🤯Unknown Unknowns #120 - On Happiness

A reader asked me, “What makes me happy?

Honestly, I’m not even sure I can define what happiness is.

Being with friends and family, doing things you love, beauty.  These are common answers but I don’t think you can explain why they bring happiness.

What are other things that make me happy and what does that tell me about happiness?

I like the feeling of improving every day or putting the work in every day.  But this can be taken to the extreme, like tracking the progress or becoming obsessive about improving a number every day.

I also like the feeling of pronoia, the opposite of paranoia.  When you’re paranoid, you think the universe is out to get you.  Pronoia means the universe is conspiring to help you.  I like the feeling when everything works, when events line up to help you.  When the subway comes just as you go down the steps, when you finish all your leftovers right before leaving before a trip, when you get a coupon code right before you’re about to buy something.

I also like pursuing my curiosity and going down rabbit holes.  Exploring all the branching questions that come up when learning something new.

These are things that make me happy - I feel there might be a common thread but I’m going to have to think about it some more.

Thank you to Christin for asking this question, it made me think about a topic that I hadn’t thought deeply about in a while.  If you’re curious about my opinion or how I think about a topic, please feel free to reach out and ask.

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Writing of the Week:

I’ve been writing unpolished, around 100-word mini-essays.  Just reflections on ideas from podcasts or things on the news.  Here are the latest:

1️⃣ Getting Paid

2️⃣ Trust Barriers

3️⃣ Life Expectancy

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Discoveries:

Two essays showing spontaneous emergence, the creation of a complex system through decentralized, distributed systems.  Centralized, top-down hierarchies often disrupt complex systems.

1️⃣ In Bali, water distribution and rice cultivation seemed chaotic but when the government attempted to optimize the system, output collapsed.

🔗 The Ancient Order of Bali

2️⃣ The water distribution of China four thousand years ago showed no sign of hierarchical planning.

🔗 China's ancient water pipe networks show they were a communal effort with no evidence of a centralized state authority

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Idea of the Week:

I listen to podcasts at 2.5x speed.  Some people criticize listening at faster speeds but I don’t listen in order to extract every detail of knowledge in them.  I listen to podcasts to surface concepts and relationships to ideas that I’m already thinking about.  Listening to podcasts is an inspiration generator for me.

The problem with podcast speed is that speakers speak at different speeds.  And podcasts can have multiple speakers on one episode, each of whom speaks at a different speed.

AI can now transcribe podcasts and identify speakers.  It should be relatively easy to identify the average words per minute of each speaker.

Idea: Set podcast speed by words per minute instead of a multiple of the original speed.  An additional setting to customize the words per minute by speaker.

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Quote of the Week:

“He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it.” - Robert Henri

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You can find more of my writing at chr.iswong.com.

Questions, suggestions, complaints?  Email me at [email protected].  

Feedback welcome.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend or two.  And feel free to send anything you find interesting to me!

Leaving you in peace,

Chris