“Reading
someone like a book” is supposed to denote an easy penetration of someone’s
motives and thinking. But in fact reading is an interactive process which
depends not only on the reader but on the context and timing. I find that I get
different things from rereading a book. Two years ago (almost to the day) I enjoyed
the wry humour and scope of Michael Foley’ s The Age of Absurdity - why modern life makes it hard to be happy which mocks contemporary anguishes and values (an early chapter has the great
title of “the righteousness of entitlement”). By coincidence I came across this US stand-up comedian who deals with the same issues.
But rereading Foley in the last few days showed me a depth I had missed the first time round. He criticises the generality of the six convergent values identified by Martin Seligman (the founder of the positive psychology movement) in his trawl of religions – justice, humaneness, temperance, wisdom, courage and transcendence.
But this article about one region's attitudes to saving and spending is useful.
But rereading Foley in the last few days showed me a depth I had missed the first time round. He criticises the generality of the six convergent values identified by Martin Seligman (the founder of the positive psychology movement) in his trawl of religions – justice, humaneness, temperance, wisdom, courage and transcendence.
“Do the classic texts , he asks, not give us more practical strategies for
living ?”
“The good news (he tells us on page 68) is that there are indeed such strategies. The bad news is that all of them are discouraged by contemporary Western culture”.
The "strategies" are personal responsibility; autonomy; detachment; acceptance of
difficulty; understanding; mindfulness; ceaseless striving; and constant awareness
of mortality.
Drawing
on philosophy, religion, history, psychology and neuroscience, Foley then explores the
things that modern culture is either rejecting or driving us away from:
- Responsibility – we are entitled to
succeed and be happy, so someone/thing else must be to blame when we are
not
- Difficulty – we believe we deserve
an easy life, and worship the effortless and anything that avoids struggle
(as Foley points out, this extends even to eating oranges: sales are
falling as peeling them is now seen as too demanding and just so, you
know, yesterday …)
- Understanding – a related point, as
understanding requires effort, but where we once expected decision-making
to involve rationality, we moved through emotion to intuition (usually
reliable) and – more worryingly – impulse (usually unreliable), a tendency
that Foley sees as explaining the appeal of fundamentalism (“which sheds
the burden of freedom and eliminates the struggle to establish truth and
meaning and all the anxiety of doubt. There is no solution as satisfactory
and reassuring as God.”)
- Detachment – we benefit from
concentration, autonomy and privacy, but life demands immersion,
distraction, collaboration and company; by confusing self-esteem
(essentially external and concerned with our image to others) with
self-respect (essentially internal and concerned with our self-image), we
further fuel our sense of entitlement – and our depression, frustration
and rage when we don’t get what we ‘deserve’
- Experience – captivated by the
heightened colour, speed, and drama of an edited on-screen life, our
attention span is falling and ‘attention’ (at least in the West) is something
we pay passively rather than actively and mindfully:
From a recent blog discussion, I noted this interesting perspective -
I think we need to address the question with our own actions, the things we do that make life worth living. Verbs, not nouns. When I think of how I would answer the question, the following behaviors come to mind:
Creating: Writing, drawing, painting (though I’m not good at it), playing music (though I’m not especially good at that, either). For others, it might be inventing something, building a business, coming up with a clever marketing campaign, forming a non-profit.
Relating: It’s not “family” that makes life worth living, I think, but the relationships we create with members of our family, and the way we maintain and build those relationships. Same goes for friends, lovers, business partners, students, and everyone else.
Helping: Being able to lend a hand to people in need – however drastic or trivial that need may be – strikes me as an important part of life.
Realizing: Making, working towards, and achieving goals, no matter what those goals are.
Playing: Maybe this is a kind of “relating”, but then, play can be a solo affair as well. Letting go of restraints, imagining new possibilities, testing yourself against others or against yourself, finding humour and joy.
Growing: Learning new things, improving my knowledge and ability in the things I’ve already learned.
Those seem like more satisfying answers to me – they strike deeper into what it is I want for myself, what makes it worthwhile to get up in the morning.The Guardian is currently trying to give its readers some understanding of the nation which is now in the driving seat of the "European project" and indeed of our futures - Germany. I have several times on this blog remarked on how seldom this effort of understanding our neighbours (their culture and history) is made in British books or journals - with most of the accessible literature being humorous accounts of setting up home in rural France or Spain (occasionally Italy). I'm not particularly impressed with the Guardian series - no mention, for example, of the two recent writers who have tried to do the country justice (Simon Winder and Peter Watson).
But this article about one region's attitudes to saving and spending is useful.
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