Binary Balance

I was recently reading a blog post entitled ‘How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)’ by David Tate.

The post has a lot of good advice and observations in it, relevant to my interests because working from home is something I aspire to be doing more of.

In the section on interruptions, where – referring to adjusting from the more typical office environment to working from home – David writes:

What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything.

I stopped at that sentence for a moment, because whenever I come across someone talking/writing about how they have trouble focussing – and I come across this reasonably often – it makes me wonder why I usually don’t have this problem. Read more...

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard people say that happiness is a choice. It’s easy to dismiss this phrase as a platitude, to lose it amongst other phrases with a similar resonance like ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right’, ‘Life is what you make it’ etc. But in this post, I’m going to talk a little about what the phrase means to me.

So what is happiness anyway? Better philosophers than I have spent more words than I plan to use in this post trying to figure out a generally applicable answer to this ostensibly simple question. I don’t think I could do the question justice here were I to seriously try and give a comprehensive answer. But I will try and define what I think it is for me. I might start with what I think it’s not. Read more...