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Happiness is overrated

  A plea for lives built on ethics I don’t seek for happiness.  I don’t bother about whether I am happy or not.  I do what I feel as true and good and I don’t care about whether it brings happiness or unhappiness.  Only the mediocre mind seeks for happiness.  A truly cultured mind seeks for higher values like truth, beauty and goodness and it will seek it even if it leads to much pain and suffering.    Albert Einstein Personal happiness seems the ultimate goal for many in modern society. However, this is a very individualistic value. In a world filled with injustice, we too easily ignore our conscience, which may well be the reason so many of us are unhappy. Let's try to refocus our lives on living ethically and virtuously, and we may find this may end up giving us a much more profound kind of happiness. True happiness is not an individual, but a collective and a moral matter. The cult of the individual It seems like our Western society today is o...
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Meditation: A Practice of Privilege?

  I have been meditating regularly for about ten years now. I have attended and facilitated meditation groups and retreats, in various places in Europe, North America, and Asia, in different (mostly Buddhist-inspired) traditions. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to do so and have experienced great benefits from this practice. However, one thing has kept bothering me all those years. The Buddha claims – and I deeply believe – that his teaching can liberate all beings, yet when I join meditation groups, I often see myself surrounded by rather socially privileged people (just like myself 1 ). W hy does (Buddhist-inspired) meditation in the West seem to attract mainly an academically educated, 2 (upper) middle class audience? Is meditation not relevant for other social groups, or is there something else at play here? (I will focus on class privilege in this article. Gender and white privilege fall beyond its scope. I believe others  to be far better qualified th...
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What's the matter with foreign aid? (1) Development as colonialism

This is the first part of a three part critique of our aid and development model. This first part of this essay is a brief look into the historical context of our current development paradigm. (1) I grew up believing that something changed after WWII, there had been a global awakening, and the start of a period marked by international collaboration and respect for human rights, advanced by such historic achievements as the founding of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the independence of former colonies. Based on these new foundations, there would be a steady progress towards, peace, freedom and equality, thanks to a process called 'development'. I am a bit older now, and have worked for nearly 7 years in this field of development. My optimism has faded, and I am starting to fear it may have been a naive childhood illusion. Has anything really fundamentally changed? Development as we know it today started after the second World War. At the end of...
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