Review Outline for Comparing Jeff Henderson and Phil Connors
- Paragraph 1, summarize the memoir Cooked by Jeff Henderson with a focus on Henderson’s character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 2, summarize the movie Groundhog Day with a focus on Phil Connors’ character arc or personality transformation
- Paragraph 3, your thesis: explain the key similarities in Henderson’s and Connors’ personal journeys
- Paragraphs 4-8, expound on the similarities in your body paragraphs
- Paragraph 9, your conclusion, restate your thesis in emotionally powerful language
- Works Cited page, have no fewer than 4 sources
Paragraph 4: They suffer from grandiosity and the false ascent.
Paragraph 5: They must overcome their denial.
Paragraph 6: They must clean their room.
Paragraph 7: They must embrace Cal Newport's notion of the Craftsman's Mindset.
Newport's Career Manifesto
A CAREER MANIFESTO: Be a Craftsman or a Craftsperson
Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.
The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.
The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.
The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.
The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.
The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.
The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfilling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.
The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.
The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).
The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.
The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.
The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.
“Drivel” of the Passion Mindset
Or if you reject the craftsman mindset, you can have the passion mindset, which asks how much value your job is offering you.
Newport argues it is only by producing the craftsman mindset that you can create work that you love.
In terms of maturity, the craftsman mindset is the approach of a mature, fully realized human being.
What are the Five Habits of a Craftsman?
1: Decide what capital market you are in. There are 2 kinds of markets –
Winner-take-all: One killer skills with a few winners all over the world (e.g. Hollywood scriptwriter)
Auction: Diverse collection of skills. Here, there are many different types of career capital and each person might generate their own unique collection (e.g. CEO of a Fortune 500 company)
2: Identify your capital type. Ignore this if you are in a winner-take-all market as there’s only one type of capital. (i.e. be among the top 10 script writers in the world to make it in Hollywood)
For an auction market, however, seek open gates i.e. opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. Open gates get us farther faster. Skill acquisition is like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. (e.g. keep moving upwards in an organization and then laterally instead of trying to move laterally and start from scratch)
3: Define “good.” Set clear goals. For a script writer, the definition of “good” is clear – his scripts being taken seriously.
4: Stretch and destroy. Deliberate practice – that uncomfortable sensation in our heads that feels like a physical strain, as if neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations.
5: Be patient. Look years into the future for the payoff. It’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you.
Six. What is the power of control and how does control result in job happiness?
Giving people more control at work increases their happiness, fulfillment, and engagement.
But you cannot earn safe control without career capital. Think of the lady who quit her job to run yoga studios. She had to go on food stamps.
Paragraph 8: They must learn to serve the community and "love people, not things."
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure.”
"Love People, Not Pleasure" by Arthur C. Brooks
One. Happiness Fallacy:
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process, he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Sample List of Signal Phrases (active as of 2-29-20)
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
Partial List of Signal Phrases
acknowledges adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes
Examples of a signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
X's main point is that
The essence of X's claim is that
Here is a good college link for in-text citations.
Here is a good Purdue Owl link for in-text citations.
Review Complete Package of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure.”
"Love People, Not Pleasure" by Arthur C. Brooks
One. Happiness Fallacy:
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
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