Mistaken Identity, HeartBleed, Happiness, Advertising and a Vow to do something different.

I watched Mistaken Identity last night with my lovely lady. The film is really not that funny and a bit sad really, in ways, I think, the creators probably hadn't thought.

But anyways - it contains a few nuggets of wisdom.

One about identity and passwords and things that we should protect. Which means this morning I updated most (if not all) of my passwords. With fear of what heartbleed is doing. 

The other point I but here for my daughter Mia to read later on in life.

It's that money simply does NOT buy you happiness. 

The lady in the film steals people's identities and then their money.

But for me it's more about the lack of happiness this brings her and the fact that she only buys things to interact with the very shop assistants selling her things.

Anyhoo this is what someone MUCH wiser than me has to say about it all...as Mr Chopra has pointed about about modern life...

"This is where a very bad idea enters the picture. It holds that money buys happiness, and the more money you have, the happier you will be. In a sense, capitalism runs on this idea, but I'm not writing to outline the flaws in capitalism. Every economic system generates its own myths and is blind to its own defects if you believe in the system. The real problem with "money buys happiness" is twofold.

First, it's not true beyond a very limited point. Having enough money to be comfortable produces more happiness than living with the stress of poverty and want. Beyond this fairly modest state of financial security (not so modest if you were born into a poor country or have an impoverished background in a rich one) money brings more stress than it's worth.

Positive psychologists seem pretty sure about this finding, looking at a broad range of subjects, although of course there are exceptions - rich people who seem exceedingly happy and poor people who seem the same. Even so, if you really care about your happiness more than your bank account, you shouldn't devote your life to the pursuit of wealth, no matter how much our society glorifies being rich and mythologizes the wealthy as if they live in a paradise on earth.

The second reason that "money buys happiness" is such a bad idea is subtler. The pursuit of money prevents you from finding happiness another way. I hold the minority position about happiness, the one that says lasting happiness depends on our state of awareness, and to find the highest state of happiness, you must reach a higher state of consciousness.

The same view has been held for centuries by all the world's wisdom traditions, and ironically, now is the best time to test it out. In the past, the average person was helpless in the face of poverty, war, and disease. That's no longer true for millions of people who have enough control over their destiny to pursue happiness rather than simply try to survive.

It would be a shame to waste this golden opportunity by thoughtlessly adhering to such a bad idea as "money buys happiness." From the seed of this idea grows offspring, such as the idea that poverty means that you are an inferior person, a loser, or the idea that winning is everything, since winning implies monetary rewards.

Then there's the idea that you can use your money to buy so many glittery toys and distractions that these will constitute happiness, and so on. The truth is that happiness is an inner pursuit that is very different from the pursuit of pleasure or the amassment of a fortune. No one should accept this as a given; it needs to be tested out personally.

In the end, the message of the world's wisdom traditions is a call to find out the truth for yourself.

 It just helps to clear away the underbrush of untruths, and "money buys happiness" is just that.


Deepak Chopra, MD, Founder of The Chopra Foundation, Co-Founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, coauthor of Super Brain with Rudolph Tanzi and for more information visit The Universe Within. Come to the Chopra Foundation Sages and Scientists Symposium 2014."

To end I leave you Mia (and others that might read this) with a lovely advertisement from a country far away. 

Which proves for me two things: 

1. Advertising CAN do something positive.

2. Far away places are somehow much better than ours.

The advert is on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGghmwUcbQ

The other reason is that at 14.04 today I am going to vow (whilst outside) to re start my own business.

Doing something outside of my time with  Justaxi - Manchester's taxi comparison app

Why 14.04pm you wonder? No reasons apart from it being 14.04 and 14.04.14.

I hope 4's are powerful. 1024 seems to be doing well with them :)

As the idea is in mobile gaming - perhaps it is something I can do with Justaxi as well?