This is quite nice.

People are writing blog posts about plans, goals, resolutions and such.  I am reminded that like a plan that manifests some  eccentricity by this guy who resolved a year ago to spend a year without getting into a car.  Nice.  After the revolution all media outlets will be required to report on some happy local who has just succeeded in keeping an exceptionally interesting resolution.  Give us all hope we can pull it off.  Help to model this fine behavior.

If you see more examples, please pass them along.

A public service announcement: You’ll get 40% more done by keeping your plans secret! So if your writing up resolutions and goals, have at it; but consider tearing up the list and don’t show anybody!

Giving donations is fraught with frictions of all kinds.  For example my wife and I once gave some money to a nonprofit only to suffer a year of verysolicitations for more money.

I think this is just amazingly and delightful.  Giving Anonymously is a small nonprofit in Washington state that facilitates giving money to others anonymously.  They clear about $75 thousand dollars a month at this point.  This lets you avoid the social frictions of donations.  It avoids any suggestion that your dontation is a form of status seeking.  It avoids any suggestion that the donation is just another market transaction.

So what could you use this for?

1. Help a neighbor, coworker, friend, … in need
2. Help your club without revealing how rich you are
3. Say thanks to the person who did all that work for the recent event
4. Avoid the embarrassment of a public thank you when donating to the event
5. Use it create a hard to fake signal
6. Use it to demonstrate it to another, a potential donor
7. Give money to things one might not have expected.

I really like #2.  If you are trying to fund some club’s operations it is brilliant.  It is very likely your club’s community of members has some very very wealthy people in it.  But they have little desire for that fact to be known.  By offering all your members the opportunity to make anonymous donations you create a way for the rich members to help without insisting that they break cover.

For gifts of less then $500 they charge nothing, though you can give a bit to help them along.  That’s pretty amazing when you block out what their credit card charges, mailing costs, check processing fees, etc. are so say nothing of the labor.  Well actually, they are apparently entirely run by volunteer labor.  It must be strange working there!  Apparently they listen to every phoned in thank you message before forwarding them back to donors.  Listening to a few on their site makes it clear that would be emotional work!

To give money you’ll need:

1. a credit card or a bank account,
2. the snail mail address for your recipient, and then
3. either an email address or a phone number.

Try it!

“study shows that health benefits follow from just 2 minutes of written  expression. Certainly these results do not mean that spending more time expressing  emotion is bad but they do show that the minimum dosage required may be lower than previously thought.” — Burton and King

What we really want to know: “Is 140 characters enough?”

See also: blogging happy?

I read Seligman’s Authentic Happiness some time ago.  He has an interesting hypothesis. The idea is that the negative emotions (fear, envy, greed, etc.) are about scarcity (win-lose) while the positive emotions are about more collective constructions (win-win). It is a bit difficult to discern which ideas in this book are well validated by good studies; it appears that this idea is closer to the insta-theory end of the spectrum than most. But I like it. Collective good, selfish bad.

Even if you can puzzle out exactly which ideas and techniques he suggests are well tested you still get difficult confusions between cause and effect. Happy people have larger social networks, but how can you tease out the causality?  In another example; it is will known that marginal increases in your wealth have a weak but positive correlation with happiness. That weak link suggests we ought to strive to earn more. Much less widely reported though is the trajectory of happy people tends toward higher wages and positions.  I think that a cheery affect tends to generate the wealth, not the other way around.

The studies did show some interesting effects. Your various traits (humor, punctuality, cleanliness, etc. etc.) do tend to be genetically inherited and they don’t tend to be strongly effected by circumstance. I particularly liked that they know that older siblings do often have higher IQs than younger ones. How much? One IQ point!

He has a few pages devoted to dismissing the Freudian idea that childhood trama creates an emotional blockage which latter blisters out in ugly behaviors. Those ideas have been extensively tested and they came up wanting.

The Freudian idea that emotions are like water, e.g. if you represses them up they will leak out elsewhere turns out to be extremely wrong. Repressing is fine, and effective. Bottling up doesn’t cause them to stew. No, stewing on them makes them fester. If you nurture a grudge you can turn it into a monster. Living with those is a bummer. If you nurture gratitude, satisfaction, forgiveness, confidence, optimism, etc. etc. you can fill your inner life with kittens.