Peter RuddFiled under: departure lounge, the sweet life | Tags: blame, Oliver Burkeman
I’m going to try this one. Best wishes for the new year everybody!
resolve to cut everyone a massive amount of slack, including yourself. That’s the overarching conclusion of social psychology: we’re all staggeringly imperfect organisms, prone to making bad decisions when stress, busyness or poverty robs us of “cognitive bandwidth”. We habitually excuse our own bad behaviour as the result of special circumstances, while blaming others’ misdemeanours on deep-down nastiness. Or we torment ourselves with how much more accomplished everyone else is, when really it’s just that we lack access to their inner monologues of self-doubt. So: ease up.
Oliver Burkeman: New Year’s resolutions worth making, The Guardian
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: failure, happiness, negative path to happiness, Oliver Burkeman, uncertainty
To be happy, relish uncertainty, insecurity and failure. Stop running from these negative things; our wellbeing may depend on how we react to these very human emotions, says Oliver Burkeman:
[Research] points to an alternative approach [to happiness]: a ‘negative path’ to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.
Happiness is a Glass Half Empty, Oliver Burkeman
Book: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: failure, happiness, insecurity, negative thinking, Oliver Burkeman, positive thinking, The Antidote
It turns out there’s a long tradition in philosophy and spirituality that’s about embracing negativity, about easing up on all this positive thinking, and learning instead to bathe in insecurity and uncertainty and failure, to confront your mortality and to find the enormous potential for happiness that’s lurking inside all that.
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
coromandal 