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How to Find Joy in Your Sisyphean Existence - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673248 absurd sisyphus happiness philosophy psychology
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • the gods. They took their revenge by condemning Sisyphus to eternal torment in the underworld: He had to roll a huge boulder up a hill. When he reached the top, the stone would roll back down to the bottom, and he would have to start all over, on and on, forever.
  • One could even argue that all of life is Sisyphean: We eat to just get hungry again, and shower just to get dirty again, day after day, until the end.
  • Absurd, isn’t it? Albert Camus, the philosopher and father of a whole school of thought called absurdism, thought so. In his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus singles out Sisyphus as an icon of the absurd, noting that “his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.”
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  • It would be easy to conclude that an absurdist view of life rules out happiness and leads anyone with any sense to despair at her very existence. And yet in his book, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy
  • this unexpected twist in Camus’ philosophy of life and happiness can help you change your perspective and see your daily struggles in a new, more equanimous way.
  • he argues that despite the hardships of this world, against all apparent odds, human beings regularly experience true happiness. People in terrible circumstances bask in love for one another. They enjoy simple diversions
  • Even Sisyphus was happy, according to Camus, because “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Simply put, he had something to keep him busy.
  • Instead of feeling desperation at the futility of life, Camus tells us to embrace its ridiculousness. It’s the only way to arrive at happiness, the most absurd emotion of all under these circumstances
  • We shouldn’t try to find some cosmic meaning in our relentless routines—getting, spending, eating, working, pushing our own little boulders up our own little hills
  • Instead, we should laugh uproariously at the fact that there is no meaning, and be happy anyway.
  • Happiness, for Camus, is an existential declaration of independence. Instead of advising “Don’t worry, be happy,” he offers a rebellious “Tell the universe to go suck eggs, be happy.”
  • If embracing the ridiculous seems impossible to you, Camus says it’s only because of your pride.
  • “Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness,”
  • In fact, each of us can consciously implement Camus’ absurdism in order to forge a happier life. Here are three practical ways to find joy in the ridiculous.
  • 1. Stand up to your ennui.
  • You can’t necessarily change your perception of the world, but, as I have written, you most certainly can change your response to that perception. Meet that feeling of despair with a personal motto, such as “I don’t know what everything means, but I do know I am alive right now, and I will not squander this moment
  • 2. Look for opportunities to do a little good.
  • One of the best ways to cultivate futility is by focusing on the big things you can’t control—war, natural disasters, hatred—as opposed to the little things you can.
  • Those little things include bringing a small blessing or source of relief to others.
  • if your commute to work is a soul-sucking existential nightmare, don’t ruminate on the cars stopped ahead of you. Rather, focus on making space for that poor sap stuck in the wrong lane who’s desperately trying to merge
  • 3. Be fully present.
  • Absurdity tends to sting only when we see it from the “outside”; for example, when you think about how meaningless it has been to wash the dishes every day in the past only to find them dirty again right now—and imagine the countless dish washings that the rest of your life will comprise.
  • Confronting the absurd is much more comfortable when you do so with mindfulness.
  • “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.
  • When the broad sweep of life brings you horror, concentrate on this moment, and savor it. The pleasure and meaning you can find right now are real; the meaninglessness of the future is not.
  • Some mornings, I wake up seeing only boulders and can’t face pushing them once again up that hill
  • Those are the days when my old friend Camus comes in handy. Instead of despairing of the absurdity of life, I lean into it, laugh at it, and start my day in a light mood. Then I gather my beloved boulders and set out for the nearest hill.
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The Neoracists - by John McWhorter - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists identity anti-racism racism
shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist, using this to promulgate an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian and unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming.
  • The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.
  • first, what this is not.
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  • We need not wonder what the basic objections will be: Third Wave Antiracism isn’t really a religion; I am oversimplifying; I shouldn’t write this without being a theologian; it is a religion but it’s a good one; and so on
  • It is not an argument against protest
  • I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.
  • This is not merely a complaint.
  • Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.
  • our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?
  • My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte
  • We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.
  • We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.
  • they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.
  • “The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.
  • But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are
  • Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;
  • o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.
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All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...ump-indictments-everywhere-all corruption gop maga electorate trump culture politics inflation policy bias
shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
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Opinion | I Did Not Feel the Need to See People Like Me on TV or in Books - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...entation-television-books.html relevance reading tribe self goal other-directed self-centeredness learning education
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • It reminds me of how many people complain that they don’t see themselves in movies, books, etc. When I was growing up, I didn’t much, either, but I can’t say that it bothered me.
  • But what I enjoyed about TV was seeing something other than myself. I liked it as a window on the world, not as a look into my own life.
  • It was the same with books. The last thing I expected when growing up was to read about myself
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  • There were plenty of books about Black people, but they tended to be about poor or working-class Black people and often depicted Black lives proscribed by discrimination and inequality
  • I was aware of two instances of myself in fiction of the time. One was the nerdy teenage middle-class Black girl in Louise Fitzhugh’s “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change.” Then there was “Sarah Phillips” by Andrea Lee in 1984. That one was a near-sacred experience for me, in depicting a middle-class Black girl who grew up outside Philadelphia, went to Harvard and then moved to Europe. Here was someone I could have been, a variation on some people I knew
  • But I neither needed nor sought out more such books. How much me did I need? I read to learn about what I didn’t know.
  • when I started my graduate study, I explicitly did not want to study Black English. It was too close to home.
  • What fascinated me, and still does, are languages utterly unlike the one I grew up with. This is what I do my academic work on. I am happy to write about Black English, but I do it out of civic duty. What first hooked me on languages was hearing someone speak Hebrew
  • This idea that one, if brown, is to seek one’s self in what one reads and watches gets around quite a bit.
  • But still, the idea that Black people are deprived in not exploring what they already relate to is not as natural as it sounds.
  • This position is rooted, one suspects, as a defense against racism, in a sense that learning most meaningfully takes place within a warm comfort zone of cultural membership. But it’s a wide, wide world out there, and this position ultimately limits the mind and the soul.
  • I question its necessity in 2023. The etymology of the word “education” is related to the Latin “educere,” meaning to lead outward, not inward.
  • It can be especially ticklish to hear white people taking up the idea that Black people stray from their selves when taking up things beyond Blackness
  • I sense the idea that real Blackness means ever seeking yourself in your reading and viewing is a post-1966 thing, to refer to what I wrote here last week.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois had no such idea. He wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
  • Du Bois adapted these “white” works to his own needs and predilections. Even the naked racism he lived with daily did not lead him to draw a line around “white” things as something alien to his essence
  • Rather, he insisted that these works were, in fact, part of his self, regardless of how wider society saw that self or how figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle would have seen him.
  • Du Bois, in this, was normal. Today I sit with “Succession,” Steely Dan and Saul Bellow, and they wince not. I see myself in none of them. Yes, Bellow had some nasty moments on race, such as a gruesomely prurient scene in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” But I’m sorry: I cannot let that one scene — or even two — deprive me of the symphonic reaches of “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Gift.” What they offer, after all, becomes part of me along with everything else.
  • the truth is that characters I can see as me are now not uncommon on television in particular. Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was about as close to me as I expect a sitcom character ever to be, for example. That was fun. But honestly, I didn’t need it. I live with me. I watch TV to see somebody else.
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