New Year's Resolutions

I am not a fan of New Year's resolutions. My feeling is that people should constantly work on improving their lives and not use some arbitrary date such as January 1st to set goals and start working on them. However, I am a bit OCD. Therefore, having a nice round starting date such as January 1 or simply the first month of the year helps me (somehow) get focused on starting to work on my goals.

Starting this month I have already been working on some of my goals. This weekend I visited the National Archaeology Museum in Dublin. My plan is to do many more things around Dublin and Ireland instead of sitting around my apartment watching TV. I have put together a list of sites in Dublin that I want to visit and I assigned due dates. Listing things I want to do as tasks and assigning due dates helps me accomplish what I want to do. I think it has to do with how I think and get things done in general. If there is no "closure" date then I will tend to slack off and not get things done.

I also plan to travel a lot more around Ireland. This country is beautiful and there are so many things to see from nature to historical sites to festivals. And I would like to do some camping, maybe even doing it with my bicycle. I think it has been over 15 years since I camped out last time!

So, do you have any "resolutions"?

The One Percent

Tonight I watched a great documentary called "The One Percent". You can watch the entire documentary on YouTube for free by clicking the link above. I did not hear about the documentary until my friend posted a link to the documentary on my Facebook wall. The documentary was created by the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, Jamie Johnson.

The documentary was created in 2006, more than a year before the beginning of the financial crisis, and more than 5 years before the start of the Arab Spring and Occupy protests. It hits on many interesting points with respect to the growing income and wealth inequality of the rich vs the poor in America (and rest of the world). I am surprised that the movie was created BEFORE the current protests, which means that people such as Jamie Johnson, Ralph Nader, Bill Gates Sr., etc. have seen the problems of the growing gap between the rich and the poor way before the financial crisis. Does this mean if it wasn't for the biggest recession since the Great Depression people would not notice how much they are being FUCKED by the corrupt politicians and the greedy rich bastards? That's sad, I must admit.

But it is probably not the people's fault. During the movie somebody (can't remember who now) mentions that the Congress does what the people want - except that the people are given false, misleading information that benefits the rich (not to mention the propaganda by the political parties) and therefore making it seem as if the people are the ones who Congress listens to.

I did say that I will not write any more posts about American politics, and I am not. This is not about politics. This is about the need for the majority of the people of the world to rise up against this inequality and do something about it. Anyway, this wasn't one of my best posts but I hope you watch the movie and learn something from it.

Optimism

I consider myself an optimist. When I look at the future, I will tend to focus on positive outcomes vs the negative ones. If something negative happens to me, I will take away as many positives as I can and try to rationalize the negatives so that they do not happen again. On the other hand, my father is a pessimist. He tends to focus primarily on the negative effects of any event. When I get a new job as a contractor several years ago, his main thoughts were, "What happens if there is not enough work? What about health insurance? What if the project is cancelled?" whereas my thoughts were more along the lines of, "I can make a lot of money. I get to work on a variety of projects and get varied experience. I will have a more flexible lifestyle."

I read this page today which made me think a bit more about optimism: The Road to Well-Being - The Plains of Optimism. I did not bother to check the references but there ARE references on the bottom of the page. The article/paper reaffirms my opinion that being optimistic improves your health and helps a person overcome negative events better than a pessimist. There are definitely good characteristics of a pessimist person. A pessimist can prepare himself/herself for negative outcomes since he/she will focus on those events. However, a pessimist will almost always worry about how something can go wrong and that can cause psychological and physical strain. I prefer to assume that good things will happen and worry only when the bad things happen but also prepare for those bad events. I used to think that this was being a realist but according to this paper it seems that it is natural for an optimist to more realistically evaluate a negative event than a pessimist. This more realistic evaluation helps an optimist prepare better for the next event by more accurately dissecting a negative event.

I don't think I will change any pessimist's mind with this post but I hope some of you start thinking more positively :).