An Ode To Joy

Pedro Blas Gonzalez plumbs the differences between happiness and joy:

While happiness is an outward expression of gratifying experiences, a moment of levity in life’s stages, joy is like smiling privately. Happiness is often attained from outside ourselves; joy takes the form of inner peace. Like fuel that feeds an engine, happiness propels us through the world of other people, things, and events without calling attention to itself. Happiness that is not self-conscious is more akin to joy than our popular conception of happiness. We can reflect on our state of being happy and cherish it, while not commanding it. However, more often than not, happiness is only noticed when it is lacking in our lives. This is the point when we realize that happiness has evaded us. …

One reason that happiness is often fleeting is because it attempts to take root in what can be described as moving targets. Happiness is the temporary culmination of emotional fulfillment. This makes our emotional and spiritual well-being transparent. Often it is during the noticeable absence of happiness in our lives, when we have become consumed by the idea of trying to attain happiness, that we realize how fleeting happiness truly is. We cannot cultivate the search for happiness, as we can joy.

Update from a reader:

Your excerpt from Pedro Blas Gonzalez left me feeling confused, because I thought he had it exactly backwards.

To me, happiness is a state better than contentment, in which I am pleased with my life in general. I considered myself a happy person for most of my life until my husband died at age 59; after that I was not happy very often. Even so, before and after his death I had moments of joy. Joy to me is an experience of exalted happiness, where the uplift of the moment, whether found in a transcendent view, inspiring music, intense pleasure, spiritual revelation, intellectual discovery, or some other personal experience, raises me above whatever ordinary feelings I have.

If Gonzalez is looking for a word, I would suggest the word “gladness” as used in some versions of the Bible, instead of the word joy as defined in his essay. Particularly in the spiritual sense, a feeling of gladness can underlay happiness and contribute to moments of joy. He might also wish to explore the various uses of the word mindfulness in contemporary culture.

Gonzalez complains that happiness is now a buzzword “equated today with the attainment of pleasure,” and his discussion of joy seems to ignore common definitions of the word. What I concluded is that in this essay, Gonzalez decides to reject the popular understanding of a vocabulary word and assert his superior ability to define it, in the process inverting the usual understanding of the definitions of “joy” and “happiness.” I would be more impressed with his essay if he didn’t try redefining words that have achieved an agreed-upon definition among the masses of English speakers. He may be writing perfectly good philosophy, but his redefinitions are yet another attempt, in the view of this experienced editor and follower of linguistics and Language Log, of an unscientific attempt to create rules for English that don’t exist.

Face Of The Day

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Sahara Borja talked to photographer Souvid Datta about his series In the Shadows of Kolkata, which profiles mothers and children in Calcutta’s red-light district:

Can you speak a bit about the children you photographed? What was their day-to-day like? How did you interact with them?

“Children of prostituted women in the area lead varied lives. A few local NGOs run campaigns convincing mothers to send their children away to boarding schools outside the city run by religious bodies. This constitutes a small minority though. Most remain in the area, living within brothels or temporarily hired rooms, and dropping out of schools at a young age. Occasionally this is due to economic difficulties or from facing stigmatization and discrimination. The result however is commonly young women being picked up by local ‘madams’, pimps or traffickers, and young men giving into the area’s gang culture.”

More of Datta’s work here and here.

A Formula For Life?

Natalie Wolchover profiles Jeremy England, a scientist who has developed “a new physics theory of life”:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Deathbed Prayers, Finally Deciphered

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Last week, MetaFilter member Janna Holm posted a request for help to the online community:

My grandmother passed away in 1996 of a fast-spreading cancer. She was non-communicative her last two weeks, but in that time, she left at least 20 index cards with scribbled letters on them. My cousins and I were between 8-10 years old at the time, and believed she was leaving us a code. We puzzled over them for a few months trying substitution ciphers, and didn’t get anywhere. My father found one of the cards the other day and I love puzzles and want to tackle the mystery again.

Mario Aguilar summarizes what happened next:

Holy moly, wouldn’t you know it? The code turned out to be last prayers of a dying woman. Each letter stood for the first letter of the word in a prayer or message to God. The back of the card [here] was the easiest to decypher, revealing the pattern. As harperpitt noted, this is almost certainly the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name… etc etc etc

Having recognized the pattern and the prayer-like sentiment, community members started piecing together the front side of the card bit by bit. It all appears to be a series of thank yous and requests to god; things like “Please see that we are all happy and safe in our lives and work” and “thank you Almighty God for listening to my prayers and answering them.”

Casey Cep comments:

Janna Holm, in one of her final posts on the thread, said that her father suspects her grandmother had not only lost the ability to speak but was losing her memory when she wrote out the cards. Perhaps, then, the code was not to disguise her prayers but a device by which she preserved and protected them. Realizing that, Holm wrote on Tuesday, “At this point, I don’t think much more can or should be deciphered …. I’m O.K. leaving a little mystery with this one.” Would that we all could live with such mystery, and not only in prayer.

(Photo via MetaFilter user JannaK)

Being There During Bad Times

Catherine Woodiwiss offers guidance for those who want to help a friend or loved one going through trauma or suffering. Among her suggestions? “Do not offer platitudes or comparisons. Do not, do not, do not”:

“I’m so sorry you lost your son, we lost our dog last year … ” “At least it’s not as bad as … ” “You’ll be stronger when this is over.” “God works in all things for good!”

When a loved one is suffering, we want to comfort them. We offer assurances like the ones above when we don’t know what else to say. But from the inside, these often sting as clueless, careless, or just plain false. Trauma is terrible. What we need in the aftermath is a friend who can swallow her own discomfort and fear, sit beside us, and just let it be terrible for a while.

David Brooks distills (NYT) her advice to one phrase – “the art of presence” – and puts it in context:

We have a tendency, especially in an achievement-oriented culture, to want to solve problems and repair brokenness — to propose, plan, fix, interpret, explain and solve. But what seems to be needed here is the art of presence — to perform tasks without trying to control or alter the elemental situation. Allow nature to take its course. Grant the sufferers the dignity of their own process. Let them define meaning. Sit simply through moments of pain and uncomfortable darkness. Be practical, mundane, simple and direct.

Todd Brewer appreciates the advice:

Woodiwess speaks repeatedly of the “presence” of those around her – how much it helped that people were simply there. But what Brooks aptly notes is that this presence is rarely, if ever, one that is aided by the speech of the console-er. When the world goes to hell, the last thing one needs is “a word” from the pastor. A cup of soup? Absolutely! A book on “why bad things happen…’? Not so much.

For many people – especially for pastors highly trained in preaching and teaching – this is incredibly disarming. It feels like resignation or irresponsibility not to say anything to the person in the midst of trauma. At best, we want to help. But so often “help” is just another word for “control” and a defense mechanism for feeling uncomfortable with another’s grief. Perhaps some might even think that a failure to talk about Jesus is un-Christian. And so we assault the grieving with misguided theological platitudes, congratulating ourselves that we’ve done our job.

Denominational Divorce

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A study indicates that “simply living in an area with a large concentration of conservative Protestants increases the chances of divorce, even for those who are not themselves conservative Protestants”:

According to researchers who took into account race, income and other factors, marriage and fertility trends that are common among conservative Protestants — younger marriage, more kids, less higher education — affect all people in areas most populated by conservative Protestants, no matter their personal religious affiliation.

“Conservative Protestant community norms and the institutions they create seem to increase divorce risk,” researchers say in the study. For example, those who are struggling in their marriage may feel discouraged to find help in communities where marriage is idealized or marital failure is viewed as shameful, the researchers suggest.

George Chidi adds:

The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious conservatives factor into the higher divorce rates. “Unpacking these variations, [demographers Jennifer] Glass and [Philip] Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth,” the authors wrote.

Religion’s Degree Of Difficulty

Earlier this month, Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal priest, wrote about a realization he’d had – “religion shouldn’t be this hard”:

Church should be a safe place — safe to be oneself, safe to make one’s confession, safe to love whoever one feels called to love, safe to imagine more, safe to fail. Instead, church often is a dangerous place, where people feel guarded, self-protective, hemmed in by tradition and expectation, required to obey rules. Church should be different from society. Instead, it plays by the same rules: get mine, be first, be right, punish the weak, exclude the different, reward the wealthy.

Dreher suspects that behind such rhetoric is “a standard liberal Protestant agenda.” He goes on to defend the idea that the religious life should be hard:

[A]ny authentic religion will, at times, be hard. Dying to oneself is hard, but in a Christian sense, if you’re not dying, you’re not living. The saying goes, “The Church is not a museum of saints, but a hospital for sinners.” True! But a hospital treats the sick, and helps restore them to health. It doesn’t confirm the sick in their sickness. If a man comes to church with racism in his heart, he is not helped by a church that refuses to help him confront it. If a businesswoman comes to church, feeling guilty for having cheated her clients by cutting corners, the church doesn’t make her healthy by confirming her in her okayness. Church does you no good if it confirms you in your liberal 21st century American prejudices, or your conservative 21st century American prejudices. Even though Pope Francis sometimes drives me crazy, I am grateful for how some of his pronouncements challenge even non-Catholic Christians like me to rethink my approach to life. Lust, greed, anger, lying — we are all guilty, more [or] less, of these and other sins. Every person who comes through the doors of the church — men, women, old, young, rich, poor, gay, straight, every single person — is a sinner who needs to change, to become more like God. If we are comfortable in our faith, we are doing something wrong. If it’s not hard, we’re missing the point.

If The Net Had A Saint

The Internet’s Own Boy, a documentary about Aaron Swartz, premiered at Sundance this week. Tim Wu reviews the film:

Swartz grew up in an age of total capture, meaning that there is video footage from most of his life—as a young boy climbing trees, as a precocious teen-ager sprouting facial hair, and as a scruffy young man speaking at political rallies. It is an intimate film, and by the end you feel that you know Swartz. The awareness that he will eventually take his own life makes it especially hard to watch him as a happy little boy, laughing and playing. The death is less a Hollywood drama than it is a slow-moving descent into despair, after Swartz is caught and charged, as Cory Doctorow puts it in the film, for “taking too many books out of the library.” A felony is a weighty thing for anyone, but Swartz, serious to a fault, saw conviction as a mark that would stain his life indelibly.

There is some commonality between Aaron Swartz and Christopher McCandless, who died in the Alaskan outback, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild.” Neither man could really accept the world, and both of them died young. But, unlike in McCandless’s case, the but-for cause of Swartz’s death was clear: a relentless federal prosecutor who piled on the felony charges and refused to drop them, despite the fact that the crime did no real damage, and that the database owner, JSTOR, had asked that the charges be dropped. Yes, Swartz took his own life, and he bears responsibility for that act. But, as the film shows, his prosecution was a cruel and unnecessary episode that is unworthy of a country that calls itself free.

DJ Pangburn interviewed filmmaker Brian Knappenberger about his movie:

I find it fascinating that a year after Aaron’s death, I’m still finding out about the various projects and endeavors in which he was involved. Was there one thing you learned about Aaron in the making of the film that blew you away?

There is one part in the film where we list the organizations of which he was founder or to which he contributed, and that list is crazy. It’s an enormous list. Last night at the screening, there was a woman in attendance named Taryn Simon—who I recognized from film footage—who’d done project with Aaron called Image Atlas. They decided to do key words in Google searches in countries all over the world in different languages all on one page.

You could type “beauty” and it would list all of the images that came up in Iran, China, or America, and compared the notion of beauty between different countries and cultures around the world. You can still use it by the way. There were a million things like that which Aaron was doing that pop up out of nowhere.

Datamining For Dates

When Chris McKinlay, a 35-year-old PhD student, had little luck using OKCupid, he coded a script that mined profiles of potential love interests and helped him optimize his own profile for visibility:

[H]e created two profiles, one with a photo of him rock climbing and the other of him playing guitar at a music gig. “Regardless of future plans, what’s more interesting to you right now? Sex or love?” went one question. Answer: Love, obviously. But for the younger A cluster, he followed his computer’s direction and rated the question “very important.” For the B cluster, it was “mandatory.”

When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.

He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when some­one views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.

Adam L. Penenberg wonders if McKinlay might have violated federal law:

After I tweeted the story one of my followers who works in computer security reminded me that McKinlay may have run afoul of one of the shabbiest laws in existence: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — the same law that Federal prosecutors used to pressure Aaron Swartz.

CFAA makes it a crime to access a computer without authorization, a catchall chunk of poorly conceived legislation that has been ripe for abuse. For example, there’s the case of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who, as a member of a hacker group called “Goatse Security” in June 2010, scraped AT&T’s website for the email addresses of iPad users then shared the file with Gawker to show the porousness of the telecommunication company’s security. No money changed hands. He didn’t break into AT&T’s computer network or cause any damage. He simply created an automated script to vacuum up information off a publicly available webpage. After being found guilty Auernheimer was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and forced to pay $73,000 in restitution to AT&T, which had to plug the security hole.