"I've been rich and I've been poor. Believe me, rich is better." -- Mae West
I always thought it was Woody Allen that said that. Don't tell me he stole it and took credit for it?
Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I think you just went meta-Ecclesiastes! What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, "See, this is new!" has already existed in the ages that preceded us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Poetic but blatantly false. Actually, you really wonder how Ecclesiastes managed to get included in the Bible, considering that at this point the Earth was supposed to be four thousand years old or whatever. And yet even 4.5 billion years isn't old enough for everything to have happened, not even close. Aren't exponential possibility spaces wonderful?
If you take it to mean human nature and the completely cyclical patterns of human behavior, then it's most certainly correct. That's how I've always interpreted it.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#23Everything other than immortality is a dead end.
...and no ones looked at immortality yet.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#24Reading the article, it sounds like the interpretation of results could have been pretty heavily cooked. With someone this hot for a prior theory it's important to know exactly what experimental methods they used and exactly what they found. Article's pretty short on that.
The irony of social sciences: they demand the most rigor, and are given the least.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#25I think the keyword here is "psychological". If you train yourself to control your mental state you can suffer all sorts of physical afflictions but psychologically you can still be as happy as ever.
I used to think that balance was the key, but after some consideration I'm undecided. If spending all your energy on training yourself to be happy actually makes you happy despite your physical well-being, why would you need balance?
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poetic but blatantly false. Actually, you really wonder how Ecclesiastes managed to get included in the Bible, considering that at this point the Earth was supposed to be four thousand years old or whatever. And yet even 4.5 billion years isn't old enough for everything to have happened, not even close. Aren't exponential possibility spaces wonderful?
If you take it to mean human nature and the completely cyclical patterns of human behavior, then it's most certainly correct. That's how I've always interpreted it.
Verse 9 is about behavior:
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again
Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you take it to mean human nature and the completely cyclical patterns of human behavior, then it's most certainly correct. That's how I've always interpreted it.
Verse 9 is about behavior: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again Verse 10 is about things: Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? I think verse 9 is false. Remember one of the ways Solomon got his pleasure: "I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house." That's the only thing I can think of though.
Why does the case of Solomon's slaves negate verse 9?
There has always been slavery, and there is still slavery today, and lots of explicitly sexual slavery too.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#28There are a few sites I came to avoid on principle. nytimes always has very well written and interesting articles, but with no long-term value. And science daily... well, there is very little science in there. They sound good, but they also lack meat, and honestly they're not that well written.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#29Book of Ecclesiastes, nuff said.
There's a reason they call it the Bible.
Because it is a book?
early 14c., from Anglo-L. biblia, from M.L./L.L. biblia (neuter plural interpreted as fem. sing.), in phrase biblia sacra "holy books," from Gk. ta biblia to hagia "the holy books," from biblion "paper, scroll," the ordinary word for "book," originally a dim. of byblos "Egyptian papyrus," possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The port's name is a Gk. corruption of Phoenician Gebhal (modern Jbeil, Lebanon), said to mean lit. "frontier town" (cf. Heb. gebhul "frontier, boundary," Arabic jabal "mountain"). The Christian scripture was refered to in Gk. as Ta Biblia as early as c.223. Bible replaced O.E. biblioðece "the Scriptures," from Gk. bibliotheke, lit. "book-repository" (from biblion + theke "case, chest, sheath"), used of the Bible by Jerome and the common L. word for it until Biblia began to displace it 9c. Figurative sense of "any authoritative book" is from 1804. Bible Belt first attested 1926, reputedly coined by H.L. Mencken.
Re: Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I think you just went meta-Ecclesiastes! What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, "See, this is new!" has already existed in the ages that preceded us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Poetic but blatantly false. Actually, you really wonder how Ecclesiastes managed to get included in the Bible, considering that at this point the Earth was supposed to be four thousand years old or whatever. And yet even 4.5 billion years isn't old enough for everything to have happened, not even close. Aren't exponential possibility spaces wonderful?
I agree with David Mathers. I believe that time has given you enough perspective to put you more than one level above Solomon.
Its poetry is enough reason for me to see it in the Bible, and it reminds us that fame and money themselves are useless.