Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
"We spend much of our day anticipating, and trying to avoid, the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves," writes Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. "How seriously should we take these intangible outcomes, the self-administered punishments (and occasional rewards) that we experience as we score our lives?" Kahneman's point is that … Continue reading Stoicism in Thinking Fast and Slow
It feels weird to acknowledge that the model for reality within our brains is nothing more than a model. It is a construction of what constitutes reality based on our experiences and based on the electrical stimuli that reach our brain from various sensory organs, tissues, and nerve endings. The brain doesn't have a model … Continue reading The Emotional Replica of Reality Within Our Brains
In his book When, author Dan Pink investigates how humans relate to and understand time. He considers the time of day, the timing of events, and also how we understand things based on time dimensions such as beginnings, middles, and ends. His focus on endings is one of the more surprising parts for me, someone … Continue reading In The End, We Seek Meaning
Dan Pink's book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing includes a lot of interesting information about time, how we think about time, and about how humans and our societies interact with time. The book is one of the books I recommend the most because it includes a lot of interesting ideas that Pink does a … Continue reading Peak, Trough, Rebound
When we feel jealous of another person, what do we actually feel about ourselves? In his book, Some Thoughts About Relationships, author Colin Wright writes, “Jealousy, at its core, is about feeling threatened.” Many of our reactions to the world and people around us, in my opinion, tie back to tribal forces that have been … Continue reading Feeling Threatened
I am not a scientist in the sense that I don't work at a laboratory, I don't publish academic papers, and I am not going out into a field to make observation about the nature of the world to experiment with and report back on. But I do love science. I listen to a handful … Continue reading The Mind Observing the Mind
What does racism look like when it is not overt and outwardly displayed? In Obama’s Race Michael Tesler and David Sears look beyond what people say and use survey data with carefully designed questions to try to look inside the mind of average people. Sears and Tesler are able to judge people’s affect, or their emotional … Continue reading Translating Symbolic Racism
One of the things I often think about at work is whether I am helping make the office a more enjoyable place for everyone to be. Am I helping to create an environment where people actually want to be, or am I in some ways contributing to an atmosphere that people dislike and don’t look … Continue reading Emotional Wounds
Ryan Holiday addresses a common misperception of stoicism in his book, The Obstacle is the Way, when he addresses ideas surrounding our emotions and how we handle our emotions. I think people often associate stoicism with a lack of emotion, and will describe people as being stoic when they respond to emotional situations like reactionless … Continue reading Feeling our Emotions
Marcus Aurelius had a very practical way of looking at the world, and his pragmatism stands out in his book Meditations when he is taking about the ways in which we become frustrated. Rather than allowing himself to be driven by emotions he was able to slow himself down and think about his thoughts and what … Continue reading To Avoid Becoming Frustrated at Things