Things that matter

The relationship between money and human happiness is a simple one.

The happiness created by money is abstract happiness (the emotion induced by an increasing amount of goal-achievement), and one turns to it when he no longer is unable of enjoying the real happiness (which is a matter of experience of the mind, or soul).

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and best of a life are devoted to earning that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end. – Albert Camus

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photo by: jmartinovici

People with brilliant minds and extraordinary capacities think little of admitting or exposing their weaknesses and faults. For them, they represent something for which they have paid, something that they deserve to have. They might even feel that their errors do them honor and help define them better.

On the other hand there are the mediocre minds, who would rather conceal and hide their few little faults, as they are very sensitive to any references that are made to them. This happens because the mediocre mind has another scale of values, one in which a person’s worth is defined by its lack of defects or errors, and not by its brilliant capacities or results — which is absurd, for we all know that no man is perfect. Hence, when the faults of the mediocre come to light, they are immediately held in less esteem, for they have lost that which gave them value.

No one can know what capacities he possesses for doing, happiness or suffering, until an opportunity arises to bring them into play.

Without such opportunity, the best anyone can do is speculate. And that speculation is often times exaggerated, as almost every person wishes, hopes and dreams, or distorts the reality with other, more pessimistic ideas and beliefs.

Those preaching that human beings have unlimited capacities are both true and false at the same time. They are true in the abstract and false in practice, for in the realm of the living we all obey nature’s laws without exception.

If you want to know what you are capable of doing, don’t listen to the well-wishers or the pessimists; look for the correct opportunity to test your capacities. That will provide the only true answer.

Photo by: carf

As Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, once wrote, “happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

That most of us misunderstand happiness and look for it in the wrong places is not an unknown fact. We constantly suffer its illusion and blindly try to grasp its shadow. We look for happiness in the real world, in the ‘real’ realm of existence.

But the real world has many laws — natural and unnatural — which we must unceasingly overcome, and however fair, pleasant and happy we may be in it, we’re always moving controlled by them.

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Writing is the activity of giving thoughts material form, with the use of signs and symbols. Written materials, such as books, essays and webpages, are the materialization of someone’s thoughts. Thus, reading represents the assimilation of foreign thoughts in one’s own mind.

While we read, our mind is similar to a puppet in the puppeteer’s hands — we have no control over it, we are “thinking” with the writer’s mind. Obviously, that is not necessarily a completely bad thing, for when the source of our thoughts dries up we need to feed our minds new material. But too much reading creates mind atrophy (incapacity of thinking and judging), and probably even addiction to thinking with someone else’s mind. Further, it encourages a sort of “argumentum ad verecundiam” behavior, in which people support their borrowed thoughts with more borrowed thoughts. Read the rest of this post »