These are worrying times - apparently. You can’t go a day without hearing on the news or reading in the paper the latest shocking crime statistics. Only two days ago we heard that within a 24 hour period 5 people had been stabbed to death on the streets of Britain. Worrying indeed. Add to this the threat of suicidal terrorists, rampant, flesh eating hospital bugs, train crashes, hordes of child abductors and marauding gangs of feral youths, and you could be forgiven for refusing to set foot outside your door ever again.
But is this really the case? Just how dangerous is it to live in modern Britain? Is this really an epidemic of danger, or is it a media fuelled panic? Well, Lets take a different tack. Let’s suppose (in some weird, perverse way) you decided you had had enough of this dangerous and trauma intensive world, and you make the decision to end it all. But not in just any old, pop a skip load pills, throw yourself off a cliff way. No, you decide to go for a truly modern death. One that pays tribute, if you like, to the varied and many ways we are told we are likely to bite the bullet in modern day Britain. Read the rest of this entry »
Despite coming at happiness from many angles, one thing all these new books agree on is the difficulty in defining precisely what happiness is. One thing seems clear, they don’t mean pleasure. Pleasure seems too fleeting and too much linked to sensation and the physical body. Happiness on the other hand, while refusing to fit within a neat and concise definition, seems more related to a feeling of peace of mind and general wellbeing. More a kind of background emotion that can persist even in the face of physical discomfort or psychological or emotional strain. After all, people can report happiness in the most extreme places or situations, such as concentraton camps, or during severe illness.
The Gratitude Key
One thing appears to be key in being able to develop happiness as a steady and reliable feature of your life and not something that’s contingent on events: gratitude. But what do we have to be grateful for? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, Work, travel
Sunday Jun 15, 2008
Commuting to work; most of us have done it or know people that do. Traveling mid to long distances to work either each day to a work location or staying over for the week and traveling back home again for the weekend. This has become so prevalent that it’s given rise to a new phenomena - the relationship commute, or the telepartner. This is where you spend the majority of your time at your work location and commute back to your partner at specific times - e.g. the weekend. In the US, apparently more the 3.5 million couples live like this, double the figure taken in 1990.
You would think this would be a tough challenge for most relationships, and yet the figures given by the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships (and who knew that existed!) show that such couples are no more likely to break up than couples who spend the majority of their time living together. Indeed, such couples are likely to be no less satisfied in their relationships or more likely to cheat.
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, Work, thought
Friday Jun 13, 2008
You hear a lot these days about work/life balance. About how it’s becoming more important for people to integrate their lives better with their work. It’s a big buzzword in corporate life, and many large companies stress their commitment to helping their employees pursue it.
Jazz Up Your Life
If you’ve been thinking about work/life balance lately, forget it! It’s wrong headed thinking. The balance analogy implies a win/lose relationship between the two - a pair of scales where as one goes up the other goes down. I prefer the approach of Dr. Stewart Friedman presented at T4HWW. He argues that a much better analogy is to think of our lives like a jazz band, where the aim is to be a tight, integrated musical masterclass - think Miles Davis and John Coltrane:
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, thought
Tuesday Jun 10, 2008
Forget the four-hour-work-week, the power of positive thinking, lifehacks and winning the lottery, there’s only one sure fire way to turn yourself from a sad, underpaid, unfulfilled depressed loser into one of life’s, serene, impossibly positive and happy-to-be-alive winners. It’s something available to all of us and guaranteed to happen to you on a not infrequent basis. Each of the people below discovered its life altering powers, and here are just some of their testimonies to its awesome, life affirming badasserdry (taken from Daniel Gilbert’s book “Stumbling On Happiness”).
- “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way.” - JW from Texas
- “It was a glorious experience” - MB from Louisiana
- “I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now” - CR from California
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, dreams
Thursday Jun 5, 2008
While its great and all to read stuff about re-designing your life, taking mini-retirements, automating your income and sailing around the world with your kids in tow. A lot of us feel a million miles away from ever being able to effect such drastic lifehacks in our own lives. The good news is that to begin changing things doesn’t have to be so dramatic. There’s a ton of small, mini-lifehacks each of us can do that will start to mix things up for us right now!
By examining the small things we could change we learn a few things. We learn that we can change and that we are not destined to keep living out the same kind of days we have always done, we also learn what making a conscious change feels like (even if only on the small scale); what it feels like to do something different on purpose, rather than doing something because its a habit and we’ve always done it. The risk is of course, you might learn to like how that feels, and who knows where that might end up…
I sense a shifting in the force! Something is rotten is the state of productivity, and efficiency don’t live here…anymore.
Yep, the game is up. We no longer want (or need) to work 70 hour weeks, spend 15 years negotiating a complex corporate hierarchy and wait 40 years to experience the joys(?) of retirement. We want our lives back, and we want them back now.
There’s an old story about a corporate executive on holiday on a stunning island off Mexico who meets a fisherman. The exec says to the fisherman, “You have a good little business here, you should expand”. “Why should I do that?” says the fisherman. “So, you can earn more money and buy more boats. That, way you would be able to catch more fish.”. “Why would I want to do that?” replies the fisherman. “Well, so you could sell them and earn more money, expand your business even further, maybe even buy up some of the other fishing businesses here and earn even more money. Then, eventually you could sell it all, retire and go live on some beautiful island somewhere!”. “Hmm” says the fisherman, scratching his chin. “you mean like this one?”. “Oh…” says the exec.
Is the fisherman a slacker? Or has he got it right. What are we really working for anyway? Is it really worth the candle to defer your life to some uncertain future in which your too old to do the things you’d love to do now? Read the rest of this entry »
These are worrying times - apparently. You can’t go a day without hearing on the news or reading in the paper the latest shocking crime statistics. Only two days ago we heard that within a 24 hour period 5 people had been stabbed to death on the streets of Britain. Worrying indeed. Add to this the threat of suicidal terrorists, rampant, flesh eating hospital bugs, train crashes, hordes of child abductors and marauding gangs of feral youths, and you could be forgiven for refusing to set foot outside your door ever again.
