{"id":5375,"date":"2013-09-08T06:40:25","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T12:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5375"},"modified":"2013-09-08T06:40:25","modified_gmt":"2013-09-08T12:40:25","slug":"a-point-of-view-why-embracing-change-is-the-key-to-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5375","title":{"rendered":"A Point of View: Why embracing change is the key to happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/m.bbc.co.uk\/news\/magazine-23986212\">BBC<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Human happiness may rely on our ability to conquer a natural fear of upsetting the status quo, says AL Kennedy.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine three identical boxes. Two are empty and one contains your heart&#8217;s desire, perhaps love, perhaps a nice cup of tea. A kind, if slightly perverse, person says you can pick one box and own its contents. Let&#8217;s say you select Box A. The person then shows you Box B is empty. So either Box A &#8211; your choice, or Box C &#8211; a mystery, contains your happiness. Now, you can change your choice to Box C, or stick with Box A. But what gives you the better chance? Should you change or not?<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re like me, you won&#8217;t want to change. Even if things aren&#8217;t wonderful, but are familiar, I would rather stay with what I know. Why meddle with something for which there is a Latin, and therefore authoritative, term: the status quo. I studied dead languages at school &#8211; no chance of sudden changes in grammar or vocabulary there. So I&#8217;m aware status quo has roots in the longer phrase &#8220;in statu quo res erant ante bellum&#8221; &#8211; the state in which things were before the war. I feel the implication is that without the status quo there will be chaos. There will be war.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BBC: Human happiness may rely on our ability to conquer a natural fear of upsetting the status quo, says AL Kennedy. Imagine three identical boxes. Two are empty and one contains your heart&#8217;s desire, perhaps love, perhaps a nice cup of tea. A kind, if slightly perverse, person says you can pick one box and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5375"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}