Greetings from the LHH! TLW and I returned Monday night from a lovely, long weekend in the Bahamas. That’s the view of the beach from our balcony in the late afternoon. It was such a nice break from the winter cold. I wish we could have gone for my spring break in March, but TLW is a tax accountant, and this was our last chance to get away before she gets buried in an avalanche of work until April 15. Yes, I become a tax widower shortly. I hand her a sandwich as she runs by me most days from now until then. So it was nice to have some down time and quiet together before she enters once more into the breach, fiercely brandishing her 10-key before the gates of the IRS to keep her clients safe.
I’m not really a sand and sun vacation guy - I typically prefer more culturally-oriented trips - but this was a nice break after the rushing about of the holidays. I basically parked myself either by the pool or beach for three days, reading some good books and sipping rum punch. We stayed at an all-inclusive resort. I was skeptical about the value of such places, but I have to say, for what we wanted - someplace to chill out (or warm up, as it were), without having to do a lot of thinking or planning - the all-inclusive worked out quite well. It wasn’t cheap - but look at that beach! And if I balanced out what I would have been willing to pay for the room without the other amenities, it was an excellent value once I did the mental math to add the value of the amenities. If you’re looking for such a get away, I recommend the RIU Bahamas.
The books I read were Emily Esfahani Smith’s The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness and David McCullough, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West. Both were excellent. I’ll put them in Read below with a few thoughts.
This week is accidentally mostly about happiness and joy. As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness
Why: ChatGPT recommended this book to me when I asked it what else I should read after I uploaded all of the FITW newsletters. Smith is an excellent writer and approaches this question as a journalist, supporting her philosophical and psychological research with lots of first hand reporting. She argues that there are four pillars of meaning:
Belonging
Purpose
Storytelling
Transcendence
Her pillars are very similar to my model of meaning, and three of the four pillars map fairly well onto my three C’s of meaning.
Belonging → Connection
Purpose → Contribution
Storytelling → ?
Transcendence → Competence
I think the mapping is fairly straightforward, so I won’t get into the details. I don’t have storytelling, which she explains as narrative identity - the story we tell ourselves and others about who we are and what we are doing. She makes the argument that our sense of meaning comes in part from how we frame our experience. The example I like to use when talking about this is the hospital janitor at a children’s hospital (which has been written about elsewhere). When asked what he does, a hospital janitor at a children’s hospital stated that he helps care for sick children and make them well. That is the janitor’s narrative identity. Day to day, he’s mopping the floors, but he knows that his work is part of the organization’s mission. As one of my commanders once said of my the support troup I was the medical platoon leader for, “try fighting without us”. Without the work of the janitor and a whole slew of support staff, a hospital grinds to a halt fairly quickly. Being able to tell a story where we make an important contribution is an important part of finding meaning in our lives.
I think I differ from Smith in that the narrative process is exactly that - a process for establishing our sense of purpose (contribution) and belonging (connection). I don’t see it as an independent source, but a mechanism for creating a source. Sort of like practice leads to transcendence/competence. Practice doesn’t belong as a pillar.
A small nit-pick, but an excellent book that is written so well it was easy to breeze through it. Highly recommend.
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What: David McCullough, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
Why: The Pioneers was a Christmas gift, but I was excited to get it because I enjoyed the books I had read by McCullough previously, specifically 1776 and John Adams. The Pioneers was about the settling of Ohio in the years following the Revolution. I knew very little about this part of American history, and did not realize the influence of New Englanders in the process. Specifically, they ensured that Ohio would remain a free state as Southerners joined the settlements and wanted to bring slavery with them. McCullough does an excellent job describing the courage, drive, and determination it took to go out into the wilderness. This kind of character should be more celebrated again.
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Watch
What: Martin Seligman, The new era of positive psychology (23 min)
https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_the_new_era_of_positive_psychology?subtitle=en
Why: Seligman is one of the founders of the study of “positive psychology” or psychological study of how to be happy. Smith (author of The Power of Meaning referenced above) studied with Seligman. This is a great video to watch if you are thinking about reading Smith’s book.
Seligman breaks down happiness into three categories:
Pleasant - characterized by positive emotion
Good - characterized by regularly being in a state of flow
Meaningful - knowing your strengths and using them to belong to and serve something larger than yourself.
His argument in this video is that if you can get the good and the meaningful, you have a high level of life satisfaction. If you can get positive emotion in addition to that, it’s like the cherry on top of a sunday.
One major point he makes is achieving higher levels of happiness is different from treating mental illness. I thought that was very interesting. It seems to me a lot of people go to therapy seeking to be happier when they aren’t actually mentally ill. If that is true, they are seeking out people who have the wrong toolbox to help them.
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Listen
What: Flourishing in the World Podcast, Playful (and joyful) learning with Dr. Kim Nesbitt (64 min)
https://markbonica.substack.com/p/playful-and-joyful-learning-with
Why: My latest FITW podcast interview. I had to take a break over the fall because I was a bit overwhelmed with all the things. Hopefully I can be back in stride now.
As I note on the podcast page, Kim is a psychologist who has developed an interest in how children (kindergarten to second grade) learn. She has been working on the idea of playful learning, the use of play as a pedagogical tool. While our conversation mostly focuses on children, I think there are a lot of useful tidbits there for thinking about how even us olds learn.
But I think what I liked most about our conversation was the focus on joy that came out of both the literature and what Kim had to say. Any time we can integrate more joy into our lives, I think that is worth exploring.