Koch describes happiness island as the 80/20 of happiness - that is to say the 20% of activities/people that bring 80% of your happiness.
I'm a big believer of the 80/20 princple (aka pareto principle) for most aspects of life but have never thought to apply it in the realm of personal happiness.
Ironically, prioritizing personal happiness is probably the 80/20 for most other pursuits.
Terry Crews recounts his highschool championship basketball game in which he intercepted the ball and ran down the court with five seconds left on the clock, taking and ultimately missing the shot that cost his team the championships.
"As I sat in the silence, another thought pierced through my sadness. “I took the shot.” It was invigorating, even exciting. “Hey, when all the chips were on the line, you didn’t leave your future up to others, YOU TOOK YOUR SHOT.” Instantly I felt free and in control. I knew from then on that I could have the courage to fail on my own terms. From that moment, I decided that if I was going to succeed or fail, it was going to be up to me. I was changed forever."
Terry Crews
Independent of outcome, I strongly believe it is better to own both success or failure on your own terms vs outsourcing responsibility to others. This is how we grow.
Sara Walker, theoretical physicist, talks about her thoughts on the definition of life.
The origin of life is like this boundary that the universe can only cross if a structure that emerges can reinforce its own existence, which is self-reproduction, autocatalysis, things people traditionally talk about. But it has to be able to maintain its own existence against this sort of randomness that happens in chemistry, and this randomness that happens in the quantum world. And it’s in some sense the emergence of a deterministic structure that says, “I’m going to exist and I’m going to keep going.” But pinning that down is really hard... I think there’s a confusion because life emerges in chemistry that life is chemical. I don’t think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.
Sarah Walker
It's well known that humans are bad thinking about exponents. But combinatorial growth is an order of magnitude greater yet. Walker makes the case that life emerges from these spaces that are beyond human comprehension and makes it not only for non-organic life, but also for conceptual abstractions like math and language.
Personally, I like this line of thought of life as an emergent property of combinatorial spaces. What does this say about puns?
Created 2024-08-11T04:49:35.886000, updated 2024-08-11T04:52:02.501000 · History · Edit