Halcyon Imagines

Imagining how we might all become just slightly happier...

 

 

...rather than trying to solve the insoluble - i.e. the perennial problem of human happiness and fulfilment.

Becoming happier is a subject that has occupied some of history's greatest thinkers, but how do we sort the good ideas from the bad?  Are there any hard and fast rules when it comes to happiness, and should we trust anyone who claims to know the secret?

Over the last five years journalist Oliver Burkeman travelled to some of the strangest corners of the 'happiness industry' in an attempt to find out; in early 2011 he recounted his findings to an RSA audience.

From stress, procrastination and insomnia, to laughter, creativity and wealth, Burkeman suggested how we might imagine achieving a more realistic goal - i.e. becoming slightly happier.

Imagining accepting the inevitability of death...

 

Acceptance of dying is perhaps one of the keys to the acceptance of living. 

Dylan wrote, in To Ramona, that "there's not use in trying to deal with the dying, though I cannot explain that in lights", although ironically, the earlier Dylan from whom he took his name told us to "rage, rage against the dying of the light".

Imagining not trying to keep up with the Joneses

 

"It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbours, or even our relations" - Bertrand Russell

A consistent message through religion and philosophy, this one, from biblical commandments not to covet thy neighbour's possessions, through Alain de Botton's recent analysis of status anxiety, and now the same concern is being highlighted in the mainstream media.

Perhaps much future pain and conflict - personal and societal - could be avoided if we could only find a way - through tools, techniques and role models - to build this into our daily behaviours. 

Competing is clearly a key part of the human condition and an essential survival skill in evolutionary terms but, for more of us, more of the time, what dividends might a growing, conscious focus on acceptance and gratitude pay?

Telling it like it is

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself - Henry David Thoreau

This too shall pass

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn't most of them turn out all right after all? - Dale Carnegie, 1888-1955

Our aim? Introducing ideas that have never met...

From today, our Halcyon Days blog will also include posts of some the thousands of comments and quotes by others that have made us feel and have made us think. 

Many of these quotes are already available on the community pages at Halcyon Future, but we will now also start to share these quotes here in order to encourage others to reflect upon and make use of the ideas - and in many cases, the timeless and profound wisdom - contained within them. 

For now, we will deliberately not comment directly on most of the quotes that we post because, although they stir much in us, we would like to leave it you to interact with the quotes in your own way. We will therefore simply tag the quotes under the same categories that we use for all other entries here, and on both Halcyon Future and Halcyon News (where we share exciting responses to the world's problems). 

You can therefore now easily find news, quotes, blog entries for all of Halcyon's communities under common categories, and we will soon add audio, video, conversations and related content from all over the social web. 

However, we also believe that most value will come not from leaving ideas within their categories - on the contrary, we believe that such silo thinking actually compounds many of the world's problems - but rather, like a chemist or perhaps an alchemist, from introducing to one another ideas that have never met. 

For example, how well can acceptance co-exist with activism, complexity with simplicity, or consumption with sustainability?  Only one way to find out: let's get them together and watch the novelty emerge...