In the “no focus” area, incremental changes in circumstances make for incremental changes in your feelings about your circumstances. But once your situation catches your attention, changes in your circumstances have an exaggerated effect on your mood. In light of the Focus Illusion, how then should we live?
We assume that team players aren’t selfish—as the saying goes, there’s no “I” in team. But actually, there’s plenty of “I” in team. We can be intensely selfish on behalf of our team.
The core insight behind science goes something like this: To get what you want, set aside what you want long enough to see what is.
We want to pay attention to what’s relevant and not what’s irrelevant. Irrelevant big-picture factors can distract us from paying attention to crucial details. But lost in the details, we can miss something crucial about the big picture.
Since meaning means a whole lot to us, semiotics should too, and yet most of us have never heard of this academic discipline.
We see death coming and it doesn’t look good. We cope by committing to culturally defined immortality campaigns, which we hope will make us much larger than our physical lives.
Spirituality is one’s overall strategy for coping with the challenge of investing, knowing that one must eventually divest. Spirituality is a kind of preparation, a pre-grieving. Defined this way, I see three main spiritual paths.