Inquiring others about foregone options

(and about their lives in general)

I am curious about how people manage their life and make decisions.

Curiousity brings me to wonder about the choices my freinds have taken. Would they fare better had they choosen differently? Would have this freind happier would he marry this women that he left for seemingly stupid reasons, only to take a worse one?

But the very asking would be bad to this person's happiness. If I am right and he was mistaken back then, he can get quite sad about his current situation.

So I cannot ask people about historical choices they have made, lest it make them unhappy.

But I can still post aobut it, and aside from venting, it makes me look like a very considerate person. And who knows, maybe some wiser choices would come my way......

Looking clearly at our mistakes

I am finding myself doing many mistakes.

The more painful part is that I am catching myself almost online. A second after acting, up pops up the exact ensemble of gestures and actions that would have been much better.

It poses a dillema. Avoid these thoughts? Look at them? be happy or sad about that?

happiness or sadness about these, are partly out of our control. I have doubvts about "making oneself happy" intentionally. But I have no clear idea about that.

Yet looking at our mitakes can indeed teach us a lot. Doing a mistake and knowing the right way of action has good odds for a voiding the mistake another time.

There are a few caveats, however.
First, sometimes what we deem "the right way" is not realistic. knowing hte right way that it out of our realistic practical ability is of no use.
Second, simce we are bound to make mistkaes, much of what we need to learn is about how to handle life with our given behaviors. Not merely knowing hte optimal way of acting.
There is a lot of practical wisdom in learnig to handle our life given our weaknesses and stupidity.

Still I feel that knowing our mistakes has great value (and if one feels it inherently, he may enjoy much the process of thinking about the bettere ways to act upon every mistake he does). Let's hope I am not mistaken.

Indulgence strategy

Jerome Kagan has a priod of serious depression. As a result he says,

"I took a private oath to make each day as beautiful as possible. Family, freinds, forests, reading, tennis, and exploring rich corpora of data have been effective defenses against the recurrence of that deep, dark melancholia"


It is a big wonder why this oath is not common to all people. Probably, rationality is not enough. Only a strong and effective experience makes people to invest in enjoying life.

Indulgence means to do things one truly enjoys for their own sake. Feeling free to move to the thing that is fun, and stopping at the moment it does not feel like fun. It is not work, it is fun.


Everyone has some free time, where he is having the technical ability to simply indulge in fun activities. One got to act upon it. Also, one must have a wide spectrum of things that he enjoys. Because moods and energy change. So that one can always truly enjoy the free time.

It may not happen on its own. For some people, having fun cannot be left for chance. (nor can one let fun be technically managed. It is a balance that is different between people and between days/situations)

Listening to advice

1) When a friend advices me on something, I tend to ask why. Then I tend to think whether his reason is ocnvincing.

This is not so good. Advice represents also the friends' more general opinion about what I should do, which cannot be reduced to the reason he is giving.
I must take into account that my friend thinks so, regardless to his specific reason.

Note also that when we analyze the friends reasons, we go back to our own opinion....

2) Another reason for taking a friends advice as it is, is that the very opinion of a friend is informative even when we do not think so. Reality is not within our own opinion, but can be different from what we think.



3) Against advice. A problem with advice for personal life in general, is that life is complex, and advice must be compatible with one's life. Many times advice does not really take into account the advicee way of life, constraints, strategies etc.
See my post How different are you?


Ultimately, one got to be smart. There are no simple and clear technical rules