Delight Springs

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Learning lists

LISTEN. I've proposed that we do something fun and unscheduled today in Happiness class, after our little exam, possibly peripatetically. One of my first thoughts was to share our favorite happy moments in film, but on second thought why not just talk about our happiest moments in real (not reel) life... though of course Older Daughter the film producer would challenge the distinction.

One survey ranks people's reported happiest moments: birth of a first child,  wedding day,  birth of grandchildren etc. Will we come up with something different? LISTEN

And how do such lists measure up against the more idiosyncratic things that make life worth living? We talked about that back at the beginning of the semester. Woody's list: Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues... 

And how would we cash out such lists in terms of basic life lessons, the wisdom of happiness? Maria Popova's "learnings" list begins with something we discussed in CoPhi yesterday: Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind... Wittgenstein came immediately to mind, when someone asked if there were examples of philosophers who'd significantly altered their thought over time. But the more I thought of it, the more I realized that the best philosophers always expand their horizons, albeit rarely so dramatically as the author (respectively) of the Tractatus and the Investigations. That's one benefit of a long and reflective life.

Lists are fun, but they can be confining. It's good that Maria has expanded her original list of ten. It's good to keep the books open. Experience matters. LISTEN

I'd say more about that, but I squandered some of this morning's pre-dawn on an engaging New Yorker piece about an Amazon fulfillment center (funny name for a warehouse, when you think about it) in Sacramento. There's a happiness lesson there too: we live in an age committed to consumerism, thinking the "Amazon culture" of rapid material gratification in the form of goods delivered quickly to your door a path to true fulfillment. We know, don't we, what Epicurus would say about that.

Happy birthday Morning Edition...

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