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Lauren Levine's avatar

After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.

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Du Bois - Life is the fullest, most complete enjoyment of the possibilities of human existence. It is the development and broadening of the feelings and emotions... Hence rise Love, Friendship, emuilation and ambition and the ever widening realms of thought in increasing circles of the apprehended and interepted Truth.

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Dees the heart ever get lighter? in egypt - weighed for wrongdoing against a feather - can you undo harms, and if you cannot - what does this mean for risk, for big lives?

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Prince Wiliam and Aston Villa

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Nozick - Anarchy State and Utopia - Easterlin Paradox - how does this apply to distribution of pains over a life?

We would be willing, moreover, to give up some amount of happiness to get our lives’ narratives moving in the right direction, improving in general. Even if a downwardly sloping curve had slightly more area under it, we would prefer our own lives to slope upward. (If it encompassed vastly greater area, the choice might be different.) Therefore, the contour of the happiness has an independent weight, beyond breaking ties among lives whose total amounts of happiness are equal. In order to gain a more desirable narrative direction, we sometimes would choose not to maximize our total happiness. And if the factor of narrative direction might justify forgoing some amount of happiness, so other factors might also.

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It is better,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.

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