Month: January 2018

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The Shapes of Clouds

A little while back I was looking for just the right cloud. I had the idea that I wanted the tag for this site (the one that appears in the tab when this site is open) to be a glass full of sky. It would just look like a glass full of something blue unless there were a cloud in it, so I needed to find one.

I had to wait for the better part of a week, past the perfectly clear days and the overcast days, and then past the streaky-grey days and a much-too-wide-and-amorphously-cloudy day, too. Last weekend we got to a fluffy, cotton-ball cloud day, and I found this one:

On the same day I joined  friend on a trip to Palm Springs. Even after I'd found the cloud I wanted, the awareness of the shapes the of clouds lingered.

"There's a good one!" Benton said, over and over, as we drove out to the desert. 

What makes a cloud good? It had to fit the standards I was looking for that day - but of course, the clouds don't care.

If my understanding of earth science holds up, we were both much more interested in the shapes of the clouds than they clouds were themselves. It was the awareness of what was around us, looking at it in a different way - setting ourselves the task of looking for a cloud that would be handsome in a glass - that made it a worthwhile experience.

I spent most of the next day learning to use a program called GIMP to edit Perry into a picture I took of a glass of water. Took quite a bit of learning.

In the end, the glass was too small to recognize up in the tab bar on my browser, so I just added the initials IH to the background I was already using.

Having results is nice, but it's in the doing that the fun is.

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And so it goes

This being the first week of Impractically Happy’s existence, I just had to laugh when I saw this. Such is life.

Here’s to continuing to have fun on the internet, with or without everyone’s approval.

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It’s still not about the stuff.

I came across a classic 2012 editorial from the New York Times this afternoon called “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy.” It makes the same point that so many Times editorials, and advice columns and research summaries do: that having more stuff doesn’t make most people that much happier. Having more interesting experiences and being more generous both have that result. While material goods can provide a certain amount of comfort, experiences and relationships are also vital if you’re going to lead a fulfilling life. And while there’s no really practical limit to interesting things you can do or meaningful relationships you can create, most of us have satisfied our quota of stuff. (You really don’t need that much.)

This probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. What I find more curious, though, is why writers continue to feel the need to point this out.

Consumerism and materialism – these are tied deeply to Americans’ instincts about what will make us happy. They’re connected so deeply, it seems, that we need to be reminded over and over that there’s more to life than just owning things.

The fact that these articles keep coming out, each as though it were for the first time, seems to suggest that we have a collective amnesia about the other sources of happiness. Or maybe we’re so preoccupied with work that those other goals just fade from view.

I have some ideas about the historical foundations of this preoccupation, which I’ve posted in a column here. Let me know what you think.

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A Few Introductions

At the end of December, 2017, my mechanic discovered a crack in the frame of my bicycle, just where the cross bar meets the post that holds up the seat. In December and January the sun never rises too high in the sky over San Diego, and the wind blows gently through the arroyos and over the mesas. Perfect bike-riding weather. But while the manufacturer agreed to honor my bike's lifetime warranty, it would take weeks to ship a new extra-tall frame to the west coast and get it assembled. I wouldn't be cycling this January. I'd turned in my grades a week before, and since California State University offers its faculty an unusually long winter break, I knew how I was going to pass my days.

"Time to build that website," I said to myself.

continue reading...

I'm an anthropologist. For the last 20 years I've been researching and writing about life in Thailand, applying myself to practical questions – or questions that I thought were practical, at any rate: How can you be sure if someone really loves you? How can you know you're doing the right thing when the world is so full of uncertainty? Over the years, I left behind psychodynamic theory and started seeking answers in the idea that narratives shape the ways we see the world. The result of all this was a Ph. D. dissertation, a small collection of articles on karma and ghosts and the nature of belief, and a book manuscript that explains how stories shape truths, and truths shape reality.

Not a lot people read Ethos, the journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, as good as it is. I'm convinced that the tools of my particular trade could help make the world a better place, if they were plied in a way that was easy to understand, and in a place where more people could see them.

I started putting this happiness project together about two years ago, on an unusually long escalator ride between the floors of a mall in Bangkok, and it has taken me on a rather circuitous journey through American history, the philosophy of mind, pop psychology, and explorations of cultural values.

I'm not done.

Outside of reams of notes and a hard drive full of essays, to-do lists and other people's articles, <em>Impractically Happy</em> is the first product of this project.

My goal isn't to teach people how to be happy – not directly, at any rate. There are plenty of sites trying to do that already. Instead of providing those fixes – which aren't always very effective – I want to take a step back and figure out what happiness means in our society. Western societies challenge us to be happy, while also setting up roadblocks that prevent us from getting there.

This site is devoted to the exploration of what it means to be happy in our world today.

And this is just the beginning. I plan on expanding the encyclopedia in in Happiness HQ, adding to the collection of book and movie reviews, and articles on being happy in America – even after I get my bike back.

-Steve Carlisle
January 15, 2018

(I hope you found this informative. I've posted a copy of this under the "About SC" link, as I expect this will get lost at the bottom of the blog before too long.)