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Weekly Link Love #23- Living an Authentic Life

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I read a lot. In this weekly post I present a summary of some of the things which have caught my eye this week, along with a few thoughts about each of them. By doing this I hope to live a more authentic life and improve my level of self-knowledge:

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton

Links

Another week, another opinion piece: Opinion: Lance Armstrong – One Massive Lie

Sadly however his victories were just too unbelievable: the “miracles” were in fact due to cheating. In the interview Armstrong confessed to Oprah that all of his Tour wins were, in part, due to the use of performance boosting drugs. The story of an all American hero, who had conquered cancer then crushed all competition in stunning style, now lay tattered and torn.

I’ve also started to read books written by Jared Diamond. Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). Originally trained in physiology, Diamond’s work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

My first post can be read here: Guns, Germs, and Steel (Video Summary)

Elsewhere I was interested to read a study [1] this week which concluded:

atheists’ and religious believers’ world views have the same practical goal

in so much that:

Both groups seek a coherent world view to manage the fear of death and link themselves to a greater and immortal entity, such as a supreme being, scientific progress or a nation.

Of course this conclusion seems support terror management theory’s basic premise which is:

… humans are motivated to quell the potential for terror inherent in the human awareness of vulnerability and mortality by investing in cultural belief systems (or worldviews) that imbue life with meaning, and the individuals who subscribe to them with significance (or self-esteem

What’s your worldview and do you believe that you’re meeting the standards it requires, as the more you meet these the higher your self-esteem and therefore the less you should fear death. I’m starting to lean towards Secular Humanism: here’s a summary of this particular worldview:

Interestingly, there’s probably a gap between how much we think we comply with our worldview and how much we really comply, as:

… people cling to selected “facts” as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works … we persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview. All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.

Also, our expectations have a lot to do with this perception of reality:

… it’s worth taking stock of how often our imagination, our expectations and assumptions, bleed into reality and actually change experience or change our bodies. This isn’t about denying, disguising, or not seeing what’s true, it’s about the cases when truth may be malleable.

And of course we change over time too as a recent study showed:

the very idea of a fixed and stable self might be, somehow, erroneous. Different versions of that dizzying notion underpin the philosophy of Buddhism, and David Hume, and a thousand two-bit new age gurus. On this view, “we” are endlessly changing patterns of molecules or thought processes; any sense of fixity or coherence is just a mental construct.

as:

people similarly underestimate changes in their personal values (things like success and security) and preferences (like their favourite band and best friend). “What these data suggest, and what scads of other data from our lab and others suggest, is that people really aren’t very good at knowing who they’re going to be and hence what they’re going to want a decade from now

Moreover:

people believe they have changed more than they will change, and that that belief is a mistake

The article then goes onto suggest that you can make predictions about how your future self by looking at other people to see how they have reacted.

So in summary if you want to maintain a high level of self-esteem then all of this suggests that you should:

  • Clarify your worldview and the standards it requires
  • Meet the standards that are expected from this worldview and much as possible
  • Be flexible enough to add facts to inform your worldview whilst being aware that confirmation bias, along with our expectations, will bend reality.
  • Seek out people who have support your worldview, who are older than you, and use these people to model your own beliefs, goals and behaviours.

Read any great articles this week? Leave a comment below.

Inspiring photo of the week

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine–
like no leaf that ever was–
edge the bare garden.

Approach of Winter – William Carlos Williams

Quotes of the week

From here and here:

alone

death-is-terrible-for-anyone

Videos of the week

Another documentary by Adam Curtis (watch some more of his excellent documentaries here and here). In Pandora’s Box, subtitled, “A fable from the age of science”, is a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.

The episodes deal, in order, with:

  • communism in The Soviet Union,
  • systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War,
  • economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s,
  • the insecticide DDT,
  • Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana during the 1950s, and
  • 1960s and the history of nuclear power.

What do you think? Leave a comment below:

[1] Vail, K., Arndt, J., & Abdollahi, A. (2012). Exploring the Existential Function of Religion and Supernatural Agent Beliefs Among Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and Agnostics Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (10), 1288-1300 DOI: 10.1177/0146167212449361

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