Every now and then you hear guys talk about how it seems so difficult to find an interesting, clever, and a beautiful woman when they are single, but as soon as they start dating they become chick magnets and suddenly that kind of quality women are around every corner. On top of that, many of them seem to be attracted to these guys - something that was completely unheard of before! One moment you’re just another single guy trying to get the attention of a beautiful woman. Start dating, and you become magic.

The scarcity principle is one explanation; people are always more interested in things that seem unobtainable or rare. Then there is social proof; someone else has already done the screening for you. But how do you create the same effect without starting to date and consequently remove yourself from the marketplace?

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It has been a long time since my last article. I have found excuses to keep me from writing, afraid that I wouldn't have anything to say. But each journey begins with the first step, and for me the first step seems to be the most difficult one to take. After that my mind starts to work on its own and words flow through my fingertips. I hope you enjoy my incoherent ramblings :)

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds. 
- Bob Marley.

Photo by: kronic.it

Thoughts have power, moreso when followed by action. And action is rarely present without the thought. You don't just get out of bed in the morning and go to work like a robot who has no say on what it's programmed to do. You think about what needs to be done before leaving the house, and you may even stop to think why you are going to work. Maybe you're saving money for a vacation, or maybe you feel like you are helping to make the world a better place through what you do for a living. In any case, you did not just end up where you are, but you rather got there as the end result of countless actions; actions preceded by thoughts.

Thoughts have power to manifest themselves in physical reality. The Wright brothers thought that a flying machine can be created. They believed it to be possible, even though the idea seemed ridiculous to others. But then again, it was the Wright brothers who created the world's first airplane. It was not someone who thought it couldn't be done.

Edison thought that it is possible to create light in a controllable way with electricity. He believed it so much that he famously invented 10 000 ways how to not create light before coming up with the lightbulb. What if he would have quitted? What if he would have buried his head in his hands in defeat, saying that "it is not possible" and fully embraced that thought?

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Have you heard how sometimes a drowning man, or a survivor of a shipwreck, has been helped ashore by a dolphin? This kinds of things come up in the news every now and then. Are they proof that dolphins are intelligent and benevolent? Do dolphins know that by doing this they are saving a human life? Or are they just being playful?

Photo by ladybugbkt

And what about the times when the dolphins ignore a struggling swimmer and let him drown? Or start towing or pushing him to the open sea instead of land? We never hear about these stories. It doesn't mean they wouldn't happen, but there's no one alive to tell them. Maybe a dolphin is just being playful, pushing and pulling the drowning man to wherever. The stories we hear are told by those who were lucky enough to be pushed ashore and lived to share their experience, and this distorts our perspective on reality. We are inclined to think that dolphins are benevolent creatures.

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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.

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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.

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