge system is not intrinsically about wellbeing, ethics and goodness per se; it is about the search for truth and efficacy—be that for competing ideas about what is good, for the purposes of competitive advantage in commerce or national prestige, or for destructive purposes linked to warfare and security.

I stole the title from this Substack post. I cannot put this much better than them: “we’ve chosen to optimize for feelings— to bring the quirks and edges of life back into software. To create something with soul.” Enjoyment is an important component of my day to day. 

Montaigne once teased the writer Erasmus, who was known for his dedication to reading scholarly works, by asking with heavy sarcasm “Do you think he is searching in his books for a way to become better, happier, or wiser?” In Montaigne’s mind, if he wasn’t, it was all a waste.

The paradox of hoarding isthat no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s neverenough.

“None of the women and men emerging from our schools in the next decade should expect to lead to purely mechanical, conforming, robotic lives. They must not be resigned to thoughtlessness, passivity, or lassitude if they are to find pathways through the nettles, the swamps, the jungles of our time.” ~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination

Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.”

a new conviction structured the next decade of my life: The un-annotated life was not worth living.

‘Security’ takes manyforms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smallerchance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security ofknowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if oneis.

The colonial history of Northand South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured oradopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of wherethey wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with thelatter.

Seeing this, long-suffering great Odysseus was happy,and lay down in the middle, and made a pile of leaves over him.

You can learn about it here, but fundamentally, there is an assumption on the part of the Siksika that rather than attaining what we would call "self-actualization" over time one is, in fact, born with it and this would seem to inform many other aspects of the culture. Childrearing, for example, is very hands-off, which would make sense if you believed your child arrived basically okay and kind of awesome so why would you fuck with that?  Furthermore, their views on wealth suggest that the whole point of attaining wealth is that so you can give it away. The one considered the wealthiest is the one who has given the most away. Which ties into why one has difficulty finding poverty in this environment because the second someone is poor, the rest of the community chips and makes them whole (instead of questioning "well do they really *deserve* to be made whole?" because, again, arrived self-actualized).

a lot of our assessment system our accountability

Yet there are many good reasons to revisit our working culture, not the least of which being that for most people work brings few rewards beyond a payslip. As the pollster Gallup showed in its momentous survey of working life in 155 countries published in 2017, only one in 10 western Europeans described themselves as engaged by their jobs. This is perhaps unsurprising. After all, in another survey conducted by YouGov in 2015, 37 per cent of working British adults said their jobs were not making any meaningful contribution to the world.

So has Warren Buffett, who says his measure of success is, “Do the people you care about love you back?”