Guard your emotional investments in anything outside of your life’s best interests. Addiction is an emotional over-investment in things that do not serve your personal growth. A good example is sports fanship. Why do we do it? My hypothesis is that our level of fanship (how much we emotionally invest in “our” team’s outcomes) is connected to our own level of self-esteem. I don’t know if it’s a perfect correlation, and I believe that there are other reasons why we become fans (such as pure enjoyment and entertainment). But there is no question in my mind that there is a major element of escapism at work here. We are putting our faith on the shoulders of men and women – heroes – hoping for them to provide for us an emotional spark or lift; consequently, this reduces our self-reliance on providing and sustaining such a spark. What if our team loses? How much energy did we lose on those bets?
Personally, I have observed how drained I am on Mondays following emotionally intense Football Sundays. Even now, as I sit here and watch the World Series, a sport which I generally don’t even watch and teams which I don’t really care for (Phillies and Yankees), I find myself emotionally swaying, from frustration to excitement, in certain tense situations of the game. Why do I even care? read more…
I have become a big fan of Karen Armstrong over the past several years. Funny thing, is that I bought one of her books – A History of God – over ten years ago, but never cracked it until last year. It was worth the wait! Since then, I’ve read two more books from Armstrong, who is a leading author and scholar on the ever-controversial subject of Religion.
Here is a short clip of her recent TED talk. The theme is Compassion as the underlying essence of all world religions.
If you don’t know about TED yet, I strongly advise you to visit ted.com, create a profile and participate! TED also has strong presence on Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.
Here in New York City, we live in the epicenter of capitalism. It’s truly a dog-eat-dog city, where we compete for power and money. Does that make us bad or selfish? Aren’t there many good, cultured and spiritual people in New York and other big American cities; people who give back and embrace socially conscious missions from global warming to global poverty? How do we strike a balance between making money and doing social good. Ahh, the age old question between self-interest and common good, which usually falls under the label of Capitalism vs. Socialism.
I really love this topic, probably because I frequently find myself with a lot of internal conflict around it. Here I am, running a for-profit business in the ultra-competitive web marketing industry, faced with the practical realities of competing for cash conscious clients in the midst of a global economic meltdown. When it comes to selecting vendors like Blueliner (my consulting company), business owners have their own livelihood on the line; ask them how much they care about “greater good” versus profits, and you will see that they typically don’t care how well-meaning we are. They are hiring us strictly to make them money. read more…
