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How to Like Things
- xyzelement 4y agoThis is like, the secret to life. If you can enjoy exercise, healthy eating, working on your relationship, and challenging impactful work, spiritual inquiry, etc. you are set
- Jensson 4y agoIf you can enjoy being fat, being alone, being lazy and oblivious you are set as well.
- qup 4y agoI seem to enjoy both of those, so I guess I have a lot of options.
- deebosong 4y agoCan't tell if serious or not, but this sounds like Homer Simpson. Granted he's got a family, but he's seemed to be fairly neglectful towards his family's actual needs, talking past them and hearing only what he wants to hear in light of his family members' literal words spoken lol.
- stemlord 4y agoWhy downvote? It's an interesting cultural take.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWe seem to be programed to never enjoy such things. It's basically impossible. But the GP's set are a possibility, and not certain at all. So it is worth pointing.
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- copperx 4y agoImpossible? we are programmed to LOVE all of those things, except for being alone, which can't be learned away. Is there anyone with special genetic makeup that naturally rejects idleness and high-calorie foods?
- leobg 4y ago“Freedom is not the ability to get what you want. It’s the ability to want what is good for you.”
- cratermoon 4y agoInterestingly, James Williams points out in his book Stand Out of Our Light that the technology of the "attention economy" doesn't does distract us from our immediate goals and into internet holes, but over time diverts us from wanting what is good for us.
- leobg 4y agoExactly. And they get away with it precisely because we believe in this wrong notion of freedom. We’re still stuck at the 2nd stage of the three transformations that Nietzsche outlined back in the 1980s. Which is essentially to think we’re free only because we get to reject people who outright tell us what to do. He said, “Free though callest thyself? Free of what - what do I care about it. But free to do what? That is what thy gleaming eyes shall tell me!” It also helps that no one is paying any attention to BF Skinner anymore. It’s not the people who tell you what to do that you should fear. It’s those who know how to make you do it voluntarily.
- zabzonk 4y ago> I’m using “like” in a very loose sense, actually meaning something more like “appreciate”. then say “appreciate”! stuff like this made this article somewhat incomprehensible to me.
- lapcat 4y agoExactly. Why wasn't the article titled "How To Appreciate Things"? It felt more like "How To Grin and Bear Things".
- lencastre 4y ago4000 weeks in a nutshell… just try to be in the moment enjoying what you are eating seeing hearing feeling, seeing yourself while doing mundane tasks, being present when with friends and family, active listening,… reads like platitudes sorry. But it works.
- simonw 4y agoHanging out with people who like stuff is generally a lot more rewarding than hanging out with people who don't - who are endlessly cynical or negative and love to explain why they don't think things are any good. So defaulting more towards liking thing can make you a more fun person to be around.
- haswell 4y agoThe book “Learned Optimism” (Martin Seligman, PhD at the forefront of the discovery of learned helplessness in the 60s-70s) explores the impact of explanatory styles and how those styles are indicators that reliably predict depression/stuck-ness on the one side and resilience/achievement on the other. I think your instinct is right on, and highlights both sides of this effect: people like being around people who are optimistic. This has implications for both optimistic people and pessimistic people. Pessimism reinforces itself (No on wants to hang out with me, I’m unlovable), and optimism seems to have the opposite reinforcing effect. Cultivating qualities of optimism in yourself seems to be powerful because it not only changes your own outlook for the better, but actually leads to real world improvements in your relationships, which in turn gives you more reasons to feel optimistic. For most of my life, I spun my own default-to-pessimism as just part of my identity and occasionally useful in certain work settings. But I’ve recently come to realize where this pessimism came from (drilled into me during childhood), that it doesn’t need to be permanent, and can be replaced by better patterns of thought. Mix this with a bit of mindfulness/zen meditation, and the world looks like an entirely different (better) place.
- moremetadata 4y ago[dead]
- hoten 4y agoI just picked up this book recently in the hopes of achieving an outcome like you have, nearly finished with it. I'm also going through a self-guided therapy of DBT, which seems to go hand-in-hand with Learned Optimism (although I haven't seen anyone else make an explicit connection yet).
- mhb 4y agoI like the design of that web site.
- abhayhegde 4y agoSeems like it's made with Simple CSS. Not sure.
- sitkack 4y agoThanks for posting this! Esp here, where the default is to shoot things down and find the fatal flaw that someone overlooked. Critique has its place, but all forms of No are a thought terminating action. Questioning and exploration cease. I think of it more as a pervasive curiosity, and how can we encourage that in others. Be charitable, stay curious and encourage those traits in others.
- karaterobot 4y agoI like (ha ha) this quote by Auden: > Bad art is always with us, but any given work of art is always bad in a period way; the particular kind of badness it exhibits will pass away to be succeeded by some other kind. It is unnecessary, therefore, to attack it, because it will perish anyway... The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public. In other words, most bad things will be forgotten eventually anyway; the tragedy is when a good thing is also forgotten. So, it's more useful to call attention to what you like rather than waste time spotlighting what you don't. In my own life, I noticed that, no matter how much I like something, I'll forget 95% of it after a year anyway. Most movies I've seen, most books I've read, video games I've played, whatever: I can tell you the outline of the plot, and a couple things I found interesting. Everything else, all the little details, are gone. Over time, I've just learned to accept that frailty, and now I focus only on spotting the few interesting things I want to take away from a work, whether or not I liked it as a whole. Those things are, in effect, the work's legacy for me. And if a work gives me one interesting new idea, or new image, or whatever, then it was worth my time in the long run. I also think that, at least some of the time, when we say we don't like something, we're trying to tell people something about our identity and affiliations. We're really saying "I'm not the kind of person who likes this thing". So, the review is not of the work itself, but of what we view as its larger semiotic or cultural position, with respect to our own. We get caught up in proxy wars, and sometimes make unfair evaluations of works of art based on characteristics they can't be blamed for having. Grading them on a test they didn't know they were taking.
- marc_abonce 4y agoI mostly agree with the quote, in fact, I occasionally see bad works of art that would otherwise get quickly forgotten become more famous because of the negative criticism. On the other hand, when I read reviews I always go for the negative reviews because I want to be warned about the thing's potential flaws. Even if I disagree with the critics I still learn so much about my favourite works of art thanks to those opinions. Also, if a critic claims that everything is excellent, then I have no way to act on their recommendations because I don't know what's their standard or taste unless I can compare it with something they didn't like.
- joeatwork 4y agoI wish I could upvote this twice - the folks I know who have cultivated the skill of liking stuff have been some of the most productively creative people I’ve ever known. Learning how to like stuff is a superpower for people who want to make things worth making.
- sogen 4y agoAny recommendations of tactical RPGs that are available on Steam??