"LAGOM": A New Life Style for Post Recession Americans

This recession hasn't finished teaching us that American idol of Darwinian-capitalist pursuit of riches, where a neighbor in difficulty automatically becomes a "loser" to be put out of mind and forgotten, just doesn't cut it when "we" are coming close to becoming one of "them".

This recession is marked by a frightening prospect overnight conversion from plush to bust that can reach all levels, just ask Bernie Madoff's "clients". We all feel the anxiety of material failure, of being second, being the loser when we are nicely comfortable. It all doesnt make sense, we intuit, but who has the time to contemplate when we are so driven to materially excel and garner more than our neighbor in the race to see who next will be the winner, or loser.

The essence of this recession is the repeated lesson that wild frontier, laissez faire (self-regulated, NOT!) capitalism ala Ayn Rand is just a dream, actually a dangerous nightmare because it creates a false theater of false fronts, and actors in false face, where "dollars are the ultimate". And time after time all of these falsities come tumbling down killing the fortunes and hopes of many many people, families, countries. However, America is not down and out for good. We can move on to a higher level of maturity by adopting a life style of moderation, suitability (LAGOM) from one of the most advanced cultures on the planet, and perhaps the culture with the highest standard of living and certainly the first or second highest in cultural well being, Sweden.

The cultural happiness can be summarized in the following observation about purely economic success (which seems to be the current way America values itself):

For all its prominence, GDP is only one yardstick of economic performance and it is no guide to social progress. It simply indicates the market value of all goods and services produced in an economy. It takes no account of how income is shared out, or of how it is generated. Few would celebrate a boom in costly divorce cases – but it would be great for GDP.

America is ready for a new way of living life. It is in our best interest to try a new way of valuing life than material accumulations. That is to say, let's try on "Lagom".

"LAGOM" has no exact translation in English. But good translations of lagom are: "enough, sufficient, adequate, just right". Lagom is also widely translated as "in moderation", "in balance", "optimal", and "suitable", also "sustainable" as a way of life.

Lagom also carries the connotation of perfection through appropriateness.

The value of "just enough" can be contrasted to the value of "more is better". It is viewed favorably as a sustainable alternative to the hoarding extremes of consumerism

"Lagom" is said to describe the basis of the Swedish national psyche,..of consensus and equality. It is ... to be modest and avoid extremes.

Similar to Lagom" is the Middle Path in Eastern philosophy, and Aristotle's "golden mean" of moderation in Western philosophy.

So, America, let's have "Lagom" meals; "Lagomish" houses, cars, and visible material wealth in general.

Perusal on Our Search for Life: Questioning and Suggesting

Why are Earth’s scientific agencies and minds, or at least most that are popularly heard about/from, so focused on limiting our official searches for extraterrestrial life to “sweet zones” and “metal abundances” and such life-limiting scenarios? Do they know something they are not telling us? Are they that caught in such a deep human-centric paradigm trap? And why are uber-world class minds such as Mr. Hawking sounding the flight alarm that a super advanced life species might use their esoteric technologies to look throughout the universe to feed themselves, as if in their super-advancement of physics and space travel they had forgotten all about solving the food and waste disposal problem and we would be the prime roast, sushi, Tabuli or Muktuk on their ideal dinner menu? What is happening, or has happened, to promote such limited perspectives?

Has any one or body called for a scientific/common sense interdisciplinary team to hash out a set of prerequisites for ET life in any form? And how shall or do we define "life", exactly or broadly. A personal perspective is that our scientific communities should greatly expand the definition of life and consequently the physico-chemical settings for the creation and evolution of life. Likewise, as Feynman pointed the great range of magnitudes spanning the nano-to-galactic scales, advanced life could be several orders of magnitude different in scale from humans and still have enough manipulative distance in scale to develop technologies - and why exactly are thumbs needed when on earth we have such outstanding natural nano-scale engineering forms such as the the exuded, lacy exosceletal forms in the seas and soil, and even the many magnitudes smaller viruses?

What does seem universally required is a source of some kind of POTENTIAL (in the physico-mechanico-chemical sense, or in some other sense we are not yet advanced to be aware of), to drive the ORGANIZATION of life, i.e. to combat the natural drift of entropy which means a mechanism to counteract the normal, disruptive drift of ENTROPY, i.e. decay. This requirement does not self-define Goldilockian “sweet zones”, earth-chemistry or even species large enough for us to see (or a species might be too large to for us to notice its “organization”). Supra-large organization of SENTIENCE (life?) could exist with scaled up densities that might look to us at our scales to be mist, fog, dust, near-vcuum but actually might be equivalent to flesh and blood in function - which perhaps represents another requisite of life, a MEDIUM to support functions such as signal (INFORMATION) TRANSPORT? And what about maintaining a state of negative entropy (SURVIVABILITY and REPLICATION). These capitalized words seem part of the descriptive matrix representing life and are not limited to earth-like settings.

In retrospect, such a possible life form would not be interested in us and probably would not notice us as pertinent to its interests of survival, enjoyment of life or whatever other activities dwell in the realm of its activities. Perhaps we would be viewed as we view Nematodes in our soil.

With such an expanded view, the issues we seem terribly concerned about such as “ethics” or predation have little or no meaning. Finally the Drake expression which is in danger of becoming a sacred cow: the observed frequency of supernovas which are galaxy-wide scourings (life-ending) by immense gamma ray explosions seem to reset the time-for-evolution every 4.5 billion years or so, and perhaps the Drake expression needs to be reviewed with this thought.