World of Warcraft (WoW) came out in Europe in February 2005. I started playing it a month earlier during the final beta test phase, and I kept playing it for about four years straight - except when I was doing my student exchange in Malaysia in 2006. However, even at that time I was eagerly looking forward to the first big expansion (The Burning Crusade) to come out, and I was following WoW news sites and watching WoW videos created by other gamers.

All in all, I was rather hardcore about the whole thing: I was the founder and leader of one of the best guilds - a group of players organized to work together - on the server in which I played. Eventually we merged with another guild so we could achieve more together, and we did. We became the first ones on the whole server to beat most of the toughest opponents in the game. I also wanted to give up my position as a leader because it got simply too tiring to run the whole thing and to deal with egomaniacs, who for some reason seem to be particularly attracted to multiplayer online games...

Picture by Shards Of Blue

What finally stopped me playing WoW for good is actually rather embarrassing. In the end of 2008 I was becoming more and more fed up with the game. I had graduated a year and a half earlier and was working full-time. What I didn't want was to come home after work and play a game that started to feel like work, too. I felt obliged to play it. Then I finally realized after a period of denial that I was not getting any enjoyment out of it anymore, but instead it was making me anxious and frustrated.

Click to read more ...

Note: I wanted to try something different and refreshing with this weeks article, and I can only hope that my message about the importance of learning what happiness actually is comes across despite the writing style.

The metallic doorknob was warm to the touch. The door itself was of sturdy, wooden make, and behind the door would be 28 second year high school students whose lives he wanted to change. This was the moment of truth, so to speak. This was what the hard work of the past two years had been leading to. This would be, for the first time ever, Happiness 101 - an elective course in the science and philosophy of happiness, aimed at students who still were to decide what they wanted to do with their lives.

He wished that he would have had a chance to attend this course back when he was a student. It would have saved him a few years of drudgery, moving from job to job, from illusion to illusion, trying to pursue fleeting images of what would make him happy. He imagined being happy traveling the world. He wasn't. He imagined having a nice house and a nice car to make him happy. They didn't. He tried other pursuits too; practicing martial arts and immersing himself in painting, and sometimes he did feed happiness, but the happiness was always on the run, always seeming to slip his grasp and move farther away when he was about to reach it.

Then, two years ago, a friend of his shared a link on facebook that changed his life. It was a video recording of Matthieu Ricard's speech about the Habits of happiness. In that speech there is a section that imprinted itself on his memory, a section which he can recall word-by-word even to this day: 

So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say "everything to be happy." To have everything to be happy, that very sentence already bears the doom of destruction of happiness; to have everything. If we miss something it collapses. And also when things go wrong we try to fix things outside so much, but our control on the outer world is limited, temporary, and often illusory.

So now look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know by experience, that we can be in what we call "a little paradise" and yet be completely unhappy within.

...The experience that translates everything is within the mind.

Click to read more ...

In my previous post I talked about how we humans are made of trillions of smaller lifeforms such as cells and bacteria, and that those lifeforms are completely unaware that they are part of this indefinitely more complex structure we call human. If you haven't read my previous post, please read it before this one, as it provides an introduction to some of the concepts I'll be discussing here.

If the cells are aware of only other cell sized constructs, similar to us being aware of things that hold meaning to us and that exist in the world in which we operate, could it be possible that we are also just a part of a much larger organism? That organism would be indefinitely different from us and existing in a different world from ours. We would have no possible way to comprehend it or see our part in its existence.

Click to read more ...

If you think my previous post wasn't trippy enough, maybe this one is more to your satisfaction. The concepts I talk about here were inspired by Robert M. Pirsig's wonderful book Lila, as well as Richard Dawkins's TED talk The universe is queerer than we can suppose. And as a disclaimer, don't take these things seriously word-for-word, but instead stay open minded and focus on feeling what kind of thoughts they might provoke in you.

Let's look at you. What you are made of. We can start from atoms, move up to molecules and further zoom out to see the individual cells. There are trillions of them, and cells are considered as a basic form of life. There is life in you. You are not just alive as a person, but there are individual lifeforms within you, performing different functions without which you wouldn't survive.

Click to read more ...

We are currently living the high point of human evolution, and every single day is the next high point as our knowledge and understanding is constantly increasing. As little as 50 years ago people wouldn't have believed if you told them about how the whole world will be interconnected, and how vast amounts of information are available at practically everyone's fingertips.

We have put man on the moon, explored the deep seas and created magnificent works of art. The increase in humanity's understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit has been phenomenal, and never before have we glimpsed so deeply into how our bodies and minds work.

However, this increase in knowledge and the culture that values intelligence more than anything else has caused another kind of change in us; we have began to live our lives inside our heads. You might have a differing opinion of this, but I have started to notice that when people say "me" they mean their mind, their personality, their character. They are excluding the physical body from the concept of "me". I believe it's very common these days to refer to "my body" as something that's separate from "me", and consider it more like a possession instead of an integral part of your being.

Click to read more ...