Recommended Reading
Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness
Notes:
- Overview of several experiements that provide strong evidence to suggest that giving money away to others does more to raise one’s long term happiness than spending money on oneself.
- I definitely noticed an increase in my day to day happiness after deciding to start giving more money to charity.
- Studies show that a donation of as little as $5 can create a noticeable increase in a person’s happiness. If you’d like to put this assertion to the test, I’d highly recommend donating to one of these charities.
Excerpts:
- “…this study provides initial evidence that how people spend their money may be as important for their happiness as how much money they earn—and that spending money on others might represent a more effective route to happiness than spending money on oneself.”
- “…employees who devoted more of their bonus to prosocial spending experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself.”
- “These experimental results provide direct support for our causal argument that spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself.”
Visualizing the Human Impact on the Ocean Economy
Notes and key points:
- If the ocean were a country, it would have the 8th largest GDP in the world. This number was reached by considering profits from fishing, climate change mitigation through the absorption of carbon, wages of ocean based workers, etc. In other words, there are some massive financial incentives to preserve the world’s oceans.
- The ocean absorbs a large percentage of the carbon that humans emit into the atmosphere. However, its ability to do so is decreasing as time goes on and oceanic carbon levels approach a point of saturation. An unfortunate byproduct of the increased amounts of carbon that the ocean has to absorb is a phenomenon called ocean acidification. As the ocean acidifies, many varieties of plankton, which form the base of the marine food web, will die out. The consequences of this die out are likely to be extreme.
Music Recommendations
Journal Excerpts
I’m starting to believe that many of the so called “rules” of reality, even the laws of physics, are not quite as set in stone as most of us imagine them to be.
Would you rather have ten deep friends or one hundred acquaintances? Would you rather be a master at one instrument, or reasonably good at four? Would you rather be fluent in two languages, or able to scrape by in five?
If you find your mind wandering to a place you’d rather it didn’t go, just take a few deep breaths and refocus on what is happening in front of you.
Reading uplifting content is like introducing beneficial species into an ecosystem. The species are thoughts, the ecosystem is your mind.
If you want to heal, listen to water. Listen to the rain. Listen to the rivers. Listen to the waves.
Photo of the Week by Chase Schober
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