Recipe for a partially satisfying life

Do something hard until it is easy.

Repeat.

Time

For humans, one of the great and common hazards of living is the calcification of the mind - thoughts, beliefs, judgments.

I would rather live in the awareness of the pain of the world's people, than a dreamland of entertained numbness.

Joke

The bartender was dumbfounded when a gorilla came in and asked for a martini, but he couldn't think of any reason not to serve the beast. And he was even more amazed to find the gorilla cooly holding out a ten dollar bill when he returned with the drink. As he walked to the cash register, he decided to try something. He rang up the sale, headed back to the animal and handed it a dollar in change. The gorilla didn't say anything and just sat there sipping his martini. Finally the bartender couldn't take it anymore. "You know," he said, "we don't get many gorillas in here." And the gorilla replied, "At nine bucks a drink, I'm not surprised." 

And To All a Good Night

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/12/and-to-all-a-good-night.html

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Evolution

An important step in evolution is to develop the ability to make decisions based on reason, logic, and empirical study, with no readily available environmental indicators or context.

Most of us need environmental (read: from our surroundings) feedback to impel us to act, otherwise the inertia of our current actions and way of life carry us blindly forth.
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You can perform a task by relying on a system. If your system is good enough, you can perform the task better than everyone else.

In doing this, you are placing the value of winning above the values of freedom and chance. It comes down to your goals. The difficulty of the task also matters - if it is too easy, the system robs the task of its meaning. If the task is difficult enough that the system cannot dominate the task, meaning (fun) persists.

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