Yesterday we pondered the meaning of real success. Thank you Julie for leaving this in the comments: Success To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the […]
Happiness and Life Satisfaction
What does success mean to you?
A friend told me of an experiment today. He said that a researcher would leave a four-year-old in a room with a marshmallow and tell the kid that he would be gone a few minutes. The kid was allowed to eat the marshmallow, but if it was still there when the researcher got back, the […]
Why bother saving the planet?
First of all, I wanted to remind you all that there is a sneak peak at the No Impact Man documentary in New York tonight (Thursday). Click here for details. I hope I’ll see you there. It’ll be outdoors if the weather is nice and indoors if it’s not, so rain or shine! Now, onwards… […]
Consumerdom ain’t making women happy
We talk a lot here about whether our consumption-based economy and culture makes people happy. Because, since consumption of resources is the root cause our planet’s woes, it would be an awful shame if it turned out that we were wrecking the planet without even increasing human happiness. And it turns out, by the way, […]
Forget the stuff. Let’s just get happy.
A quote from a TED talk given by Dan Gilbert, the Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness: Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness […]
Growing your own food, Japanese style
First thing, wanted to remind you that I also twitter here and I friend my readers on Facebook here. Onwards… As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I’d […]
Urban gardening time is here!
During the No Impact project, I helped my friend Mayer Vishner with his vegetable plot in the Laguardia Community Gardens here in New York. For those of you who don’t know, a community garden is a public piece of land broken up into a checkerboard of plots and a different gardener tends to each plot. […]
Open Discussion: “You are here to be happy.” True or false?
Obviously I’ve been in the mood for introspection these last couple of days. And I think that introspection is important in the environmental realm, because we must prioritize the use of resources. We must decide what our limited resources are best used for. That requires introspection. Because to know what our resources should be used […]