Happiness
The drops of oil on the spoon
I'm reminded of their faces
When our forces are resolved
If I had The Sads
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
The threat of happiness
Dr. Saavedra had diagnosed a case of anhedonia, a disease defined by the British Medical Association as a reaction remarkably close to mountain sickness resulting from the sudden terror brought on by the threat of happiness. It was a common disease among tourists in this region of Spain, faced in these idyllic surroundings with the sudden realization that earthly happiness might be within their grasp, and prey therefore to a violent physiological reaction designed to counteract such a daunting possibility.
A strangely negative character
Utility has a strangely negative character. We speak of the secret of happiness, for its causes are elusive; but there is no secret about the causes of unhappiness: thirst, hunger, want of sleep, exhaustion, pain, constraint of movement and too great heat and cold, are evils which can effectively prevent happiness. Utility has a negative character, because useful devices are adopted in the main for the sake ultimately of avoiding such evils.
From the fact that deadly injury, pain, and exhaustion prevent the fulfillment of the universal wish for happiness, we have always tended to infer that if only life were safe, comfortable, and effortless, we would be happy. It does not follow.
A being-without
Not having a toothache is no goal for a lifetime. Happiness, however one defined it, is not something negative, a being-without.
The search for happiness
If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.
More by accident
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
The Architecture of Happiness
A Book by Alain de BottonGood Things
A Website by Melanie RichardsThanks Doc
An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig ModA couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
Five Nice Things
An Article by Siobhan O'ConnorAt our dinners, we sometimes played a game we called Five Nice Things. It is what it sounds like: You take turns naming things that are nice. Five is the number. It can be a thing that makes you happy, a compliment for the other person, a win at work, “This broccoli is tasty,” whatever. It’s a bit sappy, but it’s not the sappiest, and the rules were: Don’t overthink it, and be specific.
Shinrin-yoku
A DefinitionForest Therapy, also known as “Shinrin-yoku,” refers to the practice of spending time in forested areas for the purpose of enhancing health, wellness, and happiness. The practice follows the general principle that it is beneficial to spend time bathing in the atmosphere of the forest. The Japanese words translate into English as “Forest Bathing.”
The Cycle of Emotions
An Article by Jessica FanWhen we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.
Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:
- Love > Attachment
- Compassion > Sentimentality
- Joy > Elation
- Equanimity > Apathy
To supersede the span of individual life
A QuoteNothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
The small web is beautiful
I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.
Why aim small?
Why aim small in this era of fast computers with plenty of RAM? A number of reasons, but the ones that are most important to me are:
- Fewer moving parts. It’s easier to create more robust systems and to fix things when they do go wrong.
- Small software is faster. Fewer bits to download and clog your computer’s memory.
- Reduced power consumption. This is important on a “save the planet” scale, but also on the very local scale of increasing the battery life of your phone and laptop.
- The light, frugal aesthetic. That’s personal, I know, but as you’ll see, I’m not alone.
Features and complexity
Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”.
Solving the problem of software bloat
But instead of just complaining, how do we actually solve this problem? Concretely, I think we need to start doing the following:
- Care about size: this sounds obvious, but things only change when people think they’re important.
- Measure: both your executable’s size, and your program’s memory usage. You may want to measure over time, and make it a blocking issue if the measurements grow more than x% in a release. Or you could hold a memory-reduction sprint every so often.
- Language: choose a language that has a chance.
- Remove: cut down your feature set. Aim for a small number of high-quality features. My car can’t fly or float, and that’s okay – it drives well.
- Say no to new features: unless they really fit your philosophy, or add more than they cost over the lifetime of your project.
- Dependencies: understand the size and complexity of each dependency you pull in. Use only built-in libraries if you can.
Raw size isn't enough
A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images.
...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers.