Slang words like fauxgressive can, if they take hold, affect the public conversation. Loaded with socially charged meaning, being quick and fun to use, and serving as a banner word for a social movement, these types of words have the potential to be socially influential memes.
Always Question Authority
One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority. ~ Hitchens
Always Question Authority 
The Stoic quote you just cited reminds me of mindfulness philosophy, which I have great respect for. I’m currently doing my final OT placement in outpatient mental health. I’ve been teaching people with emotion regulation difficulties about mindfulness and about living in this moment. This moment, even the bad moments, is all that you need to bear on your shoulders. Adding on baggage from the past and future is further burden.
One of the reasons I’m loving this placement is that I benefit so much from the things I’m learning and helping others with, there. I’ve had difficulties with things like emotion regulation, anxiety and depression myself, so I feel like I’m benefiting as much as anyone that I’m helping there. It’s a win-win.
Ah, you got the 1940s Boston Trolley up. I used to have the Boston trolley as the background for the whole site, but recently switched it to the San Fran trolley. Boston’s one of my fav cities, and I figure that San Fran will be another when I get to visit it. Now if only Vancouver had trolleys, I could give my other favourite city a scenic plug:)
Ron,
I am from New Orleans, and was looking for a St. Charles, or Canal Street trolly, but to no avail. Either way, the philosophical trolly conundrum is interesting. I don’t believe one would actually know how they would respond until faced with said conundrum.
In Reason,
Madison
I agree. There are lots of situations in which people don’t know how they would act or feel until they experience it. They sometimes think they know, but research has indicated that people are more often wrong than right. Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard who studies what he refers to as “affective forecasting” (the ability to predict how you would feel under certain circumstances) has done research wherein he asks people to predict how they would feel if this or that highly positive event (e.g., lottery win) or negative event (e.g., cancer diagnosis, need for amputation) were to occur. In a number of cases he has managed to reconnect with people whom have had events like this happen to them. He’s also done research on people whom have had these sorts of charged events happen to them whom he had never surveyed before. In both types of study, he’s found that people frequently over estimate how much happier their lives would be in the long run after a big positive change and how miserable they would be in the long run after big negative changes. In both cases, people tend to emotionally re-normalize over time, and so their experienced quality of life doesn’t shift as much as they would have expected.
Ron,
Your statement, ” people frequently over estimate how much happier their lives would be in the long run after a big positive change and how miserable they would be in the long run after big negative changes,” reminded me of the core principle of Stoicism, i.e., live in the present, for we dwell on the negativities of our past, and the uncertainties of our future, neither of which we have any control over. In fact Epictetus, the father of Stoicism, discusses this in the first chapter of his epic, and wonderful read, “Discourses.”
In Reason,
Madison