[Paleopsych] the grief-meter

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/28/2004 11:53:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, BMC273 writes:
Mike Levine had a great show on Suitcase Nuclear bombs last Monday, did you 
catch it? I think he said OBL had purchased 40 of these from Russia.

hb: aha.  so you missed my art bell show appearance saturday night discussing 
islam's nuclear threats for three hours.  i'd have liked your opinion of it.


As for the issue about who suffers more...men or women, my friend had a good 
point - she said its true we all suffer as humans but dont the POOR suffer 
more than the RICH? So there are differences...(I still think she is right that 
women do suffer more then men in general). What do you think?
hb: in his Progress Paradox, Glenn Eastbrook sums up the literature on 
happiness and comes to the conclusion that no matter how rich you get, you still 
manage to fill some internally driven quota of discontent and misery.  I believe 
that Timothy Wilson in his book on the adaptive subconscious also shows a lot 
of evidence that we have an internal set-point for misery that manufactures 
miseries when we're in clover and manufactures blessings when we are truly laid 
low.

You dream of winning the lottery and are miserable because you are not 
wealthy as a prince.  Then you win the lottery and are miserable because you have no 
more goals to pursue and your former friends no longer come to you to chat or 
watch the ball game on tv.  All they want from you is money.  
 
You come down with a dire disease.  You fight it like hell.  You feel it 
strengthens you and gives you new insight.  And things that others take for 
granted become delights to you.
 
This isn’t poetry, it’s the result of research.  The happiest people tend to 
be the disabled and the chronically ill.
 
In technical terms, we have a homeostatic mechanism that makes sure that we 
each have our tiny share of joys and our far larger parcel of griefs.
Howard
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty 
Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy 
of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive 
editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang 
to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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