What Governs Our Choices?

Savoring What You Can Control

Amid the pandemic and its economic fallout, it’s easy to feel out of control.  And our happiness is affected by how much control we have.

Fortunately, we have more control than we may realize. My Psychology Today article today offers example, which, in turn, could help you attain a bit more happiness, even in these trying times.

Should You Be Bolder or Less So? A self-assessment

Some evidence suggests a genetic predisposition to risk-taking.
Not withstanding that and philosophical determinists from Kant to Sam Harris, I like to think we retain a measure of free will.  

With that as an assumption, my Psychology Today article today offers a self-assessment inventory that could help you decide whether you want to direct your free will in a new direction.

How Much Control Do We Have? The free-will debate in the time of coronavirus

For time immemorial, philosophers have debated the extent to which we have free will.

The coronavirus pandemic makes such a debate timely because something so important is happening to us that is out of our control. As a result, it's easy to feel helpless and unmotivated to do what we should do.

In my Psychology Today article today, I argue that they're wrong and that we do retain much free will. The article's goal is to reassure and motivate us to be assertive, to have internal locus of control even in this time of coronavirus. We can choose to make a difference or not to, in our lives and others.

I focus on behaviors related to the coronavirus.

Just Your Luck: Luck matters much more than we like to acknowledge.

Speaking to Harvard’s 2019 graduating seniors, dean Rakesh Khurana asserted that Harvard grads don't deserve their success. Rather, they are the benefits of privilege, of luck.

My reflexive reaction was to disagree. After all, I'm pretty successful despite coming from true poverty, living in a Bronx tenement, the child of Holocaust survivors who suffered the unimaginable and who spoke virtually no English, had no education, no money, no family, only the scars of the Holocaust tortures.

But on reflection, Khurana may be right. I make the case in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

On an Albert Ellis Quote

The famed cognitive-behavioral therapist, Albert Ellis, said, "The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. "

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I argue he's being simplistic.