Tag Archives: Penelope Trunk

The Buddhist problem of value

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, God, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self

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Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading →

Is happiness the purpose of life?

13 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Serenity

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Blogger Penelope Trunk describes herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome. Her obsessive Aspergian interest seems to be in the nature of her own life – which makes her a dedicated follower of Socrates’s maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. So while her blog is supposedly about career advice, it often winds up being highly philosophical. Recently, she’s said a fair bit about one of the most enduring philosophical questions: happiness.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.” Continue reading →

New York as Eden

17 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, Food, Gratitude, Happiness, Place, Psychology

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[EDIT: Image of New York City removed at copyright holder’s request.]

This weekend I went to New York City with friends so they could attend a bridal shower. I love New York – but I’m also wary of it. Happiness researcher Christopher Peterson ran an online happiness questionnaire and analyzed the results by zip code – and found that the most miserable zip codes of all were found in midtown Manhattan. Peterson himself cautions that this is not a controlled or rigorous experiment, and even if it were, it would still be measuring happiness by the questionable measure of self-report.

Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.
Continue reading →