Baezal

This topic reminds me of an article written by John Ciardi regarding happiness. Kind of a long read, but very enlightening. : [hide=]John Ciardi What is Happiness? In this essay, which first appeared in Saturday Review, Ciardi tries to define the elusive concept of happiness. In developing his definition, Ciardi analyzes the role of advertising and the nature of materialism in American life. The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one seems quite sure which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift seemed to think so when he attacked the ides of happiness as the possession of being well-deceived, the felicity of being a fool among knaves, for Swift saw society as Vanity Fair, the land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough. And at the same time the forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to possess is to be happy. And then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. It was only a few years ago, to cite a single example, that car dealers across the country were flying banners that read You Auto Buy Now. They were calling upon Americans, as an act approaching patriotism, to buy at once, with money they did not have, automobiles they did not really need, and which they would be required to grow tired of by the time the next years models were released. Or look at any of the womens magazines. There, as Bernard DeVoto once pointed out, advertising begins as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmacopoeia and therapy in the back pages. The poetry of the front matter is the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. These, the flawless teeth. This the perfumed breath she must exhale. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. Once past the vaguely uplifting fiction and feature articles, the reader finds the other face of that dream in the back matter. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herself in order to display that perfect figure. These, the chin straps she must sleep in. This is the salve that restores all, this is her laxative, these are the tablets that melt away fat, these are the hormones of perpetual youth, these are the stockings that hide varicose veins. Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or by such pharmacopoeia and orthopedics. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy the dream as offered and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is it trying to buy? The idea happiness, to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition: the best one can do is try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. That holy mans idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. He sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned? What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through a fantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is a joy within him. Is he a happy man? Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion. But who can take it from him? And who will dare say it is more illusory than happiness on the installment plan? But, perhaps because I am Western, I doubt such catatonic happiness, as I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market. What is certain is that this way of happiness would be torture to almost any Western man. Yet these extremes will still serve to frame the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance. Thoreau a creature of both Eastern and Western thought had his own firm sense of that balance. His aim was to save on the low levels in order to spend on the high. Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreaus idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening ones perceptions of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him function for more important efforts. Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfactions we get from a lifetime depend on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of The pleasure of taking pains. The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is that it purports to be effortless. We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When the spoilsport ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun. The buyers and sellers of the happiness-market seem too often to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty. Heaven knows what they are playing, but it seems a dull game. And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all. The Western weakness may be an illusion that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the Eastern weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect (and therefore static) happiness. Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as an inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness. What they might have underlined, could they have foreseen the happiness-market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become. By all means let the happiness market sell us minor satisfactions and even minor follies so long as we keep them in scale and buy them out of spiritual change. I am no customer for either Puritanism or asceticism. But drop any real spiritual capital at those bazaars, and what you come home to will be your own poorhouse.[/hide]

The trade worlds always have a good number of people.

I think another problem is that people will quit if their team doesn't win after the first round, even by 1 point! :thumbdown:

Nothing wrong with updates, I always say :D

Same as always, they don't protect over squat

Very nicely done! I remember getting that :thumbsup:

I think I found a typo... Amount of time it takes to... Yurn 27 Steel Bars into 104 Cannonballs: 180 Seconds

Report them and move on I guess...

I bet I can make a better list... Baezal's new and improved list! 11. Can improve upon this list 10. Likes people that oppress him: teachers, parents, principals, police, and authority figures. 9. Is overly enthusiastic about 'Dungeons and Dragons' and other role playing games. 8. Very familiar with megahertz, wears glasses and, can quote scripture. 7. Frequently speaks of martial arts, but still gets beaten up. 6. Says 'Whom' instead of 'Who.' 5. Is pleased when disruptive individuals are sent to the office, so that they can continue with their learning. 4. Prefers NPR to any music. 3. Gets upset when there is a test or quiz that he did not know about. 2. Rooted for Deep-Blue in the famous chess game. 1. Must be pulled off bridge when not accepted at the college of his choice. Eh, guess that makes me a nerd :

Congratz on 950, and soon to be 1000 total :D Your runecrafting owns mine lol :XD:

Hey everybody, it's me again, baezal. First of all, Happy New Year, everybody! No nubby resolutions for meh! I'm not sure if anyone recognizes me from my last thread, when I got 1k total, but anywhos... no grudges against ya if you didn't. : Well, it looks like tonight is the final night before school starts :wall: , and apparently I hit 30 Mil total exp around new year's day. Now, I tried to do something special for you guys, like hit exactly 30Mil and... [hide] It didn't go too well... :oops:[/hide] And my bank pic... will probably be posted whenever I get around to it, maybe when I get my first 99 :) Goodbye 2007, and hello 2008! If anyone wants to add me, feel free to, my private chat is almost always on

Crafting mind runes is pretty fun. : Other than that, combat skills are pretty stimulating, athough I havn't tried out BH or clan wars yet.

I go with the old fashioned green cape, it looks good on me :D

This is slightly weird as lower prices on items such as whips/str potions will only benefit, well, Pkers. :-k Even when Pking is "eliminated," Pkers benefit :-k

Naw, stay 68 like me! Good luck on your goals :P