Thursday, October 29, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Are People Altruistic? Economic Quandaries Abound
Here's an excerpt posted in the NY Times from the author of Freakonomics’ new book, Superfreakonomics.
I want this book!!
I want this book!!
Friday, October 9, 2009
Love
Do you ever feel filled with love for the people around you? Filled with goodness and you want to harness it somehow? It’s like raw energy that flows out of you and you don’t want to let it escape, like heat, but you don’t know how to keep it around. You want to take that palpable affection towards these people, this empathy you can almost touch, and cling to it, hang on to it. Maybe you could put it into something. Like a poem or an essay or some other set of words that somehow lets you hang onto that energy for awhile longer, lets you keep some of it close…
It’s bound to drift off in the end but sometimes you just need to do something with it…
It’s bound to drift off in the end but sometimes you just need to do something with it…
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Recipes for Happiness
When I was little, I would sometimes wonder why poor people don’t all just jump out the window. It sounds terrible, but I mean, really. Say you live in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. You’re a woman, so you don’t get much to eat, you work long hours in a garment factory, and hygiene and sanitation is terrible. I used to think: how on earth could you find happiness??
Maybe I’ve just moved beyond my fifteen-year-old angst, but in recent years I have come to understand and more fully appreciate how people manage to be happy in many kinds of lives.
I’m not saying that poor Bangladeshi women live easy, wonderful lives, or anything near that, but what I do want to emphasize is that humans have ways of dealing with hardship than those of us who lead cushy lives often struggle to understand.
Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but I have spent a lot of years of my life wishing that things were different and feeling sure that it was impossible to be happy in my present situation. In fourth grade, I was convinced my life would be drastically better if I could get new brown Sketchers’ shoes for my school uniform. In seventh grade, I was sure life would do a one-eighty if I made A-team soccer. In ninth grade, I was sure if my face were prettier I would be happy. In eleventh grade, I positively itched to get away to college.
Last spring, my psych professor Barry Schwartz gave a new perspective on the whole happiness thing and on why I had spent so much of my (at least adolescent) life dissatisfied. Opponent-Process Theory basically explains that emotions work in pairs and vary around a neutral point, and when we feel one emotion it is because that emotion has temporarily suppressed the other. So if you feel something really good, you’ll later experience a really bad feeling; and if you experience something sort of good, you’ll later have a sort of bad feeling. But the more you have a feeling, good or bad, the less strong it is, and the stronger the following reaction is. This explains everything from why sky-diving is more fun the more you do it (the more you do it, the less the “bad” overwhelms the “good”), to why people become increasingly dependent on drugs (in this case, with time the “good” overwhelms the “bad” less and less).
For me, this theory shed some light on how to (and how I had) escaped the death-grip of chronic dissatisfaction. First of all, it explained how people who have so little can be so happy. They experience a low, and that low might be something absolutely terrible, but with time it feels less and less bad, and thus with time the good feelings that follow becomes stronger and stronger. Secondly, this theory explains some of the ways that I think I’ve (completely unintentionally) managed to change my own enjoyment of life. I think that I seek out bigger challenges now, so that after bouts of hardship, I will reap their greater rewards. Like running six miles. Or up and moving to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. Both of those are hard things that make you feel amazing after you’ve done them.
I’m not saying that everybody should go out setting up hardships for themselves. Some people thrive on that (me, to a certain extent) and others just don’t. What I do think, though, is that by keeping this in mind – that every good will follow a bad – you’ll maybe be able to help yourself get through a rough time or two.
Maybe I’ve just moved beyond my fifteen-year-old angst, but in recent years I have come to understand and more fully appreciate how people manage to be happy in many kinds of lives.
I’m not saying that poor Bangladeshi women live easy, wonderful lives, or anything near that, but what I do want to emphasize is that humans have ways of dealing with hardship than those of us who lead cushy lives often struggle to understand.
Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but I have spent a lot of years of my life wishing that things were different and feeling sure that it was impossible to be happy in my present situation. In fourth grade, I was convinced my life would be drastically better if I could get new brown Sketchers’ shoes for my school uniform. In seventh grade, I was sure life would do a one-eighty if I made A-team soccer. In ninth grade, I was sure if my face were prettier I would be happy. In eleventh grade, I positively itched to get away to college.
Last spring, my psych professor Barry Schwartz gave a new perspective on the whole happiness thing and on why I had spent so much of my (at least adolescent) life dissatisfied. Opponent-Process Theory basically explains that emotions work in pairs and vary around a neutral point, and when we feel one emotion it is because that emotion has temporarily suppressed the other. So if you feel something really good, you’ll later experience a really bad feeling; and if you experience something sort of good, you’ll later have a sort of bad feeling. But the more you have a feeling, good or bad, the less strong it is, and the stronger the following reaction is. This explains everything from why sky-diving is more fun the more you do it (the more you do it, the less the “bad” overwhelms the “good”), to why people become increasingly dependent on drugs (in this case, with time the “good” overwhelms the “bad” less and less).
For me, this theory shed some light on how to (and how I had) escaped the death-grip of chronic dissatisfaction. First of all, it explained how people who have so little can be so happy. They experience a low, and that low might be something absolutely terrible, but with time it feels less and less bad, and thus with time the good feelings that follow becomes stronger and stronger. Secondly, this theory explains some of the ways that I think I’ve (completely unintentionally) managed to change my own enjoyment of life. I think that I seek out bigger challenges now, so that after bouts of hardship, I will reap their greater rewards. Like running six miles. Or up and moving to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. Both of those are hard things that make you feel amazing after you’ve done them.
I’m not saying that everybody should go out setting up hardships for themselves. Some people thrive on that (me, to a certain extent) and others just don’t. What I do think, though, is that by keeping this in mind – that every good will follow a bad – you’ll maybe be able to help yourself get through a rough time or two.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Roots
When I think about why I came to Bangladesh, there’s a whole host of reasons that I can easily explain. Get some experience by doing an internship, learn a language, spend some time with family, learn more about the world, get some time away from the Swarthmore Bubble. And that’s all well and true, but there’s another X factor that I can’t quite figure out what to make of: get in touch with my roots.
It sounds like bullshit, right? “Get in touch with my roots.” I imagine myself as some barefoot, long-haired hippie digging my toes into the mossy ground near a big tree with family names hanging from its branches instead of leaves. “Get in touch with my roots.” What does that mean, anyways?
The best explanation I can think of is that I’d like to discover things from my genetic past and make them more fully a part of myself. I’d like to be comfortable in the same places and languages that my ancestors lived in and spoke.
Here’s the thing, though. Sometimes I really wonder whether my desire to connect with this past is actually legitimate. I mean, I have Bengali blood. But when I’m having a bad day, I tend to wonder: does that mean that I am actually a Bengali?
My liberal education, plus my experience living in Argentina, have made me understand that most of who we are is formed by the culture we live in. That’s why I consider myself Argentine, even though I don’t have a drop of Argentine blood in me: because Argentina became home. I'm not going to lie, though: I think I was able to feel Argentine because I look Argentine. I guess what I’m trying to do here is to get to those “roots” by making Bangladesh more of a home, as well. The only problem is, I will never look Bengali.
So maybe I have no right to be here. Maybe I don’t belong, and maybe I never even will, as much as I try and as much as I want it. All I can say is that there is something that pulls me back here, and as green as my eyes and pasty as my hands are, I know that it will keep pulling me and I will keep coming back.
It sounds like bullshit, right? “Get in touch with my roots.” I imagine myself as some barefoot, long-haired hippie digging my toes into the mossy ground near a big tree with family names hanging from its branches instead of leaves. “Get in touch with my roots.” What does that mean, anyways?
The best explanation I can think of is that I’d like to discover things from my genetic past and make them more fully a part of myself. I’d like to be comfortable in the same places and languages that my ancestors lived in and spoke.
Here’s the thing, though. Sometimes I really wonder whether my desire to connect with this past is actually legitimate. I mean, I have Bengali blood. But when I’m having a bad day, I tend to wonder: does that mean that I am actually a Bengali?
My liberal education, plus my experience living in Argentina, have made me understand that most of who we are is formed by the culture we live in. That’s why I consider myself Argentine, even though I don’t have a drop of Argentine blood in me: because Argentina became home. I'm not going to lie, though: I think I was able to feel Argentine because I look Argentine. I guess what I’m trying to do here is to get to those “roots” by making Bangladesh more of a home, as well. The only problem is, I will never look Bengali.
So maybe I have no right to be here. Maybe I don’t belong, and maybe I never even will, as much as I try and as much as I want it. All I can say is that there is something that pulls me back here, and as green as my eyes and pasty as my hands are, I know that it will keep pulling me and I will keep coming back.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Gym Stalkers and Other Cultural Musings
So I have a stalker.
Round, short, and jolly, she might not fit the usual stereotype for stalker, but hoh-boy, let me tell you. One day at the gym I was innocently pedaling away on the stationary bike, reading a book, when I saw someone waving furiously at me from the elliptical, trying to get my attention.
When the girl saw I had looked at her, she called to me, “Asho! Asho!” meaning ‘come here,’ and waved her hand even harder. A bit confused, I said, “Pore, ami pore jabo,” which means “I’ll go later.” I continued to bike away, and thought to myself, who does that? Who asks somebody to come over who you haven’t even met yet??
Needless to say, I didn’t go over to her, and after a few minutes she waddled over to me, and so began our one-sided friendship. When I’m at the gym, she shows me pictures of her boyfriend, unbidden stuffs her headphones into my ears so I can listen to whatever song is playing, invites me to her house, follows me from one set of equipment to the next, and, slightly creepily, comments on my “beautiful face” and “beautiful body.” She’s called a bunch of times in the evening, and the next day demands why I didn’t answer her calls.
I really don’t go much to the gym anymore.
It’s not that I don’t want to make friends. Let me clarify: first of all, I’m convinced that she wants to be my friend only because I have light skin and green eyes, which quite frankly is not exactly the basis I want any new friendship to be based on. Secondly, there are some places where I’d like to just get time to relax with my own thoughts, music, or a book.
I have always known, but am now in Bangladesh coming to more fully understand, that that notion of “my own,” is a very US idea. Here, as I’m sure is the case in many Asian cultures, your time is not your own, your things are not your own, and even your body is not fully your own. Even the way you say that you “have” something lends to this in Bengali: for example you would say “Amar boi acche” to say “I have a book,” which literally translates to something like, “A book exists to me.” Here, it’s normal for people to come unannounced and stay, to drink “your” juice without asking, and relative strangers to hold your hand for awkwardly long amounts of time.
I hypothesized a long time ago that this was the case because everybody lives so jam-packed here: half the population of the US is crammed into a country the size of Massachusetts. But then I realized a couple of things: first of all, that Bangladesh’s population explosion happened in the past couple of decades, whereas its cultural traditions are ancient, and secondly, that Argentina is an immense, sparsely-populated country that is, in some ways, similar to Bangladesh. Ok, in Argentina you probably won’t have some random girl making you talk to her friends on the phone at the gym; but on the other hand, you will have all your friends eating from your packet of cookies (though they might ask first), you will get a lot of hugs, kisses, and unsolicited pokes, and you will find that many people are consistently late and at least appear to have precious little respect for your time.
And so while I’ve been raised more or less in a society where “mine” and “yours” are clearly defined, I find that the older I get, the more I wonder how natural that delineation is. How necessary having “my own” things are to my happiness, and how necessary it is to micromanage my time so that I don’t waste huge amounts of it on somebody or something that doesn’t matter to me. I am coming to think that maybe if we spend so much energy protecting ourselves and keeping others away, we miss out on important things, like truly feeling compassion for others, or learning to live in harmony with the natural world. Maybe it lets us get out of our own heads, and live not just as and for ourselves, but be part of and live for a greater purpose.
So I'm changing, I think.
Doesn't mean I want my stalker, though.
Round, short, and jolly, she might not fit the usual stereotype for stalker, but hoh-boy, let me tell you. One day at the gym I was innocently pedaling away on the stationary bike, reading a book, when I saw someone waving furiously at me from the elliptical, trying to get my attention.
When the girl saw I had looked at her, she called to me, “Asho! Asho!” meaning ‘come here,’ and waved her hand even harder. A bit confused, I said, “Pore, ami pore jabo,” which means “I’ll go later.” I continued to bike away, and thought to myself, who does that? Who asks somebody to come over who you haven’t even met yet??
Needless to say, I didn’t go over to her, and after a few minutes she waddled over to me, and so began our one-sided friendship. When I’m at the gym, she shows me pictures of her boyfriend, unbidden stuffs her headphones into my ears so I can listen to whatever song is playing, invites me to her house, follows me from one set of equipment to the next, and, slightly creepily, comments on my “beautiful face” and “beautiful body.” She’s called a bunch of times in the evening, and the next day demands why I didn’t answer her calls.
I really don’t go much to the gym anymore.
It’s not that I don’t want to make friends. Let me clarify: first of all, I’m convinced that she wants to be my friend only because I have light skin and green eyes, which quite frankly is not exactly the basis I want any new friendship to be based on. Secondly, there are some places where I’d like to just get time to relax with my own thoughts, music, or a book.
I have always known, but am now in Bangladesh coming to more fully understand, that that notion of “my own,” is a very US idea. Here, as I’m sure is the case in many Asian cultures, your time is not your own, your things are not your own, and even your body is not fully your own. Even the way you say that you “have” something lends to this in Bengali: for example you would say “Amar boi acche” to say “I have a book,” which literally translates to something like, “A book exists to me.” Here, it’s normal for people to come unannounced and stay, to drink “your” juice without asking, and relative strangers to hold your hand for awkwardly long amounts of time.
I hypothesized a long time ago that this was the case because everybody lives so jam-packed here: half the population of the US is crammed into a country the size of Massachusetts. But then I realized a couple of things: first of all, that Bangladesh’s population explosion happened in the past couple of decades, whereas its cultural traditions are ancient, and secondly, that Argentina is an immense, sparsely-populated country that is, in some ways, similar to Bangladesh. Ok, in Argentina you probably won’t have some random girl making you talk to her friends on the phone at the gym; but on the other hand, you will have all your friends eating from your packet of cookies (though they might ask first), you will get a lot of hugs, kisses, and unsolicited pokes, and you will find that many people are consistently late and at least appear to have precious little respect for your time.
And so while I’ve been raised more or less in a society where “mine” and “yours” are clearly defined, I find that the older I get, the more I wonder how natural that delineation is. How necessary having “my own” things are to my happiness, and how necessary it is to micromanage my time so that I don’t waste huge amounts of it on somebody or something that doesn’t matter to me. I am coming to think that maybe if we spend so much energy protecting ourselves and keeping others away, we miss out on important things, like truly feeling compassion for others, or learning to live in harmony with the natural world. Maybe it lets us get out of our own heads, and live not just as and for ourselves, but be part of and live for a greater purpose.
So I'm changing, I think.
Doesn't mean I want my stalker, though.
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