One Two Kinds of People
For most of my life I was an epicurean, without even knowing there was a name for it. It was great! Then life presented some “obstacles” and I found myself looking for something else to grip onto. I found what I was looking for with Ryan Holiday and in headlines like The Joys of Being a Stoic, A Good Life Doesn’t Mean an Easy One, Why Is Silicon Valley So Obsessed With the Virtue of Suffering?, Why Stoicism is one of the best mind-hacks ever devised. I can go on. Call it motivated reasoning, call it confirmation bias. I had my answer.
I didn’t just think the stoic path was the right way to have a full meaningful, happy life. I believed it was the only way. If you hadn’t come to that conclusion yet, it just meant you hadn’t thought deeply enough about what really mattered. I’m not alone, “Stoics and Epicureans tend to look down on one another, and appear to have been doing so for about as long as both philosophies have existed,” but needed to chill.
I no longer think it’s the only “real” way to find happiness. I can loosen up a bit, and that’s a relief. This article changed my mind, it might change yours too.
There Are Two Kinds of Happy People
Some of us strive for a virtuous life. Others strive for a pleasant one. We could all use a better balance.
Arthur C. Brooks • The Atlantic • Jan 2021 • 8min
People have argued for centuries about which approach is better for happiness, but they largely talk past one another. In truth, each pursues different aspects of happiness: Epicurus’s style brings pleasure and enjoyment; Epictetus’s method delivers meaning and purpose. As happiness scholars note, a good blend of these things is likeliest to deliver a truly happy life. Too much of one – a life of trivial enjoyment or one of grim determination – will not produce a life well lived, as most of us see it.
The big question is, therefore, how people can manufacture a good blend in their lives between the two approaches. Here are three ideas. (More)
Predictive Red FlagsÂ
Reddit is back in the news.This time, flexing Precog powers.Â
Evidence of an impending breakup may exist in everyday conversation – months before either partner realizes their relationship is tanking
Sarah Seraj • The Conversation • Feb 2021 • 4min
After analyzing over 1 million posts, we identified language markers that could detect an impending breakup up to three months before it actually took place.
These changes were detectable even when people weren’t talking about their relationship. It could appear when the poster was discussing sports, cooking or travel. Even though these people didn’t necessarily know the end of the relationship was coming, it was already subtly influencing the way they communicated with others. (More)
Money Doesn’t Buy Hap…
Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000/year
Killingsworth confirms that money does influence happiness and, contrary to previous influential research on the subject suggesting that this plateaus above $75,000, there was no dollar value at which it stopped mattering to an individual’s well-being. Higher earners are happier, in part, because of an increased sense of control over life, he says.
It’s complicated. “Although money might be good for happiness, I found that people who equated money and success were less happy than those who didn’t.” (More) (Study)
Arguments Don’t Add Up
When we double down on our arguments, we’re setting ourselves up to be undone by dilution.
- To deal with inflation overload our minds quickly sort the input into two types:Â
- Diagnostic: information of relevance to the evaluation being made.
- Non-diagnostic:Â information that is irrelevant or inconsequential to that evaluation.
- When both categories of information are mixed, dilution occurs.
- Rather than adding up pieces of information and assigning them different values, most of us appear to average them in their minds.Â
- When you introduce irrelevant or even weak arguments, those weak arguments reduce the weight of your overall argument.
- Example: Drug advertising. “Individuals who were exposed to both the major side effects as well as the minor side effects rated the drug’s overall severity to be significantly lower than those who were only exposed to the major side effects.” (More)
Self SabotageÂ
Why We Seem to Damage Our Smartphones Just When a New Model Comes Out
Cheryl Winokur Munk • WSJ • Oct 2020 • 2min
Research published in June in Management Science suggests that when new models of a phone are released, consumers are likely to become more careless with their current device – perhaps unconsciously so – because if it were to break, that would give them a good reason to lay out the money for a new one.
When a new model is mainly about how the product looks, consumers are more likely to be careless than when a model offers technological improvements. (More)
Kobe’s Flight, One Year Later
This is the NTSB’s conclusion. “The pilot failed to follow federal flight rules and violated his own training by flying through a thick cloud bank over a Los Angeles suburb.” Weather was a factor, but not the only one, as the lead investigator told board members “This weather did not sneak up on the pilot.”
A more complete explanation needs a wider lens. It’s about our relationship with risk, behaviour under pressure and the influence of social dynamics. All of these are covered in this Vanity Fair article, providing a better understanding of what happened that day.
Kobe Bryant’s Tragic Flight
The helicopter ride last January should have been like any other: a short, scenic chop to Mamba Sports Academy. But things didn’t go as planned.
Jeff Wise • Vanity Fair • Jan 2021 • 21min
Either option would be prudent but would cause Bryant delays. And that was anathema to Zobayan. Like many pilots, he was results-oriented, motivated to carry out his missions, according to some of those who flew with him. Sometimes that high level of motivation pushes pilots to violate their own safety limits; in 2010 the president of Poland and 95 other passengers died after the pilot attempted to land at a fogged-in airport. This dynamic is so common in aviation that crash investigators have a term for it: get-there-itis. (More)
Contradictory Thoughts
According to Kool-Aid Man: OH YEAH, #finalanswer
Deep Dive: The Weeknd Halftime Show
From Forbes The “Blinding Lights” singer will actually be losing money: He’s contributing $7 million to the gig’s production budget. It was likely a bargain:
- Lopez gained a total of 2,353,050 new followers across social media during the week following the Super Bowl, according to analytics firm ListenFirst, while Shakira gained 610,823.
- StubHub traffic has jumped at least 50% for halftime acts following the Super Bowl, according to the ticketing site.
- Maroon 5’s per-city average gross grew by $200,000 to $1.7 million after performing in 2019’s halftime show.
- Travis Scott, who also performed that year, more than doubled his performance haul; he now grosses over $1 million per show.Â
That was the first element that turned the halftime performance into this week’s Deep Dive. There are others.
Why Do We Like Things?
It seems straightforward, perform in front of 100 million people and more people listen to your songs. Obviously. But why is the effect so large, and so predictable? Isn’t music preference more personal and stable than that? Isn’t music a big part of our identity?! Yes and No? It’s complicated.
Here’s Morgan Housel in Why It’s Usually Crazier Than You Expect
Attention is hard to obtain. But once it’s achieved it can take on a life of its own, becoming self-sustaining and able to morph into something you never imagined.
Sociologist Duncan Watts once wrote:
[Common sense says] that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.
The idea that people like (or hate) what other people like (or hate) is important, because it lets small ideas grow bigger than you’d guess if you assume everything is ranked by quality alone. Social momentum is hard to model on a spreadsheet, so it’s hard to predict or think about in terms that seem rational. But it’s so powerful. (More)
It can be a little uneasy to accept that we like something just because other people do. My inner voice protests! I’m the exception (not likely), and I really do love the Weeknd (I was at his show before he was popular), I was meaning to get back into him and this just reminded me of my passion for his music. Why do I even ask myself these unanswerable questions. Just enjoy the music already.
Maybe I listened to the Weeknd today because that’s what other people were doing, and I wanted to belong. I’m ok with that.
How to Get the Halftime Show
The story of what led to The Weeknd getting the halftime show is more interesting than I expected. A real story for our times. If you’re still here, and want to go further on this topic, I recommend reading this.
How one hit song won The Weeknd a Super Bowl halftime show
TikTok fame and “the dark underlying themes” of “Blinding Lights” fit the moment..
Aja Romano • Vox • Feb 5 2021 • 9min
The TikTok meme helped vault “Blinding Lights” to chart-topping status – and once there, it stayed and stayed. The song reigned over radio waves and the internet for most of 2020, eventually becoming the top Spotify song of the year and the longest-charting radio hit in history. It’s now one of the most record-breaking songs ever.
If the meme had been the only thing drawing people to the song, it surely would have faded away by summer. Instead, once the meme had served as a perfect gateway, the message of “Blinding Light” took over, and it was an eerily prescient pandemic anthem of distance and loneliness. (More)
The Reviews Are In
It was a bit risible, at least for the contrast, to hear a medley of songs about cocaine where the coke isn’t actually mentioned, or to have the line “I just fucked two bitches ’fore I saw you” conveniently omitted from “The Hills.”  Adrian Horton, The Guardian
All in all, even though this was an unlikely halftime show featuring an unlikely performer at an uncertain Super Bowl, it was exactly the halftime show we needed. The Weeknd strode through it with confidence and charm, reminding viewers that even though plenty is different in 2021, the most important things – including the music  and the magic of live performance – remain the same.  Aja Romano, Vox
Ultimately, the Weeknd’s music—rhythmic, dance-oriented, and often beautiful, but so plainly despondent at heart—felt like the night’s most appropriate mirror of our cultural moment. He sang alone in a half-empty (though perhaps not empty enough) stadium, amplifying the glory of intemperance, gesturing to the rituals of before, while fully understanding that we don’t live there anymore. As incongruous as Tesfaye’s apocalyptic vibe might have been in the midst of a massive recreational sporting event, it also felt like an honest response to where we are now – his songs are about coping, by any means necessary. Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker