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How your friends’ friends can affect your mood – life – 30 December 2008 – New Scientist

it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks "like pebbles thrown into a pond", says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.

 

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Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind – New York Times “The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals” 

Hopes and Dreams and the Telling

Telling someone something, in some way alters the nature of the thing being told. This is especially true of personal hopes and dreams.

Partially, the telling alters the fact by the way the person responds to the hearing. Hopes and dreams, like the smallest of particles, cannot be viewed without the viewing affecting them. You can only manage the change. 

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ireneQ – unravelled: Busy affirming
“… when there is a misunderstanding or miscommunication, or somebody does something to hurt or upset me or otherwise get on my nerves, I often see the other person’s side of the story.”

Me too 

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Creating Passionate Users: Brain death by dull cubicle
You always knew that dull, boring cubicles could suck the joy out of work, but now there’s evidence that they can change your brain. Not mentally or emotionally, no, we’re talking physical structural changes. You could almost say, "Dull, lifeless work environments cause brain damage." 

Thackery on Hatred and Consistency

In describing the character and motivations of one Mr. Osborne toward a certain Mr. Sedley:

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

This is interesting for other reasons also, in that the motivation to be consistent is important and far reaching in its ability to modify our actions as human beings. This particular hook into our minds is discussed in the book, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion which I had the opportunity to read recently. 

Laziness: Subtle Fiend of Addiction and Vice

I’m not very good at introductions. I beg of you to bear with me and read on long enough to catch my meaning. What I’m writing here is important to me, because it reflects an internal struggle I face. I hate laziness (though not enough apparently to slap him in the face).

Laziness, by virtue of the fact that it hinders your ability to accomplish anything of value, creates a problem that encourages you to continue to be lazy. Laziness is self perpetuating and feeds on you much like an addiction. Laziness robs you of the joy and satisfaction you normally need to sustain yourself through times of want and desire. It robs you of your ability to be content, because it creates a state of desolation in your soul.

Here is the cycle. You submit to temptation to put off work, to instead pursue a transient pleasure (sleep, leisure, etc..). Later, you reflect upon your life and realize that you have nothing substantial to show for it. This realization causes depression. The depression drives you to seek entertainment or some pleasure to compensate. Often this drive for compensation happens at the cost of fulfilling responsibilities (laziness), and the cycle repeats.

When laziness is combined with addiction, at the point where a person is tempted to use his or her addiction, the thought intrudes upon the mind that to do without the stimulation is too hard because there is nothing else. This is the great lie, that the stimulation (as bad as it is) is better than nothing at all. Laziness feeds the lie that there is nothing at all by robbing you of physical proof that there is something else worth foregoing the stimulation for.

This is why some people never break free, even though they are aware of the lie and of all the consequences, and know all the strategies for combating addiction. It is because, when it comes down to the moment where they are faced with the decision to abstain to indulge, they have nothing that means anything to them worth saving, and they never will, because they are too lazy build it.