Wealth and Isolation

Chris linked to this interview with Tracy Gary, a woman born into a super-rich family who decided to give away her money and spend most of her time helping people. She has some interesting insights into wealth and happiness, including the link between being rich and social isolation:

"They were suffering from enormous isolation. They'd chosen that fate for themselves by living in 5,000-10,000-square-foot houses where, you know, the desire was to have space and a certain amount of privacy and solitude. But eventually they realized it was making them miserable. They were craving something that money couldn't buy."

Another Take on Flow

Flow: A new focus, a new idealism...this blog is one of those mind-benders that you might not agree with at first, but it sure gets you thinking outside of your comfortable patterns. From A World of Healthy, Happy People Doing Good and Having Fun:

"We need to create an honorable, pluralistic ethos according to which we acknowledge that many people are dissatisfied with many things in our society – fine, we welcome dissatisfaction as the source of craving for the good. But we never accept whining or criticizing of others or critiques of “society.” If you don’t like it, go fix it, go create a world, a community, a sub-culture in which your ideals can be instantiated, realized, in which you can show us what your vision of beauty and nobility looks like. Create a new social reality, so that I can see your dreams come true. I want to see a world in which billions of dreams are coming true constantly."

Teaching Happiness?

What Does It Mean to Educate the Whole Child?:

"Recently, I have suggested another aim: happiness (Noddings, 2003). Great thinkers have associated happiness with such qualities as a rich intellectual life, rewarding human relationships, love of home and place, sound character, good parenting, spirituality, and a job that one loves. We incorporate this aim into education not only by helping our students understand the components of happiness but also by making classrooms genuinely happy places.

Few of these aims can be pursued directly, the way we attack behavioral objectives. Indeed, I dread the day when I will enter a classroom and find Happiness posted as an instructional objective. Although I may be able to state exactly what students should be able to do when it comes to adding fractions, I cannot make such specific statements about happiness, worthy home membership, use of leisure, or ethical character. These great aims are meant to guide our instructional decisions. They are meant to broaden our thinking—to remind us to ask why we have chosen certain curriculums, pedagogical methods, classroom arrangements, and learning objectives. They remind us, too, that students are whole persons—not mere collections of attributes, some to be addressed in one place and others to be addressed elsewhere."

Via Stephen

Chipper

A little self-actualization parody from The Onion, about an invented chipmunk created to help kids believe in their potential:

"I knew I could do it—it was hard, yes, it's true. But if chipmunks can climb to the sky, so can YOU!" Chipper said, punctuating his message with a thumbs-up sign and a wink.

According to Dr. Roland Gibson of the American Council For Literature & Ethics, Chipper's core message—that people can be or do anything they want—is a fallacy widely perpetuated in children's books.

Along similar lines, Gwen sent me a link to this: Buddy Lee Guidance Counselor. I guess Lee Jeans has created this character as a sort of surrogate brand and creates these odd interactive sites based on the character. Weird, and I'm not sure it totally works, but some of it is pretty funny.

Not Taking Vacation

Yikes. From Canadians skip vacation, fear falling behind at work:

Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian and professor at the University of Iowa, argues leisure time has become "trivialized" while work has been "elevated to the modern religion," a way for people to define themselves and find meaning in their lives.

As a result, he says, time off can lead to a feeling of emptiness and boredom.

Surveys find that many Canadians - almost one in five - blame a lack of cash for not taking holidays.

Update: Chris Bailey bounced off this post with some wise words about fear. Also, I keep forgetting to link to this post from the Future of Work blog, pointing out the darker side of being self-employed, at least in the realm of vacation time:

"Those of us in business for ourselves, especially microbusinesses (the very small), find it really hard to take any time off at all. And when you do sneak in a Saturday off, or a long weekend, there's no guilt like the guilt of thinking about what you could be doing right then to generate cash, or build up inventory, or improve your personal infrastructure (like putting away all those old file folders, or organizing your PC files, or doing some research about the future)."

Gems from the Parking Lot

Two divergent gems from the Parking Lot this week. Chris linked to Jon's post telling a story about an engineer at Apple who just kept coming to work after being sacked, and apparently he kept showing up until his project was finished: "His swipe card worked, there were lots of empty offices, so he just kept going, unpaid, for months, creating a fully-fleged and entirely unauthorized skunkworks at the heart of the company." Now that's engagement in your work.

Chris also had some fascinating comments on the looting following the flooding disaster in New Orleans. Class struggle, materialism, greed, poverty, drugs, weapons...the psychology of this stuff makes you wonder how close we are to the collapse of everything we take for granted:

"The looting seems so instinctive, so without purpose (except for the survival necessities of course - what is the immediate survival value of a flat screen TV and a mink coat? What value does such a thing have in a flood? Why waste time and energy acquiring something so useless when food and water is in short supply? One wonders just how close under the surface the possibility for this lies in places where there is a great disparity of wealth."

Play "Pitfall"

Pat Kane hasn't been posting much about the Play Ethic this summer, but he did write a recent article about the benefits of a playful approach to life. In it, he playfully points to a potential pitfall of engaging in your life on a deeper life -- you start to realize that you can't pursue all of the interesting angles and opportunities that emerge:

"But it's a paradox of the play mentality that the more enthusiasm you have for your self-chosen activities, the more of those activities seem to be on offer. Which leads to a counter-intuitive truth: you need more energy for a player's lifestyle, not less.

Time spent freely surfing on the web crowds your brain with ideas. Lengthy conversations with fellow players at odd times in the day suggest new projects, new angles on things. Your mind-maps teem with possibilities. And where the worker worries whether they'll ever attain the life they want (see the smokers in BBC2's The Smoking Room), the player's anxiety is whether they can realise all the opportunities that life presents them with."

Independent America

It was very cool to follow along virtually with Hanson and Heather as they toured around the U.S. looking for Independent America -- mom 'n pop shops and other non-chain businesses. They're in the process of going through hours of footage and gleaning the best. This week they posted about what they've discovered. The first theme rings most true for me after researching some of this stuff over the past year:

"There's a growing hunger for community in the country -- an appreciation for relationships and civic responsibility. A realization that since we can control so little of what is happening in the outside world, what we can control closer to home matters more than ever. Citizenship vs. consumerism."

I keep blathering about values and how most of us aren't very good at aligning our lifestyle decisions with our core values -- I think the hunger they talk about here is right in the middle of that tension. I'm looking forward to seeing the result of this excellent project.

Philosopher Downes

Stephen Downes is a researcher for the NRC, looking mostly at e-learning, but he's been churning out gems at his other blog. I've been sitting on two of them, going back to re-read them occasionally. The first is is about values and how they may be in conflict with the direction society pulls us, a topic I've also been stewing on:

"There is such a divide between what we believe, what we value, and how our leadership conducts public policy. We are desperately seeking a return to a society that is life-affirming, supportive of community, and respectful to the environment."

The second is an essay on the value of work. It's loaded with smart references, radical politics, well supported arguments and even a personal timeline that isn't far off from what I'd like to build for people creating future timelines of their life plans. He's thinking about what our lives would look like if the government starting the guaranteed income program that was recommended by a Royal Commission in the '80s (PDF). What a vision it is:

"We would, for example, expect a proliferation of the arts. Enough people live today at less-than-starvation wages in order to be able to write, paint, sing, act and perform any manner of cultural pursuit; with guaranteed income even more of them would do so. We would expect a proliferation of scholars and philosophers: with the requirement to work no longer driving people into cookie-cutter training programs, people would pursue their own aptitudes and interests. We would see many, many more restored cars, hand-crafted furniture, four-table restaurants, home gardens and home restorations, as people engaged in the sort of creation and building that interests them.

We would, ultimately, see a wealthier society. It would consume less, but what it consumed would be better. We would see much greater emphasis on production efficiencies, as the labour surplus currently existing would no longer pose a barrier to technological innovation. And we would see a happier society as no person would ever need to live in fear of economic ruin or starvation. There would be a much greater sense that we're all in this together, a much greater willingness to cooperate and share, a much stronger sense of family and community."

Sims University

I keep meaning to check out The Sims games. I mean, if I'm interested in how people envision their futures, wouldn't an existing immersive lifestyle simulation be a good place to start? Duh.

One of the recent extensions to the franchise that caught my eye was Sims 2 University, which lets players live the college dream, partying, studying, playing pranks and trying to eventually graduate. The focus here is obviously fun, rather than any attempt to teach kids about college choices or the transition to careers, but I don't consider that a criticism -- this is not educational software. From a review:

"Together the new content doesn't just simulate the whole college lifestyle, it genuinely impacts the game as a whole. Sims who take the time to go to college will gain tons of skills and new friends that will give them a huge head start in their future careers. They'll also get bonuses to help them score higher in life, such as extra 'want' slots. 'Lifetime Wants' are also added into the core game, and if your Sim can achieve these incredibly ambitious goals, he or she will attain a permanent platinum mood."

Poverty and Gross National Happiness

US poverty rate continues to rise:

"An extra 1.1 million Americans dropped below the poverty line last year, according to the US Census Bureau. There were 37 million people living in poverty in 2004, up 12.7% from the previous year."

Are those numbers not completely disturbing? Do we need any clearer indication that something is very, very wrong with the way things are going? This little piece of analyis makes it even more bizarre:

"The rise in poverty comes despite solid economic growth in 2004, which helped to create 2.2 million jobs in the US."

It looks to me like the measures of economic growth we're depending on aren't reflecting the reality on the ground. Perhaps it's time to take a closer look at Bhutan's attempt to measure and foster gross national happiness instead of assuming that all economic growth and activity is a positive thing.

Update: In case we felt like criticizing our neighbours to the south, the news on poverty is the same in Canada: "Poverty is rising among children and new immigrants, the middle class is finding it increasingly difficult to afford education and housing, and there are 250,000 Canadians living on the streets...", all apparently while the economy booms.

Visualizing Future Events in Isolation

Psychologists now know what makes people happy...with a title like that, the article better be good. Of course it doesn't have all the answers, but I'm liking most of what I'm reading in there. I was most fascinated by this:

People tend to rationalize bad things, quickly adapting to new realities. They also visualize future events in isolation, but real life teems with many experiences that dilute the impact of any one. This means winning the lottery doesn't make people's lives stellar, but they recover from romantic breakups much quicker than expected.

"If you knew exactly what the future held, you still wouldn't know how much you would like it when you got there," Gilbert says. In pursuing happiness, he suggests "we should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we'll feel. We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave."

City Lifestyle Explorer

The City Lifestyle Explorer is a little java-based web app from 1999 with a great concept. The interface feels at least six years old, but I like how making a lifestyle choice gives you some instant feedback. If you choose to bath instead of shower, the water reservoir shrinks a bit. If you recycle, you get a little recycling icon on your dashboard. There's not enough depth to sort of "try on" a lifestyle, but even this simple treatment gets you thinking about how decisions interact and affect the world around you.

More Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance in the New Millennium: Where Are We? Where Do We Need to Go?

The full report (PDF) is a hefty 90+ pages, but it's solid stuff and worth skimming. Check out the eight-page summary (PDF) for the list of recommendations for employers, employees, unions and government. Some of the media reports bouncing off the study are more concise and personal -- Success Redefined is a scanned PDF article from the Globe and Mail with all kinds of lifestylism gems.

Life Building

Kirsten is thinking about the process of building your life. A quote:

"life is all about building. it's not a neat & tidy process with a firm completion date to look forward to - it's a messy, ever evolving project of weaving together what we want and making it work."

I like the recognition of ambiguity -- it's a reminder that a focus on planning your future can lull you into thinking that everything will fall into place if only you have everything figured out up front. When I'm talking about a tool to help you create future lifestyles, it's not really about creating the perfect one, it's about mixing and matching and finding interesting combinations that inspire you to take those all-important first steps toward something.