For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. The child is fobbed off with happiness when what she really wants is to get her appetite back. The right to the pursuit of happiness can be a cover story for the wish to hide.
Here is much more, hat tip goes to The Browser,
Well that was a whole lot of incoherent nothing. This path of frustration -> absorption doesn’t work unless you are already a bit happy.
The sheer high handed arbitrariness of his views was evident once he lumped objecting to immigrants as being equivalent to hating Jews or homosexuals.
Classic.
My happiness comes from the disappearance of such intellectuals — preferably through their voluntary non-reproduction.
Sorry, he is a psychologist. I thought he was a philosopher from Tyler’s tag. Now that I know better, this is actually par for the course!
Children should learn to be responsible for their actions.
That all children will learn to be responsible for their actions is too much to hope for.
That 50% of children will learn to be responsible for their actions may be too much to hope for.
could be related to one of the phillip’s in the mamas & papas, and that’s big big, big big, big big big big.
if u really knew how to play a musical instrument, you could play the hammond at yankee stadium. there’s some songs that haven’t been played. though them songs and the teams, sports, billboards, brightlights, dull day games, beer heah — they is written in stone in the baseball lexicon. Post blocking view included, you were there though, you saw mantle. runnin-on, a little here, g-nite.
Why the hostility to Phillips here? Scoop, I don’t see–and you certainly didn’t demonstrate–how what Phillips said “simply isn’t true.” What, exactly, are you objecting to? Because Phillips has made a kind of cursive argument linking several different ideas together. Indeed, thinking about it as an argument is part of the problem, because it’s not–it’s a meditation.
And cjb, Phillips did not lump objecting to immigrants (a phrase he never uses) to hating Jews or homosexuals (he also never says “hate”). What he says is some people would clearly be much happier to live in a world with Jews, or without homosexuals, or without immigrants. How has he ranked any of those three as equivalent in any way, shape or form, except in the happiness that their removal can produce in some people? He nowhere says hating Jews is like objecting to immigrants–in fact mentions neither “objecting to” nor “hating.” Before YOU object to and hate on a piece of writing, it may be worth some effort on your part to actually read and consider what was written before summarily dismissing it as high-handed arbitrariness. (I assume that’s your way of saying Phillips’ sophistication in writing style is beyond your mental reach.)
ahappinessexperiment, it may be that you haven’t quite understood what Phillips is saying: our capacity to be frustrated is part and parcel of our capacity to be absorbed. We get “absorbed” in books or games or TV shows (like LOST, say) that to some extent or in some way frustrate us: they provoke us to want more, to know more, to get more than we have. The banner of happiness can be used as a way to avoid exploring and deepening our capacity for frustration, and this, Phillips argues, is the problem: happiness is not an intrinsic Good, and so treating it as such–using it as reason to avoid being frustrated (for example, in saying “Adam Phillips’ article frustrates me, and since I don’t like being frustrated, I won’t bother with it”)–runs the risk of overshadowing the good that can come from something else, from being frustrated.
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