Interessen / Interests:

Persönlich würde ich sagen, dass eine Person langweilig wird oder langweilig werden kann, wenn sie es unterlässt Interessen zu pflegen. Interessen bedeuten in dem Sinn, dass sie Anteil nimmt an dieser Welt, oder an manchen Zügen oder Eigenheiten dieser Welt, ohne dass sie sich dadurch besonderen Nutzen erwartet. Eben dieses Entkoppeln vom Streben nach unmittelbaren Zwecken, diese "Offenheit", ein gewisser "Weitblick", machen den Menschen ja so sehr aus. Jemand verliert sehr viel, wenn er exklusive persönlichen Angelegenheiten echtes Interesse entgegenbringt, und wenn ihm somit und hierdurch der Weitblick, seine Offenheit, sein Sinn für Fernes und Ferneres mehr und mehr abhanden kommt.

-----

Personally, I would say that a person becomes—or can become—boring if he neglects to cultivate interests. Interests mean, in this sense, that one engages with this world, or with certain aspects or peculiarities of it, without expecting any particular benefit in return. It is precisely this detachment from the pursuit of immediate purposes—this “openness,” a certain “breadth of vision”—that so deeply defines a human being. Someone loses a great deal when he shows genuine interest only in strictly personal matters, and in doing so gradually loses that breadth of vision, his openness, his sense for what is distant and beyond.

Sexuelle Selektion:

Persons & Currie, 2022:

"In the longstanding metaphor of the adaptive landscape, sexual selection is a means by which lineage resting on one adaptive peak may gradually bridge a gap to another peak, without the landscape itself being first altered by environmental changes."

Ein Mechanismus, der dazu führt, dass sich Organismen von "optimaler Angepasstheit" wegbewegen können. In dem Sinne führt er also dazu, dass Organismen einen Hügel der Fitnesslandschaft verlassen können, um sich erneut auf die Suche zu machen, nach anderen, größeren Erhebungen, Hügeln, Gebirgen, nach höheren Spitzen.

Major Revisions:

Scott Peck:

"We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality. If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions. The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful."

Listening:

Scott Peck:

"By far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening."

-----

"Listenting well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well."

-----

"For true listening, no matter how brief, requires tremendous effort. First of all, it requires total concentration. You cannot listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time."

-----

"An essential part of listenting is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes."

-----

"Perhaps the primary requisite for a good psychiatrist is a capacity to truly listen."

-----

"attempting to be as consistently patient and bracketing as much as possible - all these are tasks that are often boring, frequently inconvinient and always energy-draining; they mean work."

Managing the Stresses of Group-Living in the Transition to Village Life

RIM Dunbar

Abstract

Group-living is stressful for all mammals. I use homicide rates as an index of this for humans in small-scale ethnographic societies, and show that the frequency of homicide increases linearly with living-group size in hunter-gatherers. This not, however, true of cultivators living in permanent settlements, where instead there appears to be a series of ‘glass ceilings’ below which homicide rates oscillate. These glass ceilings correlate with the adoption of behavioural mechanisms that allow social friction to be managed. These results suggest (1) that the transition to a settled lifestyle in the Neolithic may have been more challenging than is usually assumed and (2) that the increases in settlement size that followed the first villages necessitated structural rearrangements so as to manage inter-individual discord.

Statistics:

"Modern statistics, like telescopes, microscopes, X-rays, radar, and medical scans, enables us to see things invisible to the naked eye."

David J. Hand

Techniken, die Strukturen sichtbar machen ...

Difficulties:

Im Leben geht's darum, schwierige Problemstellungen und Aufgaben anzugehen. Das ist geradezu der Kernaspekt von Leben und Lebendigkeit. Dazu Scott Peck:

"Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is nno longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them ..."