2007 May | Letter Never Sent

May, 2007

Joy not happiness

We focus a lot of energy on being happy, or trying to be happy, but maybe this is the wrong way to look at it. If we want to have a good life, we should instead focus our energies on joy.

What’s the difference? To me, the concept of happiness implies a state of being, we either are or we’re not happy. Happiness is an elusive feeling that vanishes upon reflection. We are most happy in moments when we don’t dwell too deeply. The concept of happiness itself is passive. It comes from the Middle English word for “luck” and still carries this connotation of being a state or feeling that is visited upon you rather than a conscious state of mind. To seek happiness is to seek something out of your control and maybe beyond your reach.

Joy is a better word. It comes from the Latin for “to rejoice”. It carries that original meaning of appreciation and recognition of the good that is around you. Joy is a mental state of pleasure in what is. Happiness does not seem to have this same active meaning. When we seek happiness, we seek some positive internal change from outside ourselves, rather than change ourselves to adapt to the external.

As I was writing this I was reminded of a hymn they used to sing when I was a boy, it’s based on Isaiah 55:12. I found a nice blog entry on a similar subject.

General / Software / Internet — View Comments
7
May 07

Prune your feeds

I subscribe to several feeds. It’s the main way I do any recreational web surfing since I don’t generally participate in social networking, forum posting, or whatever else people do on the Internet. I use the web in a mostly functional manner, either to look up specific information or to stay on top of some of the things that are going on. I’m one of the legions of asocial lurkers out there. Sifting through the dross to find useful information.

There are several sites that update 10+ times a day. Even if I enjoy the content, this is too much for me. I can’t keep up. I organize my feeds by category, but I also have one folder for my daily reading. These are my personal A-list bloggers. Everything else is read only when or if I have the time. With a couple hundred feeds, it’s a chore to try to keep up with them all, so I don’t.

The bloggers on my A-list have some things in common: the authors are smart, perceptive and insightful, they are not part of the echo chamber (In fact, they are often the source of popular blog postings elsewhere. They start an echo.), they have their own interests, and most importantly they post no more than 5 times a day. I have a feeling that many people out there are exhausted by the sheer volume of information posted to their favorite sites.

General — View Comments
5
May 07

“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job”

Hilarious song any designer will enjoy: Make the Logo Bigger (mp3).

General / Technology — View Comments
4
May 07

The problem with the GPS receiver business

GPS receivers are too expensive. The price point needs to be $100 instead of $300-500. At $100, everyone will buy GPS. Otherwise, they will wait until it is incorporated in every vehicle, computer, and cellphone as it will some day. The GPS manufacturers like Garmin could offset this lower cost by providing location-based advertising. When you get near a Starbucks, for example, the GPS receiver could display a small advertisement alongside your map with a special offer for coffee. It would be like AdSense advertising for presence.

Business / Personal / Psychology — View Comments
3
May 07

Coffee vultures

No one likes to make coffee in our office and I think I know why. Today I set the coffee maker to brew enough for ten cups. I go back ten minutes later to get a cup and there’s one cup left. If there are 6-7 people who regularly drink coffee and each of them knows that someone will eventually blink and make coffee, the ideal strategy is to wait. In most situations in life, the person who acts first benefits first, but not so in the world of office coffee. The person who starts the coffee is guaranteed nothing. So, if you’re a coffee drinker and you’re running your life in the most efficient way possible, you will get your coffee at the optimal time, later in the morning, when it is most likely that someone will have given in.

General — View Comments
2
May 07

Padre Island Debauchery

DSCN1722.JPG, uploaded by letterneversent at 1 May ’07, 6.16pm CDT PST.

This was my cousin last weekend on the fishing boat where we spent 8 hours. We all went down to Padre Island for his bachelor party drink fest / fishing trip. After two to three hours of sleep, we tried to get up and go fishing. It was grueling. Several of the guys were laid up in the ship’s cabin the entire time.

There are two types of people in the world: those who get seasick and those who don’t. I’m the type that gets seasick. I was sick the entire eight hours. I would get sick, throw some bloody squid parts on the hook, fish, then get sick again.

I caught five red snapper, but none were big enough to keep.

General / Society — View Comments
1
May 07

A new way of living

Matt Haughey of Metafilter fame has started an interesting new blog called Fortuitous where he will be sharing tips on how to run your business online. He will be writing a new essay every Monday. It will no doubt be worth following.

The Internet is changing the way we live. Over the past couple of years web applications have matured and the Internet has expanded into every corner of our lives through smartphones and laptops, providing a new way to life for millions of people. A life where you can use technology to make yourself more efficient, more connected, and more mobile.

The great thing about technology is that is has benefited so many. In recent years, the number of one person businesses has exploded. With the use of the Internet, automation, and virtual assistants, one person can run a successful business anywhere in the world. As Timothy Ferriss says in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week: “Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.”

If you really want to be free of the grind, you can do it. You have everything you need. You just need to go for it.

Letter Never SentTell me when to go.