Dexter wrote:I liked his example with his college roommates when he resented them for not doing their fair share of work. We can probably all sympathize. This is a good example of creating unnecessary suffering for yourself.

I didn't of this as a way of creating unnecessary suffering, but of course it's true. (My son is currently suffering from roommate problems of his own.) Our cognitive bias creates "should statements" that we carry around in our heads.

Cognitive therapy works, too. In Feeling Good,36 a popular guide to cognitive therapy, David Burns has written a chapter on cognitive therapy for anger. He advises using many of the same techniques that Aaron Beck used for depression: Write down your thoughts, learn to recognize the distortions in your thoughts, and then think of a more appropriate thought. Burns focuses on the should statements we carry around—ideas about how the world should work, and about how people should treat us. Violations of these should statements are the major causes of anger and resentment. Burns also advises empathy: In a conflict, look at the world from your opponent’s point of view, and you’ll see that she is not entirely crazy.

The Kinks' great song, "David Watts" came up on my iPod yesterday. Ray Davies writes of everyone's envy for "David Watts"—who is of "pure and noble breed"— with the refrain of "wish I could be like David Watts . . ."

Even better, there's the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson that shows that just because you have social status and material possessions doesn't necessarily mean you're happy.

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

geo wrote: It probably wouldn't be good for economics if we all did it. Much of the American ethos seems to revolve around getting ahead which is usually measured by the acquisition of material goods and having big things. I recently heard the term "trophy house" for the first time.

The Buddha says stop trying to change the world (to suit you), but our society seems to expect that, especially of the modern male. That's probably a sexist attitude, but it does seem that passivity is deemed unmanly in our society.

Even though I sympathize with the not-striving philosophy--and have probably put it into practice--it's extremely hard to get away from, as you say. I'm ambivalent about striving. The messages out there certainly tell us if we don't strive to achieve we're worse than losers. Look at the terrible and absurd pressure put on young people to go to the very best colleges so that success doesn't elude them. On the other hand, I have a situation going on close to home in which our older daughter might not be interested in working at all. She breezed through school and college but obviously never had any of that fire-in-the-belly. She had a job but left it and is on an extended break. I stupidly wonder how this looks to people. She hasn't shown an interest in Buddhism as far as I know, but maybe she's a natural.

Thoreau sort of quit the game for a while at least. Presumably his experience in the woods made him a more reflective man, but did it make him happier?

How would I know, but from my reading he did seem like a happy man. He never entered the game at all, squandering his Harvard education to become what people viewed as an eccentric lacking in all ambition. He died long before he should have, but at his death he was serene. His last words were recorded as, "Now comes good sailing" followed by "moose" and "Indian." A few weeks before dying, his aunt asked him if had made his peace with God. He replied, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."

A "higher purpose" doesn't necessarily have to be based on a supernatural entity. Going back to Thoreau, I'd say a higher purpose could be to live a simple existence free of unnecessary entanglements, including taking steps to transcend some of our basic evolutionary adaptions such a tit for tat mentality.

The last clause could be a summary of what religion tries to lead us to do, transcend our survival-based adaptations. At least, that is one face of religion. Unfortunately, it's Janus-faced and presents at times an aspect that seems to intensify our capacity for strengthening our own group at the expense of others.

DWill wrote:Even though I sympathize with the not-striving philosophy--and have probably put it into practice--it's extremely hard to get away from, as you say. I'm ambivalent about striving. The messages out there certainly tell us if we don't strive to achieve we're worse than losers. Look at the terrible and absurd pressure put on young people to go to the very best colleges so that success doesn't elude them. On the other hand, I have a situation going on close to home in which our older daughter might not be interested in working at all. She breezed through school and college but obviously never had any of that fire-in-the-belly. She had a job but left it and is on an extended break. I stupidly wonder how this looks to people. She hasn't shown an interest in Buddhism as far as I know, but maybe she's a natural.

My son is sort of in the same boat though he's always been rather eccentric. He took a year of college but dropped out to pursue his real passion which is music. So he lives in Chicago, walks dogs for a living, playing music in his spare time. He shows no interest in the rat race at all. So I think he's a natural Buddhist as well. He seems genuinely happy to be doing things his way.

There are people not really cut out for the rat race. I'm probably one of them, though I have known the rat race and there were aspects of it that I really liked.

The Buddha supposedly left his wife and kids in order to detach from the world, which seems a rather extreme and ignoble thing to do. I've always liked Thoreau's advice to "simplify, simplify." As such, I like the idea of detaching from some aspects of life. I think Wright, too, says that we don't have to go live in the woods.

The first step is to see it as a game and stop taking it so seriously. The great lesson that comes out of ancient India is that life as we experience it is a game called “samsara.” It is a game in which each person plays out his “dharma,” his role or part in a giant play. In the game of samsara, good things happen to you, and you are happy. Then bad things happen, and you are sad or angry. And so it goes, until you die. Then you are reborn back into it, and it repeats. The message of the Bhagavad Gita (a central text of Hinduism) is that you can’t quit the game entirely; you have a role to play in the functioning of the universe, and you must play that role. But you should do it in the right way, without being attached to the “fruits” or outcomes of your action.

I was thinking about the illusions we have about ourselves, including what Haidt talks about here, that we grade others so much harder than we do ourselves when it comes to the rightness of our characters. Haidt mentions somewhere that with depression, this is turned around, so that we exaggerate in the other direction. That can also be the case with low self-esteem, but it seems that would also imply depression.

I also read something by Martin Seligman, one of Haidt's mentors, who said that those who tend to be slight depressives are more able to see things as they are. They aren't clinically depressed or anything, just not the sunniest of people. Every CEO should have someone like this advising him, Seligman says, to temper the motivated optimism of others around him. There is, maybe especially in America, a premium put on thinking positively, but is this really the best of values to have?

When it comes to staying a steady course when our external circumstances change, becoming neither too high nor too low, it doesn't seem to be positive thinking that is our best tool, but what might be called philosophical thinking in the older sense of the phrase: a more detached, disinterested view of our circumstances. CBT is one way to strengthen this perspective.


It was interesting what he said about the harm caused by high self-esteem and idealism. This, too, is somewhat counter-cultural, as we consider those good things. Violence and cruelty are most often caused by too much of both of these, Haidt says. Another term for high self-esteem is narcissism, when self-regard is so inflated that one might think violence is an appropriate way to defend threats to it. With moral idealism, it's as though the whole group becomes infected with narcissism. This seems harsh and even untrue, perhaps, but the key word is moral, the belief that the group's view is the only one that can be right, either because God approves of it or because the group has invented its own god-like mandate. We've often argued around here about religion causing violence, or atheistic communism causing violence, but maybe the common, essential ingredient is moral idealism.

I continue to connect all this psychology stuff to the Greek maxim to "know thyself" which, likewise, is considered one of the more important aspects of critical thinking. ("Critical thinking" is an ambiguous term and I toss it out there knowing that I can only discuss it in general terms.) But I love that this basic "tenet" of critical thinking is in the Bible—the log in the eye. I always thought I could see other people's problems more clearly than they could, not realizing this is more or less true (according to Haidt).

But this seems an important concept, this log-in-the-eye idea. A couple of years back we read and discussed Todd Riniolo's book on critical thinking—WHEN GOOD THINKING GOES BAD. I think it was Interbane who suggested that we all try to identify some of our own biases. I don't recall if any of us were successful.

I like the idea that slight-depressives may be more clear-minded than others. Indeed, some of our best CEOs are probably borderline narcissists who don't really understand the notion of failure. They just bulldoze ahead, never doubting that they will succeed. Maybe this works well in the business world, at least some of the time.

Haidt has mentioned somewhere that CBT and meditation can take away our suffering, in essence make us more even. But this takes away our intense joys as well. I've heard that anti-depressants help stabilize your mood in much the same way. Clinically depressed people at times feel a manic joy that some say is almost worth the periods of depression. I find that so interesting that Haidt's three methods for increasing happiness—CBT, meditation, and Prozac—must alter our brain chemistry in similar ways.

geo wrote: Haidt has mentioned somewhere that CBT and meditation can take away our suffering, in essence make us more even. But this takes away our intense joys as well. I've heard that anti-depressants help stabilize your mood in much the same way. Clinically depressed people at times feel a manic joy that some say is almost worth the periods of depression. I find that so interesting that Haidt's three methods for increasing happiness—CBT, meditation, and Prozac—must alter our brain chemistry in similar ways.

It does kind of seem that way, but it also seems that a lot of people who are serious meditators (based on reading about and seeing interviews with Buddhist monks in particular) are also quite happy. I suppose it's possible that they are not hitting the "peaks" of happiness but are just cruising at a lower level.

Dexter wrote:

geo wrote: Haidt has mentioned somewhere that CBT and meditation can take away our suffering, in essence make us more even. But this takes away our intense joys as well. I've heard that anti-depressants help stabilize your mood in much the same way. Clinically depressed people at times feel a manic joy that some say is almost worth the periods of depression. I find that so interesting that Haidt's three methods for increasing happiness—CBT, meditation, and Prozac—must alter our brain chemistry in similar ways.

It does kind of seem that way, but it also seems that a lot of people who are serious meditators (based on reading about and seeing interviews with Buddhist monks in particular) are also quite happy. I suppose it's possible that they are not hitting the "peaks" of happiness but are just cruising at a lower level.

Did you see the video in Wright's Buddha course where he asks a Buddha monk if he had ever reached a state of total enlightenment? The guy starts laughing and can't seem to stop.

By the way, my wife corrects me on my statement above. Mood swings are usually associated with a bipolar condition. And so people with bipolar disorder are sometimes resistant to taking medication because it eliminates the highs as well as the lows. Depressed people are just depressed.

I did see that video. Wright commented that while the monk may not have reached Nirvana, he was certainly happy. Have you looked at Wright's "office hours," by the way? He talks about what some of the students have been discussing in the forums. It's a good feature, and Wright has a very nice touch as an everyman sharing what he knows and what he doesn't. He's as everyman as you could expect a Princeton prof to be, anyway.

One view of Bipolar disorder, the former manic depression, is that artists and creative people have been afflicted with it, the high phases accounting for their tremendous creative energy. It was once thought that schizophrenia gave people access to similar abilities, but now that disease is seen as strictly debilitating, having no "upside."