Transcendental Generalization

This is the film that, for me, elevated animation above cartoons into serious art.

Viva YouTube!

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satchitananda

In Hindu literature, there is a Sanskrit word, satchitananda, which is a compound of sat + chit + ananda, meaning existence + consciousness + bliss. The word describes a state of being that is the goal of all spiritual practice. As I have thought about happiness, I have come to see this word as an exhortation:

• Be (sat). Exist and interact with the world.
• Be choosing (sat + chit). Employ consciousness to change your perspective.
• Be choosing happiness (sat + chit + ananda).

Sympathy

Is it selfish to choose happiness when others are miserable? On the one hand, I think the answer is no. The conclusion I have outlined is that happiness is not a limited resource that can be monopolized. It is accessible “in infinite quantities” to everyone willing to exercise their will. It is only inaccessible to the unwilling.

On the other hand, sympathy (literally, “feel the same”) is foundational to social relations. It is certainly considered insensitive to express joy in the presence of grief. Does that mean experiencing grief is good? What if one expresses grief, for the sake of sympathy, while feeling happiness inside? Isn’t that insincere sympathy?

This dilemma might be resolved by thinking of happiness as a home, indeed, as everyone’s home. When some one leaves home and enters the realm of negative emotion, they become separated from us. The only way to bring them home is to go to them and lead them back. This means genuinely sharing their emotions without forgetting that you are both on your way back to happiness. This experience, this emotional journey you take together, creates a social bond. It also demands emotional fortitude and leadership.

Wow, that was one of the touchy-feeliest things I’ve ever written! In the next part, I’ll briefly interpret a Hindu perspective on the subject.

Raising Happy Children

If happiness is simply a choice, then it is a disservice for parents to “make” their children happy by continually manipulating environmental factors.

Now, the survival of infants certainly requires constant manipulation of their environment by caregivers, so it is natural for parents to develop a habit of doing so. Indeed, I believe we are genetically predisposed to manipulate the environment to appease children. However,  if children are not weaned off this approach, they develop an incorrect belief that happiness comes from a properly-crafted environment. Perhaps the pathological extreme of this belief is the belief that happiness can come from addictive drugs.

It seems only logical that children who are not weaned off this approach would continue to expect that some one who loves them will always manipulate the environment to make it proper. And as a child becomes an adult, this environmental requirement becomes a tall order for others who love him or her (spouse or children). If the proper environment is anachronistic, it may be difficult or impossible to create. In this case, this approach condemns a growing child to unhappiness.

As infants learn to distinguish themselves from the world around them, so they must be helped to distinguish their happiness from their environmental conditions.

Children should be taught to find happiness by choosing it in any circumstance. This must be done by example. If parents express unhappiness unless and until they succeed in creating the “proper” environment, then the child’s association between happiness and the environment will be strengthened. If parents choose happiness independently of the environment, then the association will be weakened.

Make no mistake: this doesn’t mean we should passively accept everything in the environment. It just means we shouldn’t let the environment determine our emotional state.

I have heard it suggested that guilt is a learned emotion. Apparently, children naturally choose happiness and only learn to expect it from the environment by observing their parents. Perhaps guilt is the unhappiness we choose after failing to create a “proper” environment. As parents, we sometimes express negative emotion (anger, frustration, sadness, fear) when our children create an improper (dirty, cluttered, dangerous) environment. Children frequently remain obliviously happy after creating such environments, and parents sometimes react to this with outrage. A happy reaction to an “improper” environment seems “wrong” to them. Unfortunately, this conditions children to react with similar negative emotion when they create or encounter an improper environment. This conditioning is the source of guilt.

In the next part, I’ll talk about sympathy.

Between Order and Chaos

Continuous despair is both undesirable and dangerous, but continuous joy can be boring. Most people like to choose the intermediate region (if you will allow me my affinity for chaos theory), because it holds more novelty.

I came to this conclusion from observing two marriages. Despite all the things one married couple had in common, despite the fact that every one considered them a great match, they still had some awful fights. Another couple came from divergent backgrounds and had comparatively little in common. For various reasons, people thought their marriage was challenging and difficult to sustain. Yet the second couple was at least as happy as the first. The first couple amplified small differences. (Update: relevant story on Weekend Edition Sunday) The second couple attenuated large differences. Both couples engaged each other in the intermediate region. They did not choose order, simply to enjoy each other, nor did they choose chaos, to split up in despair.

Although the intermediate region may be full of novelty, it is still our choice to be in it or not.

I do not claim that it is an easy choice. We cannot cut ourselves off from the environment or other people. The environment can affect us in such a way that an enormous expenditure of willpower is required to choose happiness. However, once you acknowledge that the choice exists, you find that it is both necessary and sufficient for happiness. Nothing else is necessary or sufficient.

In the next part, I’ll consider how our choices affect our children’s happiness.

It’s All About Perspective

Anushka got me thinking about where true and lasting happiness is to be found. I think the answer is: in your own choice of perspective. Our choice of perspective allows us to determine, at every moment, our place on the continuum between joy and despair.

A close friend once told me that whenever he feels depressed, he thinks of people less fortunate than himself, and that takes away his depression. Though it may seem cliche, this advice is true and powerful. I am reminded of people like Jim Carrey, who suffered through depression to become a famous comedian, Rodney Dangerfield, another comedian who had lousy parents, and Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. These are all examples of people who successfully changed their perspective to find humor or happiness under the most unhappy circumstances imaginable.

Adopting the “attitude of gratitude” is a key to health and happiness. It changes our perspective from the selfish

“I’m disappointed for not getting everything I believe I deserve.”

to the grateful

“I may not deserve all the things I have, but I’m grateful for them.”

The attitude of gratitude is a way to suck happiness out of the environment, no matter how unhappy it may seem on the surface.

It has been said that “Prayer may not change things for you, but it can change you for things.” Certain prayers cause us to think through the important and valuable things in our lives. These are made in the attitude of gratitude. They can make us happier without supernatural intervention. By the same token, prayers recited from the selfish perspective naturally will make us unhappy.

In the next part, I’ll talk about why we don’t always choose happiness.

Having seen countless good and bad PowerPoint presentations and produced several of my own, I wanted to publish what I consider the most important rules of PowerPoint presentations.

1. Respect your audience. Once, I was part of a group that was refining several presentations for a conference. Upon seeing one slide rich with data, the leader of the group told the author to “dumb it down” to only the “takeaway bullets”. When I asked why, his response was that the data would confuse and overwhelm the audience. In retrospect, I am firmly on the side of Edward Tufte. Do not treat your audience with contempt, like idiots with miniscule attention spans. Do not insult their intelligence by forcing your conclusions down their throats. Instead, lead them to those conclusions by presenting complete data transparently and describing your reasoning.
2. Minimize the number of words on each slide. This has to be the most common problem I see with PowerPoint presentations. Usually, it is because the presenter is too lazy to produce separate speaker notes and documents for the audience to take away, in addition to the slides. So he ends up with a single file intended for multiple purposes: to remind him of what to say, to supplement what he says, to give members of the audience a record of what he said, and to give people who couldn’t attend the presentation a useful substitute. During the actual presentation, the presenter either reads what is written on the slides, which is a useless waste of time, or says something slightly different, in which case the slide distracts the audience from the speaker and the speaker distracts the audience from the slide.One reason people do this is that many of us learned our presentation skills in school before PowerPoint was even invented. We were taught to prepare an outline and then index cards and then deliver a speech. PowerPoint lends itself very well to this approach. But we were never taught to blow up our index cards into posters or project them on the screen, so why do we do it? The only answer I can think of is that the modern conventions of presentations demand a screen full of something while we are talking.

   Putting too many words on a PowerPoint slide has one other problem: the more words there are, the smaller they must be to fit, making them harder to see. Each line of text becomes longer, straining the eyes as they move over it.

   Replace words on slides with pictures or illustrations. Don’t describe it–show it! The human visual system can absorb a picture far more rapidly than a passage of text, and the audience can then attend to the speaker. Another great technique is simply to blacken the screen for sections of the presentation that are primarily oral. Perhaps the conclusion is: “Less is more.” whether you consider the number of words on each slide or the number of slides in the presentation.

   An interesting variation on this theme is the famous presentation on Identity 2.0 by Sxip CEO Dick Hardt. Here, the slides contain a few words at most, and serve to emphasize the speaker’s words.

3. Use subtle effects intentionally. PowerPoint makes it far too easy to put dramatic colors, fonts, transitions and animation effects in your slides. Presenters often use these as a crutch because their presentation lacks emotional appeal. Avoid these except when the effect itself serves to communicate, and choose subtle effects.
4. Three E’s: Engage or draw people’s attention to your presentation. Entertain them so they feel the time spent was worthwhile and enjoyable. Educate them so they go away with something valuable they didn’t previously have.
5. Practice practice practice.