Timeless Ideas | August 1, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday.
― Gary Chapman
II.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
― Upton Sinclair
III.
Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.
― Daniel Gilbert
Ideas
I.
As long as you think that the cause of your problem is “out there”—as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering—the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.
Byron Katie in Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
II.
The mind is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker. The result is that the uniquely human areas of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.
Jonah Lehrer in How We Decide
III.
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
Articles Worth Reading
I.
Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future
Ed Zitron | The Atlantic
When you hire someone, you’re (supposedly) hiring them to do a job in exchange for money. But the anti-remote crowd seems to believe that the responsibility of a 9-to-5 employee isn’t simply the work but the appearance, optics, and ceremony of the work. Abusive work cultures grow from this process too. Making people work late is much harder when you can’t trap them in one place with free food, a Ping-Pong table, a kegerator, or laundry services—benefits that you champion instead of monetary compensation.
II.
What Kind of Burnt Out Are You?
Rachel Fairbank | Lifehacker
When you’re burnt out, recovery can seem almost impossible. Unfortunately, burnout is one of those conditions that can take far longer to recover from than to develop, while the solutions for burnout are often hit-or-miss. In order to recover, it’s important to think about the source and type of your burnout, as that will make a difference in what you need.
III.
Ronnie de Sousa | Aeon
Many things are neither legally compulsory nor forbidden. But morality is not so restrained: a system of morality can, like God, claim total authority over every action and even every thought. Such a totalising system would seem oppressively intrusive. Yet the leading theories of morality can mitigate their overreach only by setting arbitrary limits to their own relevance. In this respect among many others, morality seems like the ghost of religion. Religion is totalising by its very nature: God knows and judges everything you do and think.
Want to read more? You can read the full archives here and other posts on our website as they are published. Was this email forwarded to you? Join the club by signing up below: