Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[Dec 12th, 2022]]

  • Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. (Location 154)

  • Obliquity describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly. (Location 182)

  • In general, oblique approaches recognise that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many elements that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with each other, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery. (Location 183)

  • The architectural commentator Charles Jencks declared that modernism ended at 3.32 p.m. on 15 July 1972, when demolition contractors detonated fuses to blow up the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis.9 Less than two decades earlier, the scheme had won awards for its pioneering, visionary architecture. Tower blocks were the supreme expression of Le Corbusier’s view that ‘a house is a machine for living in’. (Location 192)

  • An oblique approach recognises that what we want from a home, or a community, has many elements. We will never succeed in specifying fully what they are, and to the extent that we do, we discover that they are often incompatible and inconsistent. (Location 207)

  • Re-engineering was the substitution of design for adaptation and discovery – preferring the direct to the oblique. (Location 218)

  • The environment – social, commercial, natural – in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly. (Location 231)

  • Happiness is not achieved through the pursuit of happiness. The most profitable businesses are not the most profit-oriented. The wealthiest people are not those most assertive in the pursuit of wealth. (Location 234)

  • Our objectives are often necessarily loosely described, and frequently have elements that are not just incompatible but incommensurable. (Location 239)

  • In obliquity there are no predictable connections between intentions and outcomes. (Location 244)

  • The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has described the sensation people experience in demanding activities as flow. It is ‘the sense of effortless action they feel [that] tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable’.17 Flow is often achieved at work. (Location 271)

  • Through experiences we normally associate with unhappiness, they achieve greater happiness than if they had sought happiness directly. (Location 282)

  • Perhaps people are confused about what makes them happy.18 Anyone who has changed a nappy or failed to quieten a childish tantrum will recognise that looking after children is an oblique route to happiness. (Location 283)