The importance of living
The Importance of Living is a wry, witty antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world. Lin Yutang's prescription is the classic Chinese philosophy of life: Revere inaction as much as action, invoke humor to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing-indeed, eager-to be busy, to make themselves useful, and to exercise power while you bask in the simple joy of existence.At a time when we're overwhelmed with wake-up calls, here is a refreshing, playful reminder to savor life's simple pleasures.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2011–2018years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages.
Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc
Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.
Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.
Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy
Noam Chomsky's political books
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability
J.R. Saul, Voltaire's Bastards - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things
Clifford Pickover, Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc
Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.
My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.
- Right now, I am reading "The Importance of Living" by Lin Yutang and this is one of points that he was trying to get across. There is no point in striving to do something, our best moments in life are those when we are just loafing and doing nothing in particular.
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