The Architecture of Happiness

This is a fairly good book. It's fairly deep. Definitly not light reading. Ideas I want to remember from the book...

• Yes beauty affects us, but sometimes nothing but an asprin and a nap will make us feel good.
• Have high standards. Uglness doesn't happen because it's cheaper or easier. It happens because we don't act like we deserve beauty and because we don't have loftier goals.

I've reread this in 2017. A few more things stick out to me.

First, this book is kind of an antidote to Stoicism. If we can be happy with a Spartan life, then why does beauty delight us so?

Second, De Botton's language is very pretty. Only he can describe why a building could push us to be good, or evil, or more religious, or less.

Third, again, have high standards. Have lofty goals.

What's this all about...

The point of this blog is to make sure I don't get stuck in a rut. I want to perform little experiements with my life and see how they go.

Once a month, I will make somekind of change in my life. I will use this blog to record the change, to write down ideas for future changes, and more generally, write down things I want to remember.

Project #1 Try out the "Getting Things Done." workflow. The idea behind getting things done is that you should make how you portion out your daily work, mechanical, so that you can spend all your time on doing work, and not worring about what you forgot, or what you have to do next. So far I am still sorting through my paper work-- deciding what is reference, what needs to be dealt with and what is garbage. I'm suprized how much work it takes to get organized.

I fortunatly have a driver for this. I got a noticed from the IRS that there is a discrepency in my 2005 tax statement, so I need to sort through all my paperwork from two years ago. sigh.