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?”