MarketWatch advice on Happiness

PAUL B. FARRELL in Special holiday contest: Just finish that sentence! asked you to complete the sentence "Whether you're Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim or atheist, we can all celebrate today's universal spirit. How? Try this. Simply answer this question: "I'm the happiest (and richest) investor because ...", and then he said " And to give you a few clues, here are my "12 New Secrets" to being happy and rich."

Here are his 12 hints:

1. Happiness is making others happy
2. Happiness is doing what you love
3. Happiness is spending less than you earn
4. Happiness is losing yourself in the present moment
5. Happiness is knowing when 'enough is enough'
6. Happiness is being unattached to money and other stuff
7. Happiness is action, doing what's necessary and right
8. Happiness is sometimes you're faking it so good you're happy
9. Happiness is more a bunch of little moments than big deals
10. Happiness is lots of loved ones and a warm puppy
11. Happiness is about doing what you really love [see number 2 above]
    
12. Yes, happiness is also about being rich ... 'rich in spirit'

At the end he said: "So take a moment and answer the question: " I am the happiest (and richest) investor because ..." That's your prize in this contest. It comes from within, an investment that will continue growing, making you richer and richer when you go back to the celebration, to your loved ones.

You can cause happiness wherever you go -- today, and every day. Have a joy filled holiday!"

I find the above the above very inspiring, it showed that being rich and happy are not incompatible. Very appropriate for a MarketWatch article, and something to reflect upon during the holidays.

The article is also reproduced in the Buddhist Channel. The reason must be because many of the ideas are in line with Buddhism as well as with other religions.

For example in the explanation of number 4 above, he quoted Thich Nhat Hanh,
"Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist and was a close friend of the popular Trappist monk Thomas Merton. "In Stepping Into Freedom," Thich says: "Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. The Buddha says happiness can only be possible in the here and now, so go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. You may recognize that the conditions of happiness that are already there in your life are enough. Then happiness will be instantly yours."


Read the full article
Related posts on happiness

When we wish happiness for all.....

We chant: "Sabe Satha Bhavantu Sukitata", may all be blessed with happiness.

But what do we mean by happiness? It is not the same as feeling good, not the same as pleasure, not the same as wishing someone to have all their wishes fulfilled.

Quite often we hear that we do no wrong as long as we make everybody happy. This is very bad if our notion of happiness is feeling good or pleasure. The person we wish happiness may think he or she is happy, but may in fact be in delusion, clinging to some possessions which he/she currently has in abundance. If we really want the person to be happy, we should also wish that the person abide in equanimity, free from attachments and detachments.

That is why the complete chant is:
"May all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, may all be blessed with happiness and the causes of happiness, may all abide in equanimity, free from attachments, and free from detachments."

In this connection, it is interesting to read Richard Schoch's article "True happiness is more than feeling good" :

Most psychologists define happiness as a positive emotional state: a good mood or cheery disposition. But happiness cannot be defined so narrowly. Positive emotions rarely survive the events that prompted them; nor do we want to feel good all the time.

A life of unremitting cheerfulness is one of delusion, for it refuses to acknowledge normal ups and downs. By emphasizing pleasure, the psychologists turn happiness into something self-regarding: mere accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

More, they leave unanswered all the tough questions: Do you have a right to be happy? Can you be happy if others are unhappy? Does it matter whether or not you're happy?

The students will come to learn that happiness is a basically selfish, egotistical proposition: ensuring that you're always in a good mood, eternally optimistic, forever blowing bubbles.

Note how the equation happiness = feeling good is rejected.
As an alternative, Schoch proposes:

Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It's a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn't about feeling good, it's about being good.

That's what Aristotle meant when he called happiness (eudaemonia) a state of flourishing in the art of living. But just as ''one swallow does not make a springtime'', Aristotle reasoned, one pleasant day does not make a whole life happy. And thus he insisted that happiness was an activity - because it requires skill and focus.

To strive for happiness means that we regard our life as a journey in which we move purposefully toward that ultimate goal. Granted, the psychologists hint that a truly happy life must contain a purpose beyond itself. But positive psychology won't set you on the path to a meaningful life. It will put you in touch with your feelings - and encourage you to share them with anyone who'll listen -but it won't enable you to transcend them, which is precisely what's required to infuse your life with purpose and meaning.

What matters is that there is a body of enduring wisdom on how to live the good life, and we have neglected it to our cost. These ancient teachings tell us that happiness has little to do with ''emotional IQ'' and everything to do with overcoming the ego, conquering selfishness, and having regard for the welfare of others.

In short, there is a morality of happiness, and you'd be hard pressed to find it in the fuzzy platitudes that masquerade as the science of wellbeing. You're much more likely to encounter a powerful truth in the writing of Greek philosophers, Roman Stoics, Christian mystics, Buddhist monks, and Hindu sages.

Richard Schoch is professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of 'The Secrets Of Happiness: Three Thousand Years Of Searching For The Good Life'

Related: Happiness Formula Discovered?
Happiness by Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Memes as classes and patterns with emotional attachments

In 1996 Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder wrote “The Selfish Class” , a very important paper giving a code’s eye view of software reuse and evolution. Of course the analogy is with Richard Dawkins’ gene’s eye view in his book “The Selfish Gene”. Foote and Yoder discussed attributes of successful classes such as “works out-of-the-box” and “low surface-to-volume ratio”.

Our focus here also deals with classes in the sense of object-orientation, but we discuss them in relation to the representation of memes, another term coined by Dawkins.

The Wikipedia entry says that a meme refers to a unit of cultural information that can be transmitted from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution analogous in many ways to the gene.

What is this unit of cultural transmission? Will we ever find something like a DNA, the chemical molecules of genes? We don’t think so.

We suggest that memes are classes and patterns (note: patterns are sets of classes which cooperate and work together in a certain way, see e.g. the gang of four’s book ),

and hence are bits of information or software in our brains. Should we, one day, be able to extract the information content of our brains, we might be able to read those classes and patterns.

We say that memes are classes, and not just any bit of information, because classes encapsulate both attributes and procedural knowledge. A tune, for example, has the attributes the composer, the singer, dates, but also the music itself encoded as a procedure.

Origami technique of paper folding to make a ship is another example of a class with coded instructions.

Sometimes a class is not sufficient to represent a meme, the Romeo and Juliet meme for example, consists of entities with specific relations to each other, and a certain sequence of events. We propose to represent such memes as patterns. In the pattern, a class has a certain role, and classes and send messages to other classes to do something. This fits in very nicely with Dawkins view of communication, not as information exchange, but as manipulation.

Other more complicated memes such as the notion of a deity can be represented as more complicated patterns.

The consequence of looking at memes as classes is that all properties of object-orientation would apply: instantiation, abstract classes, inheritance, and messaging. One meme such as a joke could involve a bicycle or motorcycle, or an abstract 2 wheeled vehicle.

Memes actually exist in different forms, a passive storage such as books, active in our minds, or on the internet and computers, or as unwritten traditions and customs. The distinction is between active and passive, and between vehicles that only stores, and those that can manipulate and propagate. Human minds can modify memes and can propagate them. Libraries are only passive repositories. Computers if programmed to do so, can manipulate and propagate memes. TV commercials are basically programs showing multimedia content and in so doing help propagate memes.

We therefore have the following categories of meme repositories:

1. passive libraries
2. human minds
3. tools for propagation such as computers, media, and internet

The third category needs to be programmed by human beings. One day perhaps, with advanced artificial intelligence, computers could be more than just tools.

Returning to our classes and patterns, in categories 1 and 3 memes are just information, whether procedural or not. In the second category, a meme is not just a piece of information, it has emotional attachment to the host. Think about many products where the brand name actually has more prestige value than the products actual utility value.

Many memes will be competing for our attention, but only few will have a strong attachment to us, just like a suicidal terrorist infected by a doctrine. The attachments are changing all the time, one time we may be entirely occupied by earworms (songs that one can't stop humming or thinking about), just like a computer under a DOS (denial of service) attack, at other times our minds could be serene in mediation with minimal attachments.

The attachments are obviously just as important as the content.

Hence our title: memes as classes and patterns with emotional attachments.

We shall later explore this further and deal with debugging memes that are mind viruses using meditation techniques.