»Never let your schooling interfere with your education, someone clever once said. Being willing to sacrifice at the edges is one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn. [...] And I did. During my undergrad, I created Instiki, Rails, Basecamp, and got on the path to being a partner at 37signals. Do you think I could fit all that and still get straight As and have lots of time left over for playing World of Warcraft? No.«
I rediscovered this chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on flow at TED.
The green dots show income, the red dots perceived happiness. I’m certainly no statistics pro, but it looks like the correlation is zero (these are figures for the US).
Even if there’s hardly any money, people aren’t necessarily unhappy. Instead, happiness spreads to both sides – there are very happy and very unhappy countries. It seems like the Latin American and East Asian people are much less affected by little available money than the Eastern European – compare the happiness of Brazil, the Domenican Republic and Vietnam to Macedonia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. They have roughly the same purchasing power.
»If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end.
If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would florish.«
»Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes… A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.«
»Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction …«
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
every couple of years, the UN try to assess how “developed” all earth’s countries are. the result is the human development index. the factors going into it are income per capita, life expectancy and literacy. this is the result:
green => high, red => low, dark colors are the extremes.
