Timeless Ideas | April 11, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
I’d rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not done.
― Lucille Ball
II.
The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.
― Unknown
III.
By nature man hates change; seldom will he quit his old home till it has actually fallen around his ears.
― Thomas Carlyle
Ideas
I.
At the moment you consciously make a choice, pay attention to your body and ask your body, “If I make this choice, what happens?” If your body sends a message of comfort, that’s the right choice. If your body sends a message of discomfort, then it’s not the appropriate choice.
Deepak Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
II.
Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity. The tycoon who lives in personal obscurity, the empire builder who controls the destinies of nations from behind the scenes, are vanishing types. Even nonelective officials, ostensibly preoccupied with questions of high policy, have to keep themselves constantly on view; all politics becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants; but the art of public relations penetrates even more deeply into political life, transforming policy making itself. The modern prince does not much care that “there’s a job to be done”—the slogan of American capitalism at an earlier and more enterprising stage of its development; what interests him is that “relevant audiences,” in the language of the Pentagon Papers, have to be cajoled, won over, seduced. He confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others.
Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations
III.
Built into the very structure of the egoic self is a need to oppose, resist, and exclude to maintain the sense of separateness on which its continued survival depends. So there is “me” against the “other,” “us” against “them.” The ego needs to be in conflict with something or someone. That explains why you are looking for peace and joy and love but cannot tolerate them for very long. You say you want happiness but are addicted to your unhappiness. Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks
Articles Worth Reading
I.
The Best Friends Can Do Nothing for You
Arthur B. Brooks | The Atlantic
One of the great paradoxes of love is that our most transcendental need is for people who, in a worldly sense, we do not need at all. If you are lucky, and work toward deepening your relationships, you’ll soon find that you have a real friend or two to whom you can pay the highest compliment: “I don’t need you—I simply love you.”
II.
When asked to fix something, we don’t even think of removing parts
John Timmer | ARS Technica
As a society, we seem to have mixed feelings about whether it's better to add or subtract things, advising both that "less is more" and "bigger is better." But these contradictory views play out across multibillion-dollar industries, with people salivating over the latest features of their hardware and software before bemoaning that the added complexities make the product difficult to use. A team of researchers from the University of Virginia found that most people defaulted to assuming that the best way of handling a problem is to add new features. While it was easy to overcome this tendency with some simple nudges, the researchers suggest that this thought process may underlie some of the growing complexity of the modern world.
III.
What Arthur Schopenhauer learned about genius at the asylum
David Bather Woods | Psyche
A good recollection of the past is desirable, obviously, but a perfect recollection might be unhealthy in its own way. Many things are worth forgetting, after all. And anyway, desirable or not, there has to be more to mental health than total recall. Reliable memory of one’s past, by contrast, is the ‘perfect recollection’ in which mental health consists – not remembering everything, of course, but remembering who you are.
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