Brains, Proust, & Woody

Today in Happiness we look at the brain and its molecules of emotion, and at attention and dreaming. (Lenoir 10-12)

The brain regarding itself is an uncanny experience, isn't it? Persons aren't just brains, of course, but the seat of conscious thought seems like a good place to search for leverage when addressing the happiness of a whole person. That's a bootstrap operation if ever there was one. Pull yourself up by your neurotransmitters, one might implore. But we mustn't forget, "neurotransmitters are hampered by an unbalanced diet, emotional upset and a lack of sleep." Brains don't exist in a vacuum.

 Dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin have much to do with happiness, as indicated by brain imaging research. They impact our appetite for life, motivation, decision-making, intro/extroversion, impulsiveness, violence, trust, empathy, generosity, creativity, intuition, sociability, adventurousness, memory, capacity for enjoyment, optimism, contentment, serenity, sleep... Is there anything they don't have to do with? Do they explain too much, leaving too little to what we like to think of as our spontaneous characters and personalities? Do those explain anything at all, after all? Should we feel threatened by all this talk of chemically-induced happiness or misery? Should we feel diminished, or empowered?

"Our happiness is nourished by the quality of attention we bring to bear on what we are doing," said the old Stoics and Epicureans.

"My experience is what I agree to attend to, said William James, and "Attention … is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others..." When we fail to deploy attention selectively and with intention, our world becomes a "gray chaotic indiscriminateness." Brainpickings

When we do attend to our experience with selective intelligence, we open ourselves to the delighted "dilution" of awareness known as reverie. That's why Montaigne rode his horse, and got back in the saddle after a near-fatal dismount. It's why I walk the dogs, or why the dogs and I walk each other: I defy anyone to interpret my dachsund/beagle's evidently-delighted expression, when in full exuberant stride, as anything short of reverie. I try to learn from him, daily, how to live in the present.

We've noted, recall, that there's a problem about that, and an Aristotelian solution.

These days, many of us would rather not be living in the present, a time of persistent crisis, political uncertainty and fear. Not that the future looks better, shadowed by technological advances that threaten widespread unemployment and by the perils of catastrophic climate change. No wonder some are tempted by the comforts of a nostalgically imagined past.
Inspiring as it seems on first inspection, the self-help slogan “live in the present” slips rapidly out of focus. What would living in the present mean? To live each day as if it were your last, without a thought for the future, is simply bad advice, a recipe for recklessness. The idea that one can make oneself invulnerable to what happens by detaching from everything but the present is an irresponsible delusion.
Despite this, there is an interpretation of living in the present, inspired by Aristotle, that can help us to confront the present crisis and the perpetual crises of struggle and failure in life. There is an insight in the self-help slogan that philosophy can redeem... (continues)

The present moment, specious though it is, lends itself to attention and reverie for those who learn to notice and form appropriately attentive habits. See Duhigg, The Power of Habit (“This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be”) and Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (“Einstein didn't invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.")

But presence passes, and so our happiness also depends crucially on memory and the ability to "dig up happy times." That's what the author of À la recherche du temps perdu was about, with his cookies etc. (And there's my entry in the "All England Summarize Proust" competition.)

Lenoir recuses Schopenhauer from membership in the Woody Allen school of pessimism ("life is 'a grim, painful, nightmarish experience ... the only way that you an be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself") and actually implies that he might better belong with Martin Seligman and the Positive Psychologists who "insist on the need to develop our positive thoughts while eliminating our old negative beliefs," if we want authentic happiness... but also say we should "avoid having too many hopes and fears." Sounds a lot like Stoicism.

Lenoir doesn't quote Woody's paradoxical caveat: life is painful, nightmarish, etc. etc., and "it's all over much too soon." Go figure.
==

The Playboy Philosopher has died. 

...In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional... “Hefner won,” Todd Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”
The Playboy Philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all its aspects, for which Mr. Hefner won civil liberties awards. He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws... Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world...” nyt

...Women in the magazine were intended more as the girl next door than as sex objects. Still, the fact that they were often topless (full nudity didn’t appear until 1972) brought criticism that Mr. Hefner objectified women and promoted an unrealistic standard of female beauty, that women should be subservient playmates for the modern man. To Mr. Hefner, women were simply a part of the interests of most heterosexual men. The magazine featured discussions of equal rights, contraception and reproductive choice for women. Mr. Hefner never saw that as a contradiction... ("How Hefner Invented the Modern Man")

==

Today we celebrate the birthday of the teacher, philosopher, and political theorist popularly known as Confucius, born near what is now Qufu, in Shandong Province, China, in 551 BCE... His birthday is an official holiday in Taiwan, where it is celebrated as Teachers’ Day. His writings were first translated into English by James Legge in 1867, and a more readable translation was published by Oxford University in 1907.

Confucius wrote: “There are three things which the wise man holds in reverence: the Will of Heaven, those in authority, and the words of the sages. The fool knows not the Will of Heaven and holds it not in reverence: he is disrespectful to those in authority; he ridicules the words of the sages.”

And: “He who does not understand the Will of God can never be a man of the higher type. He who does not understand the inner law of self-control can never stand firm. He who does not understand the force of words can never know his fellow-men.” WA

Schopenhauer happy?

Today in Happiness we tackle Schopenhauer, who always seems to hover around our discussions. We kicked off the semester with his potentially disillusioning (but also potentially liberating?) disavowal of the whole subject.

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”

And yet, we noted him last time explicitly identifying health as a condition of happiness. So, he throws not a total disavowal but at least a big dash of cold water into every smiling face.

Likewise, his statement that "man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” The intended implication may be that health and happiness alike are a matter of luck, not design. The inevitable rejoinder, from happy people everywhere, must be Branch Rickey's: sometimes, at least, luck is the residue of design. Get happy.

 Carl Jung's "process of individuation," I'll bet, hits philosophers and philosophy majors earlier than most and before forty, for sure. Isn't that why we take courses like this, to get to the bottom of our "true individuality" and "pay more attention to our own sensibility"-even if only to challenge and replace it with a corrected view?

Goethe suggested that sensibility, character, and taste are less affected by externals than by the sheer spontaneous surge of "personal being" that defines "a child of Earth's chief happiness," but that's not Schopenhauer's (or the Buddha's) view. Or is it?

Frederic Lenoir says Schopenhauer "took up Goethe's idea and went even further... our nature predisposes us to be happy or unhappy." But Will is not personal for him. How we respond to the hypothesis of implacable impersonal Will might be. 

Plato long ago distinguished grouches (duskolos) from more cheerful types (eukolos). But as some self-avowed grouches insist, whether the glass is happily half-full depends on what's in it.

Schopenhauer's "curious contradiction" suggests we can be determinists and at the same time be happier, mostly by acknowledging Will and then not choosing not to feed it. Lenoir says that's not what he means by changing our inner lives. "We can be happier... by modifying our view of things, our thoughts and beliefs." We can "will what we will," then? But can we confirm that we can? Is it better if we can't?

Sonja Lyubomirsky says 40% of happiness "stems from personal efforts," a vague-enough statement to entertain if not entirely to understand. I'm hoping that won't be conclusively disconfirmed, 40% sounds good even if it implies a slight tilt to genetic predisposition that we probably shouldn't call determinism and certainly shouldn't call fatalism.

"No one will be happy if tormented by the thought of someone else who is happier," said Seneca before surrendering his own happy pursuit to the madness of the tormentor Nero.

Flaubert said "everyone takes his enjoyment in his own way and for himself alone." Some do, but there are altruists among us who aren't in it for themselves alone. The egocentric view may reassure hyper-egoists, but I hope the rest of us find it beside the point. 

Do we all have a peculiarly personal "deeper nature"? If you find the "atmosphere that suits" you best, have you found something deep? Must atmospheres be deep, to conduce to happiness? Or just, as the pluralists say, wide enough, at least, to accommodate the varieties of happy experience?
==
"Today is the birthday of American composer and musician George Gershwin (1898), whose lyrical and jazzy pieces, like Rhapsody in Blue, “Summertime,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Embraceable You,” have become part of the American Songbook and influenced musicians like Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin... he composed “Rhapsody in Blue” '1924), what many consider his masterpiece, in a manic frenzy. He’d been having dinner with his brother when they read a newspaper article saying Gershwin would be performing a new piece in public in two weeks, which he didn’t know about. He’d been inspired to write the piece on a train ride... "I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.'

When he performed the piece in public for the first time, Gershwin improvised some of what he was playing, and he didn’t write out the piano part until after the performance, so it’s unknown exactly how the original Rhapsody sounded, but it changed popular music forever. The soundtrack to the Woody Allen movie, Manhattan (1979) is composed entirely of Gershwin’s compositions, including Rhapsody in Blue...he died at the age of 38. He’d been behaving oddly for weeks and his doctors said he’d been suffering from a fast-growing, malignant brain tumor. Now, doctors say his erratic behavior and years-long battle with depression might have been the brain tumor all along and that Gershwin was likely misdiagnosed..." WA

Voltaire, Socrates, Jesus, Kant

Interesting quartet, in Happiness today.

Voltaire's response to my question the other day, as to whether any of us ever regret the examined life and would occasionally prefer to swap places with Forrest Gump or Winnie the Pooh, is as acerbic as you'd expect. "I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor, and yet I do not desire such happiness." Maybe he'd have been happy to live in a better neighborhood. For my part, as I was saying in class, I try to spend a bit of relatively brainless time in the neighborhood every morning with the dogs. It's a happy time of day. Knowledge and lucidity aren't obstacles to happiness, but too much thinking can be.

Our author Monsieur Lenoir is still pushing us to the "Max": last time he urged maximum pleasure and reason, this time he invokes Andre Comte-Sponville for "maximum happiness in maximum lucidity." Is it always really so wise to push the pedal to the metal? Let up on the lucidity accelerator occasionally, I'd say. It better suits the rambling narrative of this Philosopher's Guide.

"Happiness is the awareness of an overall and enduring state of satisfaction in a meaningful existence founded on truth." I guess. Sometimes it's just a warm puppy, though. Awareness can be implicit and pre-verbal.

Satisfaction is a happy word, when coupled with the love of life. Matthieu Ricard's wish for wisdom, flourishing, and peace in every moment is lofty. But as we were saying last time, wasted moments are gone forever. Make a wish. A smart and willful wish, leading to well-chosen goals. Nietzsche's formula was for "a yes, a no, as straight line, a goal." He wasn't that happy, though, do you imagine?

Nor was Kant, I imagine.  "Full and complete happiness" may not exist on earth, but the promise of their attainment after death rings hollow to Epicureans, humanists, and others who think the "earth of things must resume its rights."

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. Pragmatism

Deferred gratification is often a necessary condition of our happiness, but is deferred happiness ever a good idea?

Some more questions: Does illusory happiness interest you? Can you be happy in the absence of meaning and truth? Do you share Matthieu Ricard's "primary aspiration"? Does it set the bar too high? Do you know people who "lose themselves in a permanent hyperactivity, artificially filling the emptiness of their lives"? Is that a fair characterization, or an external view from an unsympathetic perspective? Is it your duty to make yourself worthy of happiness, to be as happy as possible, both, neither... or is talk of "duty" irrelevant to the question of happiness? Were Socrates and Jesus happy? Are martyrs happy, generally? Do you wish for a cause to die for?
==
It's the birthday of H.G. Wells (books by this author), born Herbert George in London (1866). He is the sci-fi writer most known for The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. Wells wasn't the first to write about time travel or alien invasions, but his brand of sci-fi was uniquely realistic. He wanted to make the made-up science as believable as possible. Wells called this his "system of ideas" — today we would call it suspension of disbelief... and here's a nice Happiness poem for today, by Cousin Mary:

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)”

 WA

Lenoir's Happiness

In Happiness today we begin Frederic Lenoir's Happiness: A Philosopher's Guide. In case there's any doubt, our author is quite French.



Many professional thinking persons are, unsurprisingly, convinced that a deep curiosity about the world and an unsettled awareness of our peculiar place in it are both prerequisite to living happily and well, and would agree that "it is essential to be aware of our happiness to be happy."

Or, if they're not convinced, they're nonetheless vocationally committed to pursuing inquiry as if they were. As James says so well in Varieties of Religious Experience, "philosophy lives in words" - and it's in words that philosophers must express and transact their curiosity and awareness - "but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation."

So, what's an honest philosopher to do with the realization that happiness may be visited upon us in moments of silence, meditation, and mute appreciation?

Well, he could admit perhaps that sometimes the pleasures of thinking about nothing (if not "NOTHING") and doing nothing may far exceed an intellectual's preconceptions as to the conditions of happiness. As in religion, sometimes a philosopher of happiness must defend experience against philosophy. That's one of my secular acts.

It's hard to dispute Montaigne's suggestion that happiness is amplified when we know and appreciate that we're happy. Clap your hands. Again, though, E.B. White poses the Thinking Man's perennial dilemma: savor the moment, or save the world? ("I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.")

I vote "both," but don't ask me how. Knowing what you want is not the same as knowing how to get it. But we do know, don't we, that moments unsavored are lost? And that no one of us alone can be the Savior? (Who would ever take seriously a presidential candidate, for instance, who said only he could fix things? Deplorable!)

So my unsolicited advice is, guard and enjoy every moment you can. Saving the world is a longer-term project. When planning your day, be sure to leave room for some savoring moments. But also, as we mostly agreed last time (didn't we?): don't be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness. A little Buddhist self-abnegating cherry-picking might be a useful corrective here.

Again, I highly recommend Robert Wright's new book. "Don’t feel like you’re committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self,” but also don't take yourself so seriously that you become indifferent to others' happiness as well as your own. “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” So, awareness is a step on the path to potential enlightenment.

The Pleasure Principle may sound like Freudian flap-doodle to some, but if pleasure had no adaptive value it surely would have gone by the boards long ago. "The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply," let us hope.

Aristotle, on Lenoir's reading, endorses a life balancing "the maximum of pleasure with the maximum of reason." I'm uneasy about "maximum," but for rational animals such as we aspire to be, those surely must be the right constituent parts. The ratio of the mix might vary, animal to animal and person to person. Not all virtues are equally salient for each of us, some strike a more courageous or magnanimous or gentle note (etc.) - but do take note, there are many virtues available for our respective pursuits of excellence. With all due respect to the student who posted his view that the only real virtues involve deference to God and love for our neighbors, that's needlessly self-limiting.

I'm not familiar with Lenoir's "peasant-philosopher" Pierre Rahbi, but "happy sobriety" sounds Epicurean enough. "Necessary things are easy to attain," by comparison. Food and drink and shelter, once procured, ought to make fine cooking, beautiful clothes, a fancy home (etc.) less urgent, and power and honors entirely gratuitous. If pleasure really is the key to happiness, we ought to give more thought to what pleasures most conduce to lasting happiness, and ought to be prepared to agree with Epicurus that the best things in life are practically free.

Of course, Epicurus presumably never experienced the finest craft beer.

I'm definitely prepared to agree with sourpuss Schopenhauer that 90% of happiness depends on health. I'm surprised he said that. "Keep your health, your splendid health. It's better than all the truths in the firmament."

Meaning, again. Viktor Frankl and Sigmund Freud might agree that most of us are "truly happy only when our lives are pleasant and also have meaning." But is meaning an afterthought, or is it in fact the culmination of human-order pleasure?

Some questions: Do you ever wish you were less susceptible to living the examined life, a little less curious and aware and a bit more like Forrest Gump or Winnie the Pooh? Is there a danger of shrinking or crushing our happinesss, in the very process of observing and savoring ("amplifying") it? Is it generally true, as Darwin asserted, that in our world "the vigorous, healthy, and happy survive and multiply"? Do philosophers overrate the importance of reason and reflection in the pursuit of happiness? Do you espouse "mens sana in corpore sano"? Can you imagine surviving an ordeal like the holocaust or the Vietnam War (check out Ken Burns' new film) with your capacity for happiness intact?
==
Today is the birthday of essayist Roger Angell (books by this author), born in New York in 1920... His stepfather was E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web... "It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut […] is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. […] It no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift."

Angell roots for the Mets, and doesn't get too discouraged when they lose. He thinks that rooting for a team that wins all the time is overrated, because you take it for granted and there's less drama in watching the game. He said, "Almost winning is almost the best. But you've got to win once in a while."

Angell wrote an essay about getting older in 2014 called "This Old Man," which he included in a book of essays of the same title. He writes about his own experience of changing physically and losing friends, and how society treats elderly people as if they're irrelevant. He describes a conversation where "There's a pause, and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at the point where they've just left it. What? Hello? Didn't I just say something? Have I left the room? […] When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we're invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite worth listening to anymore. You've had your turn, Pops; now it's ours."

His wife, Carol, passed away shortly before he wrote the essay. She had told him, "If you haven't found someone else by a year after I'm gone, I'll come back and haunt you." Angell writes about how we look down on older people when they start dating again, as if we expect them to settle into the background of life and certainly not try anything new that's romantic or sexual. He writes: "But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here's to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever, or at least until next week." WA

Measured satisfaction

Two more very short chapters from Daniel Haybron today, on Life Satisfaction and Measuring Happiness. The former sounds slippery, the latter potentially too precise. But it might in fact be easier to measure slippery satisfaction, suitably specified, than elusive happiness. The title of Haybron's bigger book suggests that, to me: The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being.

Most of us would probably say our lives were going badly if we found ourselves in Moreese "Pop" Bickham's situation (as recounted on Story Corps) - thirty-seven years (fourteen on death row) in Louisiana's Angola Prison, for returning fire against the Klan Cops who tried to kill him. He said, on release, "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." He was "glad and happy and praising the Lord." I'm pretty sure I'd have responded differently. Good for him?

Wonder how he'd rate his life on a scale of 1 to 10, and whether it matters or is simply arbitrary. If you think you're a 10, shouldn't you be happier (more content, more satisfied, more something) in some subjective sense than if you think you're a 4? Surely.

The numbers may not add up, certainly may not nail happiness down with anything like the precision they imply, but the Eulogy Standard seems helpful here. What will they say aboutyour life, at your funeral? Wouldn't you like to be there to find out? By this standard it seems plausible to think "most people actually have good lives" whether they know it or not.

So one of the takeaways today seems to be that very rough and approximate ballpark estimations of happiness are good enough, in terms of their practical utility. People understate their happiness on rainy days (except for the perverse people who say they always prefer inclement weather because it makes the indoors that much more appealing). Unemployed people tend to be less happy. Etc. These generally reliable generalizations remind us not to waste the good days, and not to be unemployed. Valuable reminders, those.

If you have a slight preponderance of positive over negative emotional states, are you (slightly) happy? Haybron doesn't think so. Your happiness should not be a close call, he suggests. But I don't know, maybe we ought to just take what we can get and be grateful for it. Wasn't that Pop Bickham's message? Start slight if you must, and work from there, if the glass is only 5/8 full.

By the way, which face on the scale (p.47) is yours today?

Can you believe this guy's parting words were that he'd had a wonderful life? He did have, but rarely let his face know it. Or his sister's house.

Considering suicide is one thing, what Camus called life's ultimate philosophical question, but acutally contemplating it is something else, I'd have said. The stats we'll consider are sobering. Hoping we don't echo them, in our Happy class.

I disagree with Camus's emphasis, I'd say the more pressing question for most of us is whether we're having wonderful lives, not whether we're thinking about ending them. But of course, George Bailey faced both.

==
On this day in 1927, a 21-year-old inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth achieved the first fully electronic television system. He successfully transmitted an image through the purely electronic means of a device he called an “image dissector” (the first television camera tube). He’d been dreaming of this day since he was a 13-year-old farm boy, when he became inspired by the series of lines emanating from the back-and-forth motion used to plow a field. Farnsworth was a diligent young inventor: he converted his family’s home appliances to electric power and won a national contest with his invention of a tamper-proof lock...

Today is the birthday of American jazz musician Sonny Rollins in New York City (1930). Rollins plays the tenor saxophone and is considered one of the finest jazz musicians in history. He favors long, experimental improvisation when he plays, especially during live concerts. He once said: “I’m not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I’m just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that’s when it’s really happening.”

...Rollins credits his study of Kabbalah, Buddhism, Indian philosophy, and yoga for his music... I’ve got a gift, a musical gift, fine. But I want to be a human being, a good human being. I need to always express that to young students. Everybody can have a gift. That’s a gift. But then we have to be good human beings. So that’s what it’s all about.”