Comments on: Planning Your Life Based on Your Ideal Ordinary Week

By: Finding your life – Coherent arbitrariness

Finding your life – Coherent arbitrariness — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 18:52:17 +0000

[…] time thinking about the kind of life I want to live – down to the level of what I want my average week to be like – and how to make that a […]

By: Jared Rodriguez

Jared Rodriguez — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 05:05:06 +0000

Too many Americans go for the goal, and attempt to take the most logical steps to get there. Our European friends savor life, I believe. The ‘American Dream/Nightmare’ that has been pumped down our throats by GM/Gerber/ABC/NBC/Firestone/Exxon, etc. has created the goal in all those simple little heads: nice car, house in the ‘burbs, in-ground pool, + minivan, flatscreen, trips to Disney, take out from the strip mall, multiplexes at the mall from the 1980s – shall I go on? That’s the goal; sometimes they don’t care how they get there (ie. subprime mortgage crisis) or how much the spend to obtain a lifestyle that’s not even worth obtaining (household debt crisis and massive expenditures on autos/gasoline). If Americans took your advice, they would analyze those small moments, that collectively throughout the week create content happiness. Those moments are: bumping into a friendly neighbor at the parking lot/post office/massive supermarket, enjoying the smile of a stranger, having a great dinner with a significant other, strolling in the sunset. These newly contemplative Americans would realize that their goal in the ‘burbs is really a failure; something that has detracted from the simple joys that make the ideal week. They might realize that the lifestyle of their grandparents and great grandparents might be ideal. Walk to work. Stroll past friendly neighbors after work as the sun is setting. Feel a sense of reward by losing weight from getting out from behind a windshield. Feel the breeze. Carry home a baguette from the corner store. Have a coffee with an old friend that lives a few blocks away. The old life, the simple life is the way to get to the ideal week. Or, at least, that’s my opinion. http://www.HaverstrawLife.com

By: Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:11:58 +0000

I used to think that this was obviously the correct way to think about things, but now I’m not so sure. Happiness seems like a fairly vague abstraction, and the idea that it should be integrated over time seems far from clear to me. If you model yourself as an information flow, you might think in terms of a state to move your brain into rather than a state to hold your brain in. As a clear example of this, you definitely wouldn’t improve your on average desirable life by slowing down your subjective time by some large factor.

When I actually look at my preferences, it seems to me that I have a lot of different subsystems that pursue different things, and no consistent standard for establishing a consistent trade-off between those sub-systems. However, pleasure, avoiding pain, happiness, avoiding suffering, etc, for my self and for others are not obviously dominant among considerations in terms of their appeal to me. Does it seem otherwise to you?