18 Oct Ancient ideas to improve your modern life
Happiness is not a new concept.
Living a good life is not a new concept.
Not all that’s good and useful is new!
In fact, there’s much we can learn from “ancient thinkers” about happiness and success and more; and here are 7 great ideas for you now…
via The Ladders by Eric Barker
The modern world has brought us a lot of great stuff. (I, for one, am a huge fan of antibiotics.)
That said, we know there are things that were better in the past, ideas we can learn from or reclaim.
What’s interesting is recently science and experts have validated many of the lessons ancient thinkers knew but could not prove.
Here are 7 new ideas from the old world that can make your life better:
1) Community Is Vital
For 99% of human existence we lived in small tribes. We were constantly surrounded by family and friends.
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, says it’s obvious why hunter-gatherers join modern society and not the other way around…
…but what are the advantages of the traditional world that they leave behind?
Always being surrounded by the people they love.
Via The World Until Yesterday:
Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions… As one American friend who spends much time in Africa summed it up, “Life in Africa is materially poor and socially/ emotionally rich, while U.S. life is materially rich and socially/ emotionally poor.”
And, no, Facebook is not a replacement for time with friends:
In one experiment, Cacioppo looked for a connection between the loneliness of subjects and the relative frequency of their interactions via Facebook, chat rooms, online games, dating sites, and face-to-face contact. The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”
Not feeling socially connected can make you stupider and lead to an early death:
When people’s sense of social connectedness is threatened, their ability to self-regulate suffers; for instance their IQ performance drops (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002). Feeling lonely predicts early death as much as major health risk behaviors like smoking (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008).
The solution? Use technology to facilitate face to face meetings with friends, not to replace them.
(For more on how to improve your social life, go here.)
We definitely need others, but what did our ancestors know about feeling better as an individual?
…keep reading the full & original article HERE