Happy Monday

Well here it is the start of another work week.  It’s now fall and the it’s cooler now. The leaves are falling off the trees and stuff looks like it’s all dying.

Geez. I used to hate this time of year. Summer’s over and school is well under way. You know what happens then? You start feeling crappy.

Are you having one of those days when you’re feeling beat down, run down, turned down, turned off or used up?

A lot of us are feeling that way lately and no wonder. The economy has tanked, things like houses – if you still have one – (remember those big square things with roofs?) are loosing more and more of their value while at the same time our food costs are rising.

Yikes!  How much can we take.


But hey, take some comfort, it could be worse. You could have been the brains behind the Yodeling Meter. First introduced in 1925 this clever but seemingly useless device was put together especially to measure the pitch of the human yodel. Maybe I’m just thinking like a marketer but I suppose it could have been a real scream during those summer weekend-long parties over at uncle Joe’s place.  Especially after a few of his bootlegged beers.

I don’t know how many of these were sold but I’d doubt if it covered the cost of the prototype, this professional promo photo, and the two lovely models.

Seriously though, if you really are feeling a little less than you’d like to, you should see this.

More power to you.

David's signature

Mindset Immunity and Happiness

 

Freud: Happy? "No, just less miserable."Photo of Sigmund Freud

For a long time now, particularly ever since I discovered the phenomenon of mindset immunity, I've been very interested in human happiness. Or should I say lac of it. (See I suspect that there might be a happiness deficit in the world today.) I had a hunch that there might be tons of people just like myself who are interested in happiness and how to make it stick around longer.

As I researched the topic of happiness I, naturally, ran into many references to the field of psychology. One in particular was Sigmund Freud. He was known widely as the founder of psychoanalytic school of psychiatry, a branch of medicine where it's practitioners try to make their patients better through analyzing things like dreams but Freud, as it turns out, was quite a pronounced pessimist and I'm guessing not that very happy a guy himself.

Flooded with clients who had lost their joy of life I think in time he must have caught what ever unhappiness bug it was that they had. Whatever the case it must have resulted in a man who eventually concluded that happiness and hope might be close in the dictionary listings but that's about as close as they got. Check out what he had to say about happiness:

  • "It's a doomed craft. It's propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality."
  • "One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation."

Whoa! And he was a doctor!

I think that old Sig should have forgotten his head and had is gut examined instead. If he had perhaps he'd now be listed among today's innovative researchers like Dr. Michael Gershon. Dr. Gershon you see is a professor as well as chairman of the Anatomy and Cell Biology department at Columbia University Hospital in New York City.  He's the guy who noticed that the human gut contains large amounts of feel-good chemistry and brain cells exactly like the one's found in the head.

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