Author: Dan Park

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Joy in Your 70s

In a culture obsessed with youth and beauty, it’s good to be reminded from time to time about the grace and wisdom of the older population. Mary Pipher does just that in “The Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s”. A small excerpt:

By our 70s, we’ve had decades to develop resilience. Many of us have learned that happiness is a skill and a choice. We don’t need to look at our horoscopes to know how our day will go. We know how to create a good day.

We have learned to look every day for humor, love and beauty. We’ve acquired an aptitude for appreciating life. Gratitude is not a virtue but a survival skill, and our capacity for it grows with our suffering. That is why it is the least privileged, not the most, who excel in appreciating the smallest of offerings.

Appreciating “the smallest of offerings” is a skill and habit that everyone, regardless of age, could benefit from cultivating.

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A Pile of Stuff with a Cover on It

Am I the only one watching Marie Kondo’s new Netflix series descriptively named Tidying Up With Marie Kondo and wondering how much joy the stuff in my life can really spark?

Don’t get me wrong. I like my stuff. I use stuff all the time. But the standard Kondo advocates is to keep only the things that “spark joy.” That seems like a tall order for a blender, a screwdriver, or a pair of socks, but maybe it’s just me.

As I meditate on whether my desk lamp “sparks joy” or just helps me see what I’m doing, I can’t help but think of George Carlin riffing on how we keep needing bigger and bigger places to store all the stuff we accumulate, until we go on trips, where we pack smaller and smaller versions of our stuff until we get down to the bare essentials. It’s funny. You should watch it (if you don’t mind some adult language). I’ll wait: George Carlin Talks About Stuff

As I think about it, maybe Kondo and Carlin both are saying the same thing: we don’t need as much as we think we do.

Every object in our lives adds weight. If nothing else, every object has to be stored. If we move, it has to be packed and transported. Maintenance and cleaning are generally required. We have to keep track of where everything is, what it does, and why we have it. For any individual thing, that overhead might not be too bad. But multiply across the number of objects in your life and the mental overhead starts to add up.

It’s hard to know whether something “sparks joy” or not, but maybe Kondo’s mantra isn’t a bad shorthand for thinking hard about why we have the things we have or want the things we want. If something no longer serves a purpose in your life, maybe it’s time to let it go and free up the mental overhead that goes with it. If a new, shiny thing will not make you better off in some concrete way, maybe it’s better not to acquire it, or at least wait until you know what it will do for your life and how it will do it.

I don’t think I will ever achieve the tidiness perfection that Kondo preaches, but I know I can do better about being careful about the stuff I let into my life. Time and attention are our most valuable assets. Only the things that matter and make a positive difference improving our lives deserve either.

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Morality Clauses for Writers?

For most people, a book contract is a cause for celebration, so much so that reading legal fine print can seem churlish, if not outright ungrateful.

Judith Shulevitz, reporting for the New York Times in Must Writers Be Moral? Their Contracts May Require It, shines a light on a little known clause increasingly creeping into writers’ contracts: the morality clause.

A morality clause lets a publisher back out of a deal if the the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints, or scandals.” Naturally, none of the key terms are defined.

Shulevitz criticizes these clauses:

The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.

If you were presented with a book contract with a morality clause, what would you do? Would you hold your nose, sign, and hope for the best? Or would you push back and argue that the clause itself is offensive because it gives the publisher too much power?

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Is it better to give or to receive?

Ed O’Brien from the University of Chicago and Samantha Kassirer from Northwestern University gave research participants five dollars to spend on themselves or on others, but there was a catch: the money had to be spent on the exact same thing. Unsurprisingly, over time, buying the same thing over and over again quickly got old, but interestingly, buying that same thing repeatedly for others didn’t.

Here’s how Professor O’Brien described the findings:

If you want to sustain happiness over time, past research tells us that we need to take a break from what we’re currently consuming and experience something new. Our research reveals that the kind of thing may matter more than assumed: Repeated giving, even in identical ways to identical others, may continue to feel relatively fresh and relatively pleasurable the more that we do it.

The Association for Psychological Science has a good summary in The Joy of Giving Lasts Longer Than the Joy of Getting.

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Today, I Affirm

Today, I woke up and declared, “This is going to be a great day!” I didn’t have any particular reason for saying that. Today wasn’t special. Actually, it was quite ordinary. And that was the point.

One of my resolutions this year is to start each day with a positive affirmation. It’s a modest goal, but often small goals are the best. And given enough time and repetition, modest changes can have big results. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.

What specifically am I hoping to achieve with starting my day with a positive affirmation? A few things:

  • Improve my mood and energy levels. If I say something positive out loud, my brain is more likely to believe that things are going in the right direction.
  • Remind myself to exercise, as Viktor Frankl puts it, “the last of the human freedoms” to choose my own attitude, no matter the circumstances, and take charge of how I approach life and the world.
  • Inspire myself to make the positive affirmation come true by putting in the work necessary to achieve my goals.
  • Prove that I can keep my promises to myself. I told myself I would start my day with a positive affirmation, and lo and behold, I am.

Not every day has to begin with the same affirmation. Some days I might start with “today, I will write a post for my blog” or “today, I will show more love to my dogs” or “today, I am grateful for my health and the health of my family.”

The specific words aren’t what’s important. What’s important is saying the words, with a positive spirit, every day, like I promised myself I would.

To help keep myself on track, I’ve set a recurring reminder on my iPhone to ping me at the same time every morning. If I missed my daily affirmation when I wake up, I have a second chance to recover. It’s a simple system, but it works.

I encourage you to work positive affirmations into your daily routine and fill your affirmations with your best aspirations for yourself. At worst, you’ve lost a few seconds of your day to a silly saying. At best, you’ve set yourself up for a happier, more fulfilling day, and if you string enough happy, fulfilling days together, that can add up to a pretty good life. No guarantees, of course, but it’s a gamble that seems like a good bet to me.

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Links

If men on average make more money than women, what should a heterosexual couple who has a baby do to maximize income for the family unit as a whole? Elaine Schwartz explores why men are less likely to take parental leave than women in The (Hidden) Paternity Leave Problem.

Matt Ridley asks Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy? Ridley writes:

Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.

There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves.

There is a lot of handwringing about the dangers of video games, but esports might be a good way for the elderly to keep their minds and dexterity sharp through the camaraderie and competition of on-line gaming. Samantha Bresnahan profiles one group of elderly gamers in The world’s oldest esports team is gaming their way to longer lives.

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New Year, New You: Small Scale Edition

Happy New Year! A new year means new beginnings, new hope, new energy, a clean slate, a fresh chance to accomplish goals and dreams. It’s a heady time. Mostly, however, it’s an illusion.

Most New Year’s resolutions fail. More than a third don’t even last a month. Why?

Life gets in the way. If accomplishing your goals were easy, you would have already achieved them. Something is in your way.

That something will be different for every person, but if you have goals undone or bad habits unbroken, your obstacle is somewhere in your life.

Willpower alone is almost never the problem, and so more willpower is rarely the solution. The problem is that for you to change, your life has to change, and most of us like our habits and routines, which is why we fell into them in the first place. Self-improvement can be a heavy lift.

What’s the solution? Start with smaller goals. How small? Tiny. Really tiny.

Like “I will floss my teeth.” Or, “I will drink a glass of water with breakfast.” Or, “I will walk for five minutes.”

To start making changes, it helps to pick something small, but tangible, so you’re sure you can do it.

Why small goals? Because every time you accomplish a goal—any goal, no matter how small—you prove to yourself that change is possible. You get a taste of success, and that taste will make you hungry for more. With more success comes more confidence and a greater ability to make more changes that don’t vanish after a month.

The old saying about the longest journeys isn’t that they begin with coasting into your destination. Journeys start with a single step. For most of us, the best first steps are small, concrete, and achievable within the confines of our lives as they are right now.

If your goal is easy enough, it’s not too hard to get started, and more importantly, it’s not too hard to keep going. And then, over time, as successes pile up, you can add more and more challenges and changes until you’re living the life you want to be living.

At least, that’s what I’m going to be trying this year. Small steps and incremental changes that I hope will yield big results when they have had time to germinate and grow.

So, if you’re going to give resolutions a go this year, think small. Small goals are often bigger than you think.

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Jump to the Top of a Webpage at the Press of a Button on a Mac

One of the features I like best about my iPhone and iPad is that, if I want to jump to the top of a web page, I can just tap on the top of the browser window, and like magic, I’m transported back to the beginning of the web page. This is really useful when you’ve scrolled down a long page and you want to quickly get back to the beginning.

I’ve always thought that this very handy function was a unique advantage iPhone and iPad had over my Mac laptop. I was wrong.

Turns out that the Mac has the same power. Here’s how to make the magic happen:

Hold down the function key (that’s the one in the lower left hand corner marked “fn”) and then press the arrow key pointing to the left. 

And that’s it! With this discovery, I can jump around a web page like a ninja—and now, so can you.

BONUS TIP:

If you want to jump to the bottom of a web page, the Mac can do this, too. Just hold down the function key and press the arrow key pointing to the right. That’s it. Super easy and very useful and something the iPhone and iPad can’t do.

Happy browsing!

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Hooray for the Public Domain

or the first time in twenty years, on January 1, 2019, some copyrighted works in the United States will at long last enter the public domain. This is big news, reports Glenn Fleishman for the Smithsonian Magazine in For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain.

It’s been so long since any copyrighted works have entered the public domain, it’s possible that many of us have forgotten what the public domain even is. 

A work in the public domain can be copied, distributed, modified, and publicly performed by anyone and everyone. You can republish the work verbatim or create adaptations (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). It’s the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart, and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes (mostly). The public domain is our shared culture, free to be used and reused by the people at large.

And for twenty years, not a single copyrighted work in the United States has entered the public domain due to the expiration of its copyright term. That’s a long time.

The original Copyright Act (enacted by many of the same people who wrote the American Constitution) provided that all copyrights expired in 14 years. Let that sink in: 14 years. Nowadays, copyrights last the life of the author plus 70 years or 95 years in the case of corporate copyrights. In other words, if avtwenty-year-old songwriter pens the next great American ballad, assuming the songwriter lives to be 80 years old, that song would not enter the public domain for 130 years (that is, the year 2,148).

The effect of this gigantic expansion of the terms of copyrights is that more than three quarters all of the culture created in the 20th century is still under copyright and has yet to enter the public domain. The last works to see their copyright terms expire and enter the public domain were published when Warren G. Harding was President of the United States, the roaring ’20s were just getting started, and the Great Depression, World War II, and the atom bomb were still far in the future. 

We are the first generation of Americans not to have free access to the culture of our grandparents, all because of the massive expansion of copyrights.

Finally, that is beginning to change. Unless Congress pulls the rug out from under the American people (again), every year from now on, another year’s worth of twentieth-century copyrights will expire, beginning next year with works published in 1923, and then slowly marching, year by year, through the rest of the century. When these works enter the public domain, they will be available to anyone and everyone to do with whatever their imaginations can think of. I, for one, can’t wait to see what creative people come up with. 

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Links

Some interesting links from around the Internet:

  • If you’re a news junkie, then more likely than not your diet is full of bad news. Add a little variety with this recap of twenty things that got better in 2018 from Lucy Purdy at Positive News: What went right in 2018.

  • When we want to know what the American people think, we turn to public opinion polls. But are those polls really accurate? What incentive do poll respondents have to be honest in their answers? Are they influenced by political correctness and virtue signaling? And how firmly do they support one position or another when they have haven’t given the question any considered thought or reflection? Scott Sumner at The Library of Economics and Liberty makes the case that maybe we shouldn’t pay much attention to public opinion polls in The many problems with public opinion.
  • Peter Jackson’s new movie They Shall Not Grow Old is an amazing technical achievement that brings to life old footage from the First World War like never before. But did Jackson take too many liberties to put together a story? And what about the stories of the soldiers that Jackson leaves out? Tim Carmondy at Kottke critiques the film in Against Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old”.
  • Commenters on the Internet often confuse giving offense with imparting truth. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains the YouTube Commenter’s Fallacy.
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Links

Some notable stories from around the Internet:

  • Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice reveals the chilling fact that the President has far more power than you would realize by just reading the Constitution. Over the years, Congress has granted the President vast and sweeping powers and all he or she has to do is to declare an “emergency.” Not exactly a model of checks and balances. If the United States ever has a President who lacks significant self-restraint, this could be a very big problem. What the President Could Do If He Declares a State of Emergency (If you prefer videos, The Atlantic has one of Goitein here.)

  • If the world’s existing justices and injustices were locked into place for the rest of time, would you be happy or sad? Bryan Caplan wrestles with this question and how he feels about his personal answer. A Conservative Confession