I take it as a given that it is beneficial for each human being to develop and enrich their own voice, and ask: dear reader, are you growing and nurturing your own voice?
Besides regular exercise and meaningful projects, I think one of the most important pillars of happiness is speaking your mind.
ne of the most important pillars of happiness is speaking your mind.
I posit that a more accurate statement is “one of the most important pillars of happiness is being in the position where you can speak your mind.”
I think that, on net, speaking your mind being happiness-increasing is completely dependent upon your situation in life, the way you relate to others and the current arrangement of your personality. It is a great position to be in wherein you can speak your mind and it increases your happiness. However, there are costs to keeping your thoughts to yourself and there are costs to speaking your mind and you have to weigh those costs.
I’m a very happy person (some would say irritatingly so), but some of the worst periods of my life come from speaking my mind.
In my current situation and relationships, speaking my mind about almost anything would very likely improve my happiness, but in other periods of my life the costs and benefits did not always tilt that way for all possible things I may have wanted to say.
Speaking one’s mind can indeed be very dangerous, depending on the context.
Not all environments or political situations one may be embedded within may allow doing so even in small ways, which is unfortunate. I do think that it’s important for a person to be cognizant of the situation they are in regarding the safety of speaking their own mind.
I think being aware of the costs of speaking one’s own mind doesn’t preclude the potential for doing so to make someone happy or bring great satisfaction, even if one’s safety is violated as a result.
At the very least, it seems possible to privately and secretly develop one’s own sense of self, one’s own mind, one’s voice, even in dangerous situations so that should the opportunity to make a significant contribution by speaking one’s own mind arise, one would have the wherewithal and faculties to do so. And if such an opportunity never were to arise...well, if one can stave off the bitterness and cynicism that might try to infect them...one may be very satisfied and happy that they at least developed themselves and their own voice during their life.
I agree, though I think a prerequisite to speaking one’s mind is to have a mind to speak, i.e. have developed your own thoughts enough to have something to say, or at minimum, have enough of a sense of self to know when something is wrong, right, other category, specifically, when something is legible enough to notice and then say something about. It’s hard to speak one’s mind if one never develops one’s own voice (mind, sense of self, whatever you may call it) enough to be cognizant of things to say that need saying (or merely having the capability to feel the desire to say something).
Further developing my capabilities to speak my mind via increasing the coherence of my sense of self or voice is a contributing reason for why I wrote Voicing Voice.
Besides regular exercise and meaningful projects, I think one of the most important pillars of happiness is speaking your mind.
I posit that a more accurate statement is “one of the most important pillars of happiness is being in the position where you can speak your mind.”
I think that, on net, speaking your mind being happiness-increasing is completely dependent upon your situation in life, the way you relate to others and the current arrangement of your personality. It is a great position to be in wherein you can speak your mind and it increases your happiness. However, there are costs to keeping your thoughts to yourself and there are costs to speaking your mind and you have to weigh those costs.
I’m a very happy person (some would say irritatingly so), but some of the worst periods of my life come from speaking my mind.
In my current situation and relationships, speaking my mind about almost anything would very likely improve my happiness, but in other periods of my life the costs and benefits did not always tilt that way for all possible things I may have wanted to say.
Speaking one’s mind can indeed be very dangerous, depending on the context.
Not all environments or political situations one may be embedded within may allow doing so even in small ways, which is unfortunate. I do think that it’s important for a person to be cognizant of the situation they are in regarding the safety of speaking their own mind.
I think being aware of the costs of speaking one’s own mind doesn’t preclude the potential for doing so to make someone happy or bring great satisfaction, even if one’s safety is violated as a result.
At the very least, it seems possible to privately and secretly develop one’s own sense of self, one’s own mind, one’s voice, even in dangerous situations so that should the opportunity to make a significant contribution by speaking one’s own mind arise, one would have the wherewithal and faculties to do so. And if such an opportunity never were to arise...well, if one can stave off the bitterness and cynicism that might try to infect them...one may be very satisfied and happy that they at least developed themselves and their own voice during their life.
I agree, though I think a prerequisite to speaking one’s mind is to have a mind to speak, i.e. have developed your own thoughts enough to have something to say, or at minimum, have enough of a sense of self to know when something is wrong, right, other category, specifically, when something is legible enough to notice and then say something about. It’s hard to speak one’s mind if one never develops one’s own voice (mind, sense of self, whatever you may call it) enough to be cognizant of things to say that need saying (or merely having the capability to feel the desire to say something).
Further developing my capabilities to speak my mind via increasing the coherence of my sense of self or voice is a contributing reason for why I wrote Voicing Voice.