With Finnish independence day on Tuesday, I decided to take Monday off as well and it is now just sinking in that I have a four day weekend ahead!

Cheers!

One glass of wine with Archer to celebrate.
I noticed I have to use subtitles now to catch the speed of the language jokes.

Sad.

I used to be quite quick with my own wit, now I struggle to keep up with that of others. I guess this is what it must feel like for the elderly who no longer are able to understand what the youth of today are saying. At some point, they perhaps just give up even trying to listen and tune it all out as noise - regardless of the importance of what is being said.

No wonder I am becoming have become a grumpy old man.

Smallsteps was upset this evening because her mother wasn't going to be home, as she will be out enjoying their staff Christmas party for the evening. We still had our Adventure Friday plans however, which was Daddy-Daughter sushi together in the city, and I was saying that rather than being upset, she should change her mind and think about what she was happy about instead. She asked how is it possible to change one's mind...

Good question.

After all, the mind is what it is, so if it isn't conditioned to be able to shift focus from one thing to another, it is likely going to get stuck in a rut, fixated on whatever it has decided is important at the time, which is generally what makes us feel is important, even if it isn't in our best interest, or important at all.

Like happiness?

Of course it is important to be be happy, but I think that our focus on Being happy all of the time has led us down the path of instant gratification and low level happiness, instead of building contentment. As I was talking with a colleague today socially, while instant gratification can be gained through small and irrelevant wins, they don't necessarily lead to the types of wins that are lasting, that are significant and bring meaning to life. As I said to him, there are a lot of pithy sayings, but there is often truth in them that goes unacknowledged, like;

It's the journey, not the destination.

Happiness is a destination, not the journey. It is a result and it can be gained in the moment, but long term, low-level happiness through meaningless point scoring and acknowledgement generally runs thin, requiring more and more to get the same level of high - like a drug. And because the path is short to getting these highs are coming from meaningless activities in terms of what will be important down the track, there is no longevity in that happiness.

Put a selfie on Instagram, get some likes and be happy. Next selfie gets some more likes for the same level of happiness, the next gets a million likes for the same level of happiness, then the next and the next *and the next... at some point, there is no more happiness regardless of result, because it is an expected outcome, an automatic response -

But what has been built - what has been accomplished?

A stream of selfies. Is that what makes a good life journey these days?

But as I see it, it is part of the societal disconnection that is being encouraged through the various incentive mechanisms, as we are able to get our "satisfaction" without needing to be part of a community. Instead we just get it from strangers who have no idea who we really are, but will support us on some narrow slice view we provide them. And there is no consistency required, just a "per instance" event.

I think humans are made to think about what they leave behind, some kind of legacy of some type, but with fewer and fewer people creating or doing anything of importance, we are constantly redefining what "counts" as important. There has been a massive deflation of meaning in so much of what we do, where something like "solidarity" no longer requires activity and is now achievable through the changing of a profile picture. Or creativity is using AI to generate art.

The bar is low.

But, it could also be that this is my view of things where the grumpy old man that I have become no longer understands what is going on in this world, that I am no longer know how people work - yet I suspect that after two million years of evolution, our human needs haven't actually changed that much in the last couple decades, we have just changed the definitions in order to lower the bar, even though the lowering means that we can no longer get over the lowest threshold to actually accomplish what we need to accomplish to feel that our life truly matters.

I should have a second glass of wine.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]