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The Tyranny of the Perfect Life
The Perfect Day
Life is always more out of our control than we would prefer it to be. Even with the most meticulous planning, the perfect day only shows up now and then.
If we were to have a perfect day every day, it would quickly become just another normal part of our experience. Then we would need a new fantasy to take its place.
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The Quest for Uniformity
Similar to the desire for the perfect day, an ideal life can mean enforcing a rigid uniformity that does more harm than good.
Chasing utopian dreams never takes us exactly where we want to go, because ideas change, people change, and new technologies develop.
Chasing A Perfect Paradise
Dictators from history had an ideal world in mind that would last. But their dreams were never realized, and instead left catastrophic destruction behind.
We are unable to plan a perfect life without also fully understanding the complexity of life. Things we think we want now might be different from what we want in the near future.
Incoherency of a Utopia
We believe people have many needs and values that can come together in perfect harmony. We think, under the right conditions, education, technology and political systems, we can completely solve all our problems.
But we have to stop and consider these questions: What if our values and needs contradict each other? What, if we gain somewhere, we will lose somewhere else?
Needs or Values
Choosing one way of life means giving up many others. A desire for privacy is at odds with convenience tools like Google and Facebook. Long-term travel will mean being lonely at times.
It is not possible to combine a diversity of forms of life within a single person.
The 'Perfect Life'
Obsessing over the idea of having a perfect life where you compress yourself into a focused point, means that you will suffer from tunnel-vision. Tunnel-vision means that you will miss much of life.
The perfect life is always around the corner, but the decent life is right here already if you can stop for long enough to see it.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Life hacking
Life hacking is defined as an approach to getting things done arising from “a systematizing mindset, willingness to experiment, and fondness for tech."
The idea of hacking life arose ...
Life hacking mentality
A series of trends are grouped under the rubric of life hacking, labeled "the Californian Ideology." It is a mix of cybernetics, free-market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism. It is very individualistic and distrustful of institutions.
Later on, the life hacking mentality showed up in seemingly unrelated phenomena as the pickup-artist scene. PUAs are a product of a subculture believing that all human activities can be "optimized" by applying systematic processes and formulae like workflows and algorithms. Life hackers started out analyzing and streamlining their to-do lists as well as their intimate relationships.
Life hacking is like self-help
Life hacking is a kind of American self-help. It was practical and evidence-based.
Getting Things Done or GTD, promoted the idea of breaking tasks down into pieces and sorting them by how much time they'll take to accomplish, then allocating reminders. The goal is to free you from a mental to-do list running in the back of your thoughts, making it possible to focus all your energy on a task.
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Developing mastery
Fun is the experience of developing mastery. When we acquire new skills and recognize valuable patterns, our brains reward us with a shot of pleasurable sensations.
Games and learning
Games are optimal learning environments:
- Feedback loops are short, fast and adapted to your skill level.
- Challenges grow as you develop new skills.
- Failures are learning opportunities because every time you make a mistake, you get a hint about how you can do better next time.
Boredom and learning
Boredom is what we feel when our brain decides that there's nothing worth learning. It's the brain searching for new information.
And even games become boring at some point because they eventually run out of things to teach you. That's when you stop playing.
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Key Ideas
The Universal God
Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy(1945) is an extraordinary work of synthesis, introducing global (particularly eastern) spirituality into mainstream western culture.
The Phi...
Fresh Take On Religion
- Modern society has been described as the Age of Noise, and an Organized Lovelessness.
- Advertising is revealed to be an organized effort to extend and intensify craving.
- People in the modern age worship progress, technology, and their nation-state, all of which can be described as a 'religion'.
- The dogma of such religions was profoundly criticized in the classic books, while paving the way towards newer ways to find God, like meditation.
The Author and Philosopher's fresh take on religion, shaping it as an 'empirical spirituality' was a huge influence in the 1960s and which has since then led to more people (now 27% in the US) being 'Spiritual but not Religious'
Constructing One's Reality
Aldous Huxley was heavily criticized after his death by newer philosophers who didn't subscribe to the Perennial Philosophy.
While the author insisted that the ultimate mystical experience is the moment of pure oneness with God where the concepts of 'I', language, image and culture are dissolved, his critics argued that all religions are true and some of them are truer than the others.
One of the critics states that human beings construct reality using their bodies, rituals, words, actions and cultures.
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