Baby Giraffe...!!!

Motilal Oswal

Baby Giraffes never go to school.
But they learn a very important lesson rather early in life.
A lesson that all of us would do well to remember.

The birth of a baby giraffe is quite an earth-shaking event.
The baby falls from its mother's womb, some eight feet above the ground.
It shrivels up and lies still, too weak to move.
The mother giraffe lovingly lowers her neck on baby giraffe and then something unbelievable happens.

She lifts her long leg and kicks the baby giraffe, sending it flying up in the air and tumbling down on the ground.
As the baby lies curled up, the mother kicks the baby again and again until the baby giraffe, still trembling and tired, pushes its limbs and for the first time learns to stand on its feet.

Happy to see the baby standing on its own feet, the mother giraffe comes over and gives it yet another kick.
The baby giraffe falls one more time, but now quickly recovers and stands up.
Mama Giraffe is delighted.  She knows that her baby has learnt an important lesson:

Never mind how hard you fall, always remember to pick yourself up and get back on your feet.

Why does the mother giraffe do this?
She knows that lions and leopards love giraffe meat.
So unless the baby giraffe quickly learns to stand and run with the pack ?
it will have no chance of survival.

Most of us though are not quite as lucky as baby giraffes.
No one teaches us to stand up every time we fall.
When we fail, when we are down, we just give up.
No one kicks us out of our comfort zone to remind us that to survive and succeed, we need to learn to get back on our feet.

WITHOUT HIM WE ARE NOTHING...!!!! OUR BIGGEST ASSET..OUR BELOVED...!!!

His Holiness Late Dr. Syedna Mohammad Burhanuddin (RA)

When I was born, the very first thing my parents did was to thank Him for this blessing. As I grew up, they would show me His picture everyday so that I learnt to recognize Him even before I could recognize my family. 
 

We travelled vast distances, waited for hours, just to catch a glimpse of Him, on top of buildings, on trees, on poles and on every place we could reach. And once we do that, there was no limit to our happiness. The moment we saw him, our eyes filled with tears of joy and we forgot all the miseries of our life. 
 

We dedicated all our success to Him for we know whatever we did, wherever we are, it’s all because of His prayers and blessings. From our names to our company names, for every little thing we acted upon his advice. Be it night or day, sitting or standing, working or resting, we always remembered Him. He was the epitome of contentment, a beacon of light and a mentor for young minds. 
 

We the youth might not have followed everything that He preached, but our hearts were always filled with love and respect for Him. We know, without him we are nothing.
 

When we realise today that we have lost him, we realised why he was important. We realised that the tears which we shed today on his demise, were his efforts of 50 years making us cry on the Martyr of Karbala, Imam Hussain (AS). He always said, “Hubbul Watane Minal Imaan” which means Being Loyal to the country is the real Religion and Imaan. The respect that the Dawoodi Bohra community has today is because of the Countless Efforts and preachings of His Holiness. We did not lose a Religion Leader, but we lost a Father, a Teacher, a Guide and a Holy Human Being.

He was to complete his 102 years in the next month and enter into 103th year, but unfortunately It did not happen and he left us crying. 

 
We will miss you the Doctor of Islamic sciences, Doctor of theology, the Star of Texas, the Star of Jordan, the Vishaul Nile and mostly a Father, A Guide and A Holy Man.
Miss You MAULA ….

Attitude ...!!!

Margaret Atwood

A 1983 commencement address given at the University of Toronto.

I am of course overjoyed to be here today in the role of ceremonial object. There is more than the usual amount of satisfaction in receiving an honorary degree from the university that helped to form one’s erstwhile callow and ignorant mind into the thing of dubious splendor that it is today; whose professors put up with so many overdue term papers, and struggled to read one’s handwriting, of which "interesting" is the best that has been said; at which one failed to learn Anglo-Saxon and somehow missed Bibliography entirely, a severe error which I trust no one present here today has committed; and at which one underwent excruciating agonies not only of soul but of body, later traced to having drunk too much coffee in the bowels of Wymilwood.
It is to Victoria College that I can attribute the fact that Bell Canada, Oxford University Press and McClelland and Stewart all failed to hire me in the summer of ‘63, on the grounds that I was a) overqualified and b) couldn’t type, thus producing in me that state of joblessness, angst and cosmic depression which everyone knows is indispensable for novelists and poets, although nobody has ever claimed the same for geologists, dentists or chartered accountants. It is also due to Victoria College, incarnated in the person of Northrop Frye, that I didn’t run away to England to become a waitress, live in a garret, write masterpieces and get tuberculosis. He thought I might have more spare time for creation if I ran away to Boston, lived in a stupor, wrote footnotes and got anxiety attacks, that is, if I went to Graduate School, and he was right. So, for all the benefits conferred upon me by my Alma Mater, where they taught me that the truth would make me free but failed to warn me of the kind of trouble I’d get into by trying to tell it—I remain duly grateful.
But everything has its price. No sooner had I tossed off a graceful reply to the letter inviting me to be present today than I began to realize the exorbitance of what was expected of me. I was going to have to come up with something to say, to a graduating class in 1983, year of the Ph. D. taxi driver, when young people have unemployment the way they used to have ugly blackheads; something presumably useful, wise, filled with resonance and overview, helpful, encouraging and optimistic. After all, you are being launched—though ever since I experienced the process, I’ve wondered why “convocation” is the name for it. “Ejection” would be better. Even in the best of times, it’s more or less like being pushed over a cliff, and these are not the best of times. In case you haven’t figured it out already, I’m here to tell you that it’s an armpit out there. As for your university degree, there are definitely going to be days when you will feel that you’ve been given a refrigerator and sent to the middle of a jungle, where there are no three-pronged grounded plugholes.
Not only that, the year will come when you will wake up in the middle of the night and realize that the people you went to school with are in positions of power, and may soon actually be running things. If there’s anything more calculated to thick men’s blood with cold, it’s that. After all, you know how much they didn’t know then, and, given yourself as an example, you can’t assume they know a great deal more now. “We’re all doomed,” you will think. (For example: Brian Mulroney is only a year older than I am.) You may feel that the only thing to do when you’ve reached this stage is to take up nail-biting, mantras, or jogging, all of which would be recognized by animal behavior specialists as substitution activities, like scratching, which are resorted to in moments of unresolved conflict. But we’ll get around to some positive thinking in a moment.
“What shall I tell them!” I thought, breaking out into a cold sweat, as I tossed and turned night after night. (Lest you leap to indulge in Calvinistic guilt at the idea of having been the proximate cause of my discomfort, let me hasten to add that I was on a boat. The tossing and turning was par for the course, and the cold sweat can be cured by Gravol). For a while I toyed with the idea of paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, who told one graduating class, “Everything is going to become unbelievably worse and will never get better again,” and walked off the stage. But that’s the American style: boom or bust. A Canadian would be more apt to say, “things may be pretty mediocre but let’s at least try to hold the line.”
Then I thought that maybe I could say a few words on the subject of a liberal arts education, and how it prepares you for life. But sober reflection led me to the conclusion that this topic too was a washout; for, as you will soon discover, a liberal arts education doesn’t exactly prepare you for life. A preparation-for-life curriculum would not consist of courses on Victorian Thought and French Romanticism, but of things like How to Cope with Marital Breakdown, Getting More for Your Footwear Dollar, Dealing with Stress, and How To Keep Your Fingernails from Breaking Off by Always Filing Them Towards the Center; in other words, it would read like the contents page of Homemakers Magazine, which is why Homemakers Magazine is so widely read, even by me. Or, for boys, Forbes or The Economist, and Improving Your Place in the Power Hierarchy by Choosing the Right Suit. (Dark blue with a faint white pinstripe, not too far apart, in case you’re interested.)
Or maybe, I thought, I should expose glaring errors in the educational system, or compile a list of things I was taught which are palpably not true. For instance, in high school I made the mistake of taking Home Economics instead of Typing—we thought, in those days, that if you took the commercial course most of your eyebrows would come off and would have to be drawn on with a pencil for the rest of your life—where I was told that every meal should consist of a brown thing, a white thing, a yellow thing and a green thing; that it was not right to lick the spoon while cooking; and that the inside of a dress seam was as important as the outside. All three of these ideas are false and should be discarded immediately by anyone who still holds them.
Nor did anyone have the foresight to inform me that the best thing I could do for myself as a writer would be back and wrist exercises. No one has yet done a study of this, but they will, and when they start excavating and measuring the spines and arm bones of the skeletons of famous writers of the past I am sure they will find that those who wrote the longest novels, such as Dickens and Melville, also had the thickest wrists. The real reason that Emily Dickinson stuck to lyric poems with relatively few stanzas is that she had spindly fingers. You may scoff, but future research will prove me right.
But I then thought, I shouldn’t talk about writing. Few of this graduating class will wish to be writers, and those that do should by no means be encouraged. Weave a circle round them thrice, and close your eyes holy dread, because who needs the competition? What with the proliferation of Creative Writing courses, a mushroom of recent growth all but unknown in my youth, we will soon have a state of affairs in which everybody writes and nobody reads, the exact reverse of the way things were when I was composing dolorous verses in a rented cupboard on Charles Street in the early sixties.
Or maybe, I thought, I should relate to them a little known fact of shocking import, which they will remember vividly when they have all but forgotten the rest of this speech. For example: nobody ever tells you, but did you know that when you have a baby your hair falls out? Not all of it, and not all at once, but it does fall out. It has something to do with a zinc imbalance. The good news is that it does grow back in. This only applies to girls. With boys, it falls out whether you have a baby or not, and it never grows back in; but even then there is hope. In a pinch, you can resort to quotation, a commodity which a liberal arts education teaches you to treat with respect, and I offer the following: “God only made a few perfect heads, and the rest lie covered with hair.”
Which illustrates the following point: when faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it. As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative. Blood can either be the gift of life or what comes out of you when you cut your wrists in the bathtub. Or, somewhat less drastically, if you spill your milk you’re left with a glass which is either half empty or half full.
Which brings us to the hidden agenda of this speech. What you are being ejected into today is a world that is both half empty and half full. On the one hand, the biosphere is rotting away. The raindrops that keep falling on your head are also killing the fish, the trees, the animals, and, if they keep being as acid as they are now, they’ll eventually do away with things a lot closer to home, such as crops, front lawns and your digestive tract. Nature is no longer what surrounds us, we surround it, and the switch has not been for the better. On the other hand, unlike the ancient Egyptians, we as a civilization know what mistakes we are making and we also have the technology to stop making them; all that is lacking is the will.
Another example: on the one hand, we ourselves live daily with the threat of annihilation. We’re just a computer button and a few minutes away from it, and the gap between us and it is narrowing every day. We secretly think in terms not of “If the Bomb Drops” but of “When the Bomb Drops,” and it’s understandable if we sometimes let ourselves slide into a mental state of powerlessness and consequent apathy. On the other hand, the catastrophe that threatens us as a species, and most other species as well, is not unpredictable and uncontrollable, like the eruption of the volcano that destroyed Pompeii. If it occurs, we can die with the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the death of the world was a man-made and therefore preventable event, and that the failure to prevent it was a failure of human will.
This is the kind of world we find ourselves in, and it’s not pleasant. Faced with facts this depressing, the question of the economy—or how many of us in this country can afford two cars doesn’t really loom too large, but you’d never know it from reading the papers. Things are in fact a lot worse elsewhere, where expectations center not on cars and houses and jobs but on the next elusive meal. That’s part of the down side. The up side, here and now, is that this is still more or less a democracy; you don’t get shot or tortured yet for expressing an opinion, and politicians, motivated as they may be by greed and the lust for power, are nevertheless or because of this, still swayed by public opinion. The issues raised in any election are issues perceived by those who want power to be of importance to those in a position to confer it upon them. In other words, if enough people show by the issues they raise and by the way they’re willing to vote that they want changes made, then change becomes possible. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality.
Try it and see.

On running after one’s hat...!!!

G. K. Chesterton

I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded in my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has been, I understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters. Battersea was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of human localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great sheets of water, there must be something quite incomparable in the landscape (or waterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be a vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher’s must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange smoothness of the gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago. Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary “Indignant Ratepayer” who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose, under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said, everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.
For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting, little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.
Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.
The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English.” Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at all that my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring.
So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said: “Wine is good with everything except water,” and on a similar principle, water is good with everything except wine.

(1908)

The Quality of Life...!!!

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.
I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.
That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

***

In 2013, the concept of quality of life is effectively drowning in the banality of self-reported statistical surveys based on unreconstructed concepts overloaded with institutionalized connotations.
Just looking at (for example) the Gallup well-being survey categories – career, social, financial, physical, community – depresses me. It’s not just that the words themselves denote banal categories with which to think about life. You know that they also have the force of committee interpretations by statisticians and economists behind them. Committees that probably included no writers of imaginative fiction or speculative philosophy.
The very consensual familiarity of those concepts, which makes them suitable for designing metrics and assessments, makes them useless in actually figuring out what quality of life means. The idea that you take a survey repeatedly over a long period of time, with thousands of others, to figure out whether you are living a quality life is in the not-even-wrong category. That mental model is suitable for tracking your weight or height. Not for quality of life.
An indicator of the sort of absurdity that results when you take such thinking seriously is the research finding that money does not buy happiness beyond a point. Or more precisely, that subjective self-reported “happiness” does not correlate with income above $75,000 or so, in the US.
Why is the hypothesis that we earn incomes in order to buy happiness from some sort of standard-life-script store even a reasonable one, worthy of research?
How about money as a creative stab at attaining retirement security using something other than a tax-law-incentivized 401(k) plan? Money as planning for kids’ futures outside of colleges? Money as a Plan B for health emergencies that occur while uninsured? Money as flexibility in when and how you can choose to do stuff? Money as a necessary kind of fuel in status races we instinctively engage in? Money as the capacity to spiral into stoned, drunken debauchery? Money as something to blow on a yacht in order to investigate the idea that sailing in luxury around the world might be create meaning in life? Money for individuals to invest in building both useless first-world apps and Mars rockets?
In short, money as freedom to decide what quality of life means to us?

***

To start with the can-money-buy-happiness question is to assume you have a valid framework within which to make sense of what people might mean by a loaded-and-focused word like happiness.
To measure the ability to pursue quality of life in terms of income is to assume the validity of prevailing scripts that classify quality of life as a consumption commodity. Something to be acquired through some mix of direct provisioning by others, and cash outlays within restricted categories.
The problem goes deeper than this artificial separation. How is it meaningful to ask how income correlates with happiness without asking precisely how much control we have in spending it? Could the $75,000 threshold discovered merely be an artifact of enforced consumption rigidity in middle and upper-class scripts, where marginal income dollars above that amount are already earmarked for socially expected and institutionally incentivized expenses (think home-buying and saving for college)? A sort of “cost of doing business” in a particular social class? Do people who flout those norms manage to move the threshold higher? Or are they penalized so harshly that they regret flouting those norms? Do mavericks see increasing happiness levels up to $200,000 instead of $75,000? Or does the threshold drop because of the increased financial burdens that come with breakaway scripts?
Why isn’t the most important financial threshold in the inner lives of many, rich or poor, the subjective notion of fuck-you money, the first thing to study? Why isn’t there a major UN study tracking what people consider fuck-you money? Why aren’t Nobel-winning behavioral economists designing clever experiments to tease out how we think about this quantity? It is, after all, our main subjective measure of how not-free we perceive ourselves to be.
Nobody, other than bureaucrats who fund research and economists, asks the question “how much income is needed to be happy?” We already know that talking about happiness without talking about what trade-offs we are making to pursue it is meaningless. The rest of us real people ask the question “how much wealth is required to be free of scripts that dictate what trade-offs you are allowed to make?”
It does not really matter if you generalize beyond income to various in-kind quality-of-life elements like a clean environment or access to healthcare. If you are not measuring prevailing levels of freedom you are measuring nothing relevant. Until people start answering $0 to the fuck-you-money question across the planet, you can be sure that they do not perceive themselves to be free enough to properly pursue quality of life.
The interesting question is not what money doesn’t buy us that economists assume we do, but what it does buy us that we seek it so obsessively.

***

At the other end of the spectrum from happiness-money and fuck-you-money, we have dollar-a-day politics.
McDonald’s was recently excoriated for daring to actually engage the question of how to live on a minimum wage in the United States.
On the other side of the planet in India, a politician recently found himself in trouble for suggesting that it was still possible to have a hearty meal in Mumbai for Rs. 12 (about $0.20), as part of an ongoing debate to redefine the poverty line at Rs. 33.30 per day (about $0.54).
It isn’t that these suggestions are offensive in and of themselves. I actually found the McDonald’s chart thought-provoking (even though the motives behind it are probably not-quite-best-faith) and the Indian politician’s remark a reasonable enough factoid to throw into the debate.
The problem isn’t specific stupid numbers or specific ideas about how to live on certain incomes. The problem is that we have stupid discussions about numbers because we cannot have intelligent discussions about what quality of life means. Our culture forces us to argue about how others ought to pursue quality-of-life. You there, save for college. You there, buy a house. You there, get your calories and daily protein requirement before you get your psychadelics.
Both McDonald’s and the Indian politician might have sparked far more interesting debates if they had included the local price of pot in their speculations about the budgets of others. But of course, they couldn’t, because they would have faced even greater punishment for tangibly highlighting freedom as potentially being a component of a quality life.
It is easy to dismiss such ideas as the  criticism of hard-working bureaucrats in thankless jobs by first-world residents working the top of their Maslow hierarchy of needs. Perhaps those navigating the bottom of the hierarchy of needs in Africa benefit from hard-nosed attempts to reduce poetic thoughts about freedom into clean-edged models and metrics.
The problem is, this approach doesn’t work in Africa either. And it is paternalistic to suggest that it does.

***

The basics. It is perhaps the favorite phrase of aid workers working to bring modern conveniences to the millions who lack it, starting with the basics, such as clean water and early childhood healthcare.
It is not that the act of providing the basics is itself a paternalistic act. But the notions of quality-of-life informing the act can make it so, and radically affect the structure of societies that start to emerge as the provisioning mechanisms harden into institutions. We know this because over a century, that is precisely what happened in the “developed” world that so many are miserable in today.
The disturbing paternalism in the idea lies in the implicit assumption that those who lack clean water can be treated as desperate water-seeking zombies with no higher aspirations. That when water is the immediate priority, it is the also the only priority and the most important priority. That it would be somehow wrong of a poor person to choose to spend money on a temporary escape by watching a movie for instance, before prioritizing clean water. That it would be even wronger for that person to succumb to hopelessness and find solace in getting stoned for a while.
When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realize that they don’t exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never. With “democracy” injected somewhere along the an S-curve from pre-industrial squalor to post-industrial anomie.

Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a-day to fetch water. There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones.

Basketball — hardly a “basic” —  has arguably done more to help the Black community in America heal the scars of slavery and overcome the tribulations of life in violent ghettos than clumsy efforts to provide the “basics.” In India, I suspect denial of access to street cricket and Bollywood music would cause riots faster than turning off the water supply. We are willing to trade running tap water for a mile-long walk if the alternative is to give up TV.
Even for those literally living on less than a dollar a day, the quality of life is about more than a hard daily scramble for the “basics.” Humans strive to live full lives whatever their situation. This requires freedom. 
Fear of this fact is at the root of all authoritarian attempts to model and measure the quality of life.

***

I sometimes get the feeling that benefactors who set out to help others navigate by their own notions of what constitutes unsightly and smelly squalor in their lives rather than what counts as quality in beneficiaries’ lives.
We are afraid that if we allow those with less the right to choose what quality of life means to them, they may make choices that lower the quality of our lives. If a slum-dweller chooses to use resources to buy a TV rather than address the squalor that intrudes on the visual and olfactory lives of the rich, there is a problem. A problem to be addressed by taking away cash and offering in-kind “aid” in the form of housing and sanitation projects that conform to the aesthetic priorities of the rich.
Worse yet, a minimum-wage worker might find balanced quality-of-life by doing her work at a fast-food chain with visibly sullen reluctance, and finding relief elsewhere. A problem to be solved by offering motivational seminars in the workplace and requiring fast-food workers to sport duchenne smiles and pieces of flair while they are visible to the rich.
And perhaps worst of all, the slum-dweller, once basic needs are taken care of, might use his next few marginal dollars to feed his now-foregrounded resentments with radical literature rather than spend money on showers, haircuts and turning his shanty into less of an eyesore.
I suspect the fear of such choices is what makes us fearful of simply giving the poor money rather than solutions to what we perceive as the problems in their lives. Money has its problems as a proxy for freedom, but it is better than offering a sandwich to a homeless person because you suspect he might use the equivalent amount of money to buy a beer instead.
The free response of less privileged individuals to perceptions of relative deprivation is not always what the more privileged hope it will be. If I were poor, and had to choose between eating more protein and escaping the hopelessness of my life for a few hours a day by watching TV while stoned, I’d probably choose the stoned TV-watching. Like millions of actual poor people seem to. Along with their $75,000+ middle-class peers.
This should tell us something: whatever its definition, quality of life cannot be a partial notion that focuses on “basics” and tables questions of freedom and self-actualization for future discussion when all participants are well-fed, watered, bathed, clothed and clean-shaven. Because people don’t define or seek out quality piecemeal, let alone in a sequence.
As Macaulay once noted: “If men are to wait for liberty till they become good and wise in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.”

***

So the search for meaning in life does not wait on the satisfaction of basic needs. Any notion of quality of life that starts with a breakdown and classification of quality of life into more and less basic needs is starting in the wrong place. Any model that conceptualizes development as a progressive fulfillment of needs in a predictable sequence, and offers aid constrained by that sequence (or worse, penalizes attempts by beneficiaries to break out of the sequence), is headed for a very quick unraveling.
You need music and literature even when you are hungry and ill. There is a reason middle-class revolutionaries stir up popular passions among the hungry and dispossessed with theology, philosophical rhetoric and self-actualization narratives rather than narratives driven by the logic of access to basic resources.
Prisoners in California currently on a hunger strike to protest solitary confinement policies illustrate the poverty of such linear-sequential approaches to quality of life. I know nothing about the issue or the merits of various positions in the debate. What interests me is the undoubted symbolic significance of refusing satisfaction of a “more basic” need in order to protest non-satisfaction of a “less basic” one. Though I am not a Gandhi fan, he understood the power of such signalling. It is the most basic way to undermine the mental models of those who presume to dictate what “basics” ought to mean to you and whether you are competent to decide for yourself.

***

We vastly underestimate the degree to which humans will prioritize recognition and honor, even under the most extreme of conditions.
To provide the basics in order to allow the recipients of charity to make more choices as they see fit is to understand quality of life.
To provide the basics as the first step in a fully scripted development path, deviation from which invites withdrawal of the basics, is to be paternalistic about it. In a way, it is our modern version of the medieval idea that the needy should “know their place” and “not forget their station.”
I don’t know much about the history of civil rights in America, but I remember a lecture explaining the difference between the views of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois in precisely these terms.
It is the difference between quality of life as an affordance to be provisioned and quality of life as a freedom to be protected. 
In America itself, the conception of quality of life itself started with a very shaky idea, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the contradiction between the second and third elements of that phrase that is the problem.
In order for a definition of quality of life to be meaningful, it needs to include a mechanism that allows it to be challenged and reconstructed by individuals. Happiness in America has become such a loaded signifier of entrenched scripts that it is less than useless to talk about it.
We should be thinking in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of fuck-you money. The last element is not a restatement of the idea of liberty. Liberty, understood in the traditional sense, is freedom from having others arbitrarily beat you up, lock you up, or kill you. Pursuit of fuck-you money is much more than that: the right to seek resources to script your own definition of quality.

***

So to repeat, the Maslow pyramid isn’t some sort of sequential script for life. Once truly acute stressors — we’re talking being chased by lions right now – are removed, the quality of life is a function of the whole pyramid, not just the level you happen to be navigating at that moment. Life isn’t a video game. You never really complete a level and move on. You don’t need to complete a level before being afforded a glimpse of the next one. You don’t need to tackle the levels in a set order.
Heck, you don’t need to go to Africa, India, American prisons or the home of a McDonald’s worker to appreciate how we pursue quality in life. Just look at your own. I, for instance, happen to be royally screwing up all sane notions of “retirement security” in order to pursue some sort of self-actualization through writing. At an age — 38 — when Fidelity is emailing me notices informing me that the investment choices in my retirement portfolio are “not appropriate for [my] age.”
It is easy to let yourself believe that the “middle class script” that we all like to criticize these days is merely some irrational pattern of individually chosen behavior that exists purely in culture and persists because we adopt it through mindless imitation. Gemeinschaft stupidity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Imitation is actually not a particularly important force. In fact, as an expression of free choice, it is entirely defensible as a way of picking a life-script.
The problem is that there is more than imitation at work here.
The script is hard-wired into the institutional landscape in ways that make it nearly impossible to break out of. From government programs that navigate by statistical models of quality of life to retirement planning infrastructure like the 401(k) program in the United States, to appropriate-behavior cues that are relentlessly reinforced in a million little ways, ranging from paternalistic emails from Fidelity to regulations that make it vastly simpler to seek paychecks than business income.
The justification for such mechanisms is usually conflict pre-emption. The systems are supposedly designed to ensure that your pursuit of your idea of a quality life does not get in the way of others pursuits.
That supposition does not hold up to scrutiny. But I won’t go there today.

***

When UN economists celebrate some book-keeping milestone towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, nobody really feels like joining them. Most have no idea what precisely is worth celebrating. When you get to more ambitious constructs, like the Happy Planet Index, you get greater absurdity, not greater insight.
Human life, modeled by economists, measured by bureaucrats, and celebrated by statisticians, seems to miss the point in some deep way. If we need those sorts of experts to tell us what constitutes a good life, and whether or we’ve achieved it, something is already very wrong.
The industrial approach to the quality of life is less about actually ensuring subjective quality of life via increasing freedom, and more about achieving stabilizing conditions via more complete provisioning. Conditions under which nobody is acutely distressed enough to disrupt a prevailing social order. Ensuring “happiness” or anything else is not the point. Reducing the urgency of the desire to define happiness for yourself is the point.
And so we are told that money does not buy happiness above $75,000 a year via a conjuring trick of a question that allows us to believe that our own definitions of happiness are in play. It is a lie in the same category as the ones parents tell their children when they cannot grant freedoms, or do not want to do so, you don’t really want to go to Disneyland, there’s nothing there really, our local theme park is much better. 
Money does not buy happiness not because it cannot, but because the freedom to spend it intelligently is locked away in institutionally advantaged scripts that make irresistible claims on marginal discretionary dollars above that amount.

Which is why fuck you money is the right term for aspiring to more. To reach for $75,0001 while rejecting the approved list of ways to spend the extra $1 is to say fuck you to somebody else’s notion of a happiness-and-well-being script.  Incentives to conform to said script be damned.

***

A deep truth about the human condition as captured in the Maslow hierarchy is that it is much easier for humans to help each other with acute needs at lower levels of the hierarchy. For all non-acute needs, and acute needs in the upper levels, the only defensible way to help others is to increase their freedom of action. Whether they choose to make themselves happy or miserable with that freedom is up to them.
So how did we get ourselves into a situation where institutions, politicians and economists are trying to tell us what quality of life ought to mean? How did we get to the point where arbitrary ideas like home ownership and a college education have been inserted into the script of oughts and shoulds?
In a way, the King of Bhutan is to blame for this state of affairs. When it was first introduced in 1972, the idea of Gross National Happiness seemed like a farcical idea from a pristine Buddhist Eden far from the concerns and constraints of modernity.
And it was farcical, but only visibly so because of the pre-industrial context. Industrial-era happiness scripts have been pulling a King-of-Bhutan on large populations since about 1900. The good king lent such macro-scale script engineering efforts a kind of hippie-Buddhist legitimacy that they were unable to achieve on their own.
Four decades later, with the rise and fall of positive psychology and the rise of Tony Hsieh style corporate cultural engineering, the Big Idea from Bhutan idea seems serious in a way it never did before.
Whether it is a UN committee or a Buddhist king doing the defining doesn’t really matter. To the extent that freedom is a central element of it, happiness defined is happiness denied.
In an episode of Yes, Minister titled “The Quality of Life” that aired in 1981, at the dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan era, Jim Hacker, the hapless minister decides to tilt at some Bhutanese windmills. Troubled by the ugly skylines of modernity, Hacker takes on the cause of a struggling urban farm at the heart of London, convinced that preserving a little patch of nature for urban kids would be a moral victory of sorts. He gets his victory, but it is a Pyrhhic one. He finds himself manipulated into supporting a property developer’s agenda elsewhere, in order to preserve the farm.
The fictional farce of Yes, Minister has turned into the genuine tragicomic farce that is the kerfuffle over Hayes Valley Farm in San Francisco.

***

I’ve been making a lot of fun in recent months of those who frame social evolution as a dialectical conflict between a human notion of the quality of life and an industrial notion of what it takes to sustain it.
I make no apologies for that. I find first-world artisans, Jeffersonian small businesses and other sorts of small-and-local ideologues funny. Funny because of the cluelessness of their underlying understanding of how the world does or could work.
But I do sympathize with the motives driving such behaviors. In a way, such behaviors constitute a rejection of industrial-age notions of quality of life developed by statisticians, bureaucrats and economists, and attempt to recover a more meaningful notion.
Right problem, wrong approach. Not aesthetically or ideologically wrong, but physics wrong. But still, it is better than the not-even-wrong approach of UN economists.
So it is a start. We have asked the right question. What does it mean to live a quality life today? 
If the answer is sought via a survey, or measured via an economic indicator, it is wrong. If the answer is philosophically different for Africans without access to the “basics” and privileged San Franciscans fighting to preserve an urban farm, it is wrong.
An objective, defensible notion of quality of life must exhibit, at the philosophical level, a certain context-independent universality  that reflects the shared human condition embedded within technological realities.
At the same time, at the subjective level, it must start with a freedom to define quality-of-life in more tangible, non-philosophical terms, for oneself.
Yes, paradoxical, I know, like those recursive acronyms computer programmers like.
The two must harmonize. The neo-Jeffersonians do have a word for it. They call it empowerment. The ability to decide what quality of life means to you, and pursue it.
Where they go wrong is in becoming attached to a fixed notion of what it means to be human. That it is an ideal created and promoted by a grassroots culture that romanticizes pre-industrial realities, rather than economists or Bhutanese royals, does not make it any less confining.
Sadly attachment to a pre-industrial notion of human means regress, not progress, which is perhaps worse than being told by the UN whether you are living a quality life.

***

In a way, it’s like the eighties and cyberpunk never happened.
We regressed from the adult appreciation and acceptance of technological realities that became widespread during that decade, to an unreconstructed revival of 60s and 70s idealism, repackaged in the language of social media and tyrannical #Occupy collectivism.
Rather than evolve to what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” we are regressing to the simplicity on “this side of complexity.”
Like Holmes, “I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
The journey requires us to make sense of the hump in the middle, technological modernity, and reconstruct our notions of quality of life, individually and collectively around it.
I recently encountered a manifesto that’s been doing the rounds, the accelerationist manifesto, that does slightly better than neo-Jeffersonian romantic dreaming. Unfortunately, while it valiantly attempts to scale the mountain of technological complexity and get to the other side, it ultimately fails because it too remains attached to a 1960s notion of what it means to be human (as best as I was able to understand that document).
It frames an impossible problem: pursuing an idealized human notion of quality of life while acknowledging technological realities.

***

If the humanists of both Jeffersonian and Accelerationist persuasions fail to reconstruct their identities around technological modernity, another promising group, the liberaltarian technologist crowd, gets a little bit farther. Not far enough, but well beyond humanists of any stripe.
The operating categories of this crowd — entrepreneurship, PUA, passive income, 4-Hour Body, online communities  – suggests a mental model of quality of life that is not radically different from the one informing the Gallup well-being survey or the UN Millennium Development Goals. It’s still career, social, financial, physical, community.
The difference though, is that the base constructs have been loosened to the point that there can be significant individual autonomy in figuring out at least locally viable referents.
There is not much appreciative engagement of technological realities, but there is certainly highly competent instrumental engagement. Unlike the humanists, the liberaltarians can and do hack the planet to mine freedom for themselves.
But ultimately, a failure to appreciate one’s condition via abstractions becomes a failure to change it in more aggressive ways. This is a failure of imagination. The liberaltarians are not attached to romanticizied notions of human. But they are not able to offer alternative notions of being that rise above particulars like SEO consultant in Bali. 
The consequences are immediate in their own lives. The big, dark secret of the lifestyle design movement is failed relationships (or failure to even form relationships). When you cannot construct shared explicit meanings, your social possibilities narrow to those who make similar choices and therefore share tacit meanings with you.

Nature abhors a conceptual vacuum. Where new appreciative constructs are lacking, old ones get resurrected in repackaged ways. Any day now, I expect some lifestyle designer in Bali to collaborate with a quantified-self bro-scientist in San Francisco and come up with a notion of minimum-viable lean life. And then the UN will turn that into a survey and include an entrepreneurship metric in its models.
Freedom is not the same as access to entrepreneurial modes of being. That is still provisioning with an element of gambling.
But at least we’ve made another small improvement. From not even wrong questions and answers to right question, wrong answer, we’ve arrived at right question, workable starter answer. 
We are getting somewhere. Frustratingly slowly and painfully, but we’re moving.
It’s a start.

There's More to Life Than Being Happy....!!!!!!

Hozefa Malek 

"It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."

***

This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers, which include Stanford University's Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, write.
What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.
"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."

***

Which brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't object," Freud wrote the teenager.
While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?... Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.

The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: "Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.

CFOs Not Getting Big Data Message

Half the senior finance executives in the U.S. said they wanted to master Big Data in order to move ahead of competitors. Less than a quarter said they will focus on implementing that technology over the next year.
Almost half of the executives surveyed stated they would not increase spending on Big Data (Being defined as a form of analysis that involves encoding vast amounts of information for insights that aren’t detectable at smaller scales).
Instead, the most-commonly chosen area of focus by 44% of the executives, was to better integrate the company’s existing information systems.
As the year progresses, various organizations are talking about Big Data, more specifically in the retail and marketing sectors, but Big Data is costly to bring in, and somewhat less understood. These are two barriers that are keeping companies from embracing the technology. Companies worry that by bringing in the technology they will inspire “Big Brother” concerns among their employees and customers that everything they’re doing is being watched.
Executives did not expect Big Data to become such a big discussion in analysis gathering, but choosing to focus on their core analytical capabilities instead. A recent survey indicates that only seven of the executives said companies should use Big Data as a substitute for older analytical techniques, and 25 said Big Data is not yet valuable enough to justify its costs.
The most-commonly cited obstacle to cloud technology is security. Cloud computing needs the storage of data on Internet-connected servers, often for a fee, so that it can be accessed from anywhere around the world.
Half of the executives within the survey said security was among their top three concerns. When considering cloud technology, executives feared that they were losing control of that data. With that being said, these challenges involve exiting cloud arrangements with third parties and integrating cloud-based systems with existing systems which are also top priority.
But when asked if data security will remain challenging to cloud adoption five years from now, 57 of the executives agreed that it would not.
USEReady finds that basic data integration issues do need to be resolved before real attempts are made in incorporating big data.  Otherwise the existing demands will constantly pull the technology resources back – to fixing the existing issues.