“Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups.“
A part of me always resisted the idea that these communities could work, but, this study is enough of a reason to make me a believer.
This video made me cringe. I am not surprised to see a commercial appropriating feel-good videos. Somehow, seeing especially Google do this makes me feel more disappointed. They are just another big corporation. Maybe, I believe they are capable of doing heroic stuff and I don't see them actually doing it.
The heuristic of trying to work on what you genuinely love is not helpful or practical for most people. It sounds good, but it is just a platitude.
Genuine love and fake love feel and look pretty similar. Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. Then, they make up a self-affirming, coherent narrative that justifies their emotions, decisions, and interests. If you do an AI startup, life goes well for you, and you embrace that decision and life, how can you differentiate whether it was really a genuine interest or not?
VisionSpring, a social venture, provides people glasses - which they say costs them $4-5 each. They claim that uncorrected refractive error costs the global economy an estimated $227 billion a year.
https://visionspring.org/why-eyeglasses
The other side of this problem is that more than one billion people around the world can't afford glasses.
"More than a billion people around the world need eyeglasses but don’t have them, researchers say, an affliction long overlooked on lists of public health priorities. Some estimates put that figure closer to 2.5 billion people. They include thousands of nearsighted Nigerian truck drivers who strain to see pedestrians darting across the road and middle-aged coffee farmers in Bolivia whose inability to see objects up close makes it hard to spot ripe beans for harvest. Then there are the tens of millions of children like Shivam across the world whose families cannot afford an eye exam or the prescription eyeglasses that would help them excel in school."
A part of me always resisted the idea that these communities could work, but, this study is enough of a reason to make me a believer.