1.3c – Psychology

The complexity of our world has increased tremendously in recent decades. Our natural psychological makeup is not well equipped to deal with this complexity, leading to the raft of psychological challenges in society today. This subsection of the Health chapter of Supermorning strives to bring the mind back into balance in our hectic world.

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Recap: The Pursuit of Happiness

People have been searching for the key to happiness for millennia. 

This week’s posts presented my take on this interesting subject. Given its complexity, the posts were a bit longer than usual, but they certainly were very interesting to research and write. 

Today’s post presents the more easily digestible summary.

The checklist

Here are the four key happiness insights shared this week:

  1. Directly chasing happiness is pointless.
    • The amount of time and money spent on instant pleasure activities is actually a good indicator of unhappiness.
    • Instead, we need to focus on things that give meaning to life.  
  2. Materialistic pursuits of happiness have their benefits, but also some serious drawbacks.
    • Although the pursuit of material success brings little lasting happiness, it has fueled great human progress.
    • But this motivation has a dark side in terms of environmental destruction, social injustice and self-destructive behaviors.
  3. The combination liberty and purpose offers an attractive solution.
    • This philosophy can further accelerate human progress without any of the downsides.
    • As an added bonus, it can actually bring genuine life satisfaction. 
  4. Informed gratefulness can make big contributions to happiness.
    • Gratitude increases happiness because it can reset our benchmarks to more reasonable levels. 
    • There are at least 6 big reasons to be grateful that most of us take for granted today. 

These insights won’t make you permanently happy. But they can certainly give much more meaning to the daily grind and create a more positive outlook on life. 

I really hope they work for you as they do for me! A happier world is a better world for all of us 🙂

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Gratitude and Happiness

Gratitude has emerged as a very popular happiness technique in recent years. The fundamentals behind using gratitude in the pursuit of happiness are sound, but many people struggle to put it into practice. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge is that most of us simply don’t realize just how much we have to be grateful for.

That’s where today’s article comes in. Below, you’ll find six major reasons to be grateful that go far beyond the typical small stuff most gratefulness practitioners talk about. 

Let’s dive right in…

Prosperity

Never before has society been as prosperous as it is today.

If you’re reading this, it probably means you have all the basic material possessions required for a good life. As discussed earlier, only about 20% of global citizens enjoy this privilege today.

Prosperity gets much more exclusive if we go back in history. In fact, for the 99.9% of human history before the industrial revolution, basics like comfortable housing, abundant food and warm clothing were reserved for kings and other royalty only.

Fully appreciating your historically unprecedented prosperity can significantly increase life satisfaction 🙂 

Time

With this prosperity comes a lot more value out of life’s most valuable resource: time.

Over almost all of human history, life was a grim story of hard manual labor to put food on the table. Today, many people spend less than one hour per day on earning their daily calories.

We therefore have the privilege of using our time for pursuing a wide range of other activities, making life much more pleasant and interesting. 

Next time you’re enjoying some free time or any kind of discretionary consumption, spare a thought for all those whose lives were (and still are) one long struggle for life’s most basic necessities. 

Peace

Yes, there are still some warring regions, but the time since the end of second world war has been by far the most peaceful time in human history.

Your chance of dying a violent death today is a tiny fraction of what it was only a few generations ago. And if you were lucky enough to be born into the top 20%, this minute likelihood drops even further. 

To really drive this home, I encourage you to read a little book called Man’s Search for Meaning. It will take your appreciation of peace to the appropriately high level. 

Health

The progress in global health over the past 0.1% of human history has been simply astounding. 

A mere two centuries ago, average life expectancy was only 30 years! Today, it has more than doubled and continues to increase strongly. Those who look after themselves have a genuine shot at living (and living well) to 100 and beyond. 

Infectious diseases and child mortality rates have plummeted, while routine operations today save countless lives that would have been lost only a few generations ago.  

So, if you’ve reached the ripe old age of 30 or have ever benefited from modern medical science, this is a great topic for gratitude 🙂 

Tolerance

The vast majority of human history is characterized by extreme prejudice that makes today’s social discriminations look puny.

For centuries, it was completely normal to treat slaves like animals and women as possessions. There was also extreme prejudice regarding religion and social class, often resulting in outright oppression with frequent bloodshed. 

If you’re anything other than a straight Christian white male born into a rich family, be very thankful for the society we live in today. 

Democracy

The idea that people should have any say in how they are governed is a historically very recent phenomenon.

Since the start of the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago, the people were blatantly exploited by tiny groups of elites without having any say in the matter. 

A democracy is far from perfect, but, for the vast majority of us, it’s a much better deal than the autocracies of the past. A little historical perspective makes it well worth our gratitude 🙂 

Happiness is relative

Happiness is just a feeling, caused by certain chemical and electrical signals in the body.

This feeling can be invoked by almost anything. It’s certainly possible for a desperately poor girl in an African village to derive more happiness from a beautiful flower than a Silicon Valley billionaire from his 10th exotic sports car.  

If you expect Ferrari’s and Lamborghini’s, a new Porsche will give you little satisfaction. But if you expect having to walk 10 km to work every day, a brand new bicycle can bring tremendous joy. 

This is the purpose of gratefulness: resetting our benchmark to a more appropriate level. If you manage to set your benchmark to the factually accurate levels described above, your life will suddenly look a lot better. 

And if you can gradually work towards true personal liberty and purpose as discussed yesterday, you may just realize that life can be genuinely awesome 🙂

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Liberty and Purpose

Yesterday’s post gave an interesting discussion about the implications of our natural tendency to link happiness to material success.

The main conclusion was that, for us lucky 20% who live in material comfort, this instinctive motivation has almost no upside, but huge downside. 

Today’s post will propose a much more attractive alternative philosophy. 

Personal liberty

Over the course of human history, millions of people have fought and died for personal liberty: the right to choose one’s own actions (as long as they don’t harm society). 

Today, most people enjoy this historically rare privilege. But for many, it’s only theoretical freedom. In practice, they’re economic slaves living paycheck-to-paycheck, working jobs they hate.

This economic slavery is maintained by a master called consumerism: the false promise of happiness from buying stuff we don’t really need.  

Breaking free of this economic slavery is one half of the key to overcoming the bad and the ugly aspects of our materialistic pursuit of happiness discussed yesterday. 

Purpose 

The other half of the key is having something truly meaningful to do with genuine personal liberty. Without this second half of the key, all the liberty in the world will bring no lasting happiness. 

Note that a purpose is not the same as a goal. It’s not something clearly quantifiable that can be ticked off a list one day. 

Instead, it’s a reason for getting up every morning that will always be there. For example, mine is contributing to solving the great global sustainability challenge. 

A key feature of a good purpose is that it motivates you to contribute to society with no expectation of a return.

If money is your primary motivation for working, it’s a clear sign that you are yet to find your true purpose. But don’t worry. You have time 🙂 

Liberty and purpose can change the world

As outlined in yesterday’s post, the good from our flawed material pursuit of happiness is the rapid economic progress enabled by capitalism. But this has truly ugly consequences in the form of environmental destruction, social injustice and self-destructive behaviors. 

Someone with a clear purpose and the freedom to pursue this purpose will probably create even more value for society, and do so without any of the ugly consequences. 

This philosophy shifts the target in the pursuit of happiness from maximum material consumption to free creative expression. Naturally, this leads to much less consumption and environmental impact.

It also halts the growing gap in living standards between the rich and the poor. Creators will often end up rich, but they do not display these riches, investing it in their purpose instead (which often involves the solution of key societal problems). 

A true purpose also reduces our tendency to self-destruct, much of which is fueled by instant-pleasure consumption and the disillusionment with the poor results of this direct pursuit of happiness. 

Earning freedom to pursue your purpose

The big challenge is that it mostly takes many years to earn genuine personal liberty. This will be the topic of the next chapter of the Supermorning series, starting next week. 

In the meantime, it’s important to realize that personal liberty is not binary. There is a broad spectrum between total slavery and true liberty. 

Gradually developing your life from slavery to liberty is an awesome journey, regardless of the final destination. 

Along this journey, you can work on finding and refining your purpose. Then, as your liberty gradually increases, you can pursue your purpose with increasing levels of freedom and focus. 

In my view, this journey towards liberty and purpose is the most efficient and socially responsible pursuit of happiness at our disposal. 

Tomorrow, we’ll put the cherry on top of this much more rational pursuit of happiness. See you then!

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Happiness and Material Success

There are two particularly inefficient roads to happiness that we humans are strongly drawn to:

  1. Money (the ability to try and buy happiness)
  2. Accomplishment (the promise of happiness after reaching a certain goal)

Today’s post will do a little analysis of the good, the bad and the ugly of these primitive driving forces.

The good

These two motivators, as false as they may be, must take credit for a huge chunk of the extraordinary human progress we’ve seen since the industrial revolution. 

There’s a name for this type of motivation: Capitalism.

Think about it what you may, but the numbers are indisputable: Capitalism has given longer and more interesting lives to more people than our forefathers could ever have imagined.

And this enormous force for progress is still lifting millions out of poverty today. Take a look at these charts to see how far we’ve come and how many trends are still going in the right direction. 

All this amazing progress simply would not have been possible without the genius of capitalism: that people can act in their own material self interest to create huge value for society. 

The bad

What is also clear is that the happiness we expect from money and accomplishment very rarely materializes. 

There’s a name for that too: The hedonic treadmill.

We’re driven by strong expectations of happiness if we could just achieve a certain level of material success. But if we eventually reach our goals, the mind quickly returns to its base level of happiness.

All the effort required to drive this treadmill takes its toll. As the next level of progress continues to become exponentially more complex, people are getting more stressed and overwhelmed today than ever before.

We must be objective though. Since about 80% of the global population still live in conditions of material lack, the amazing progress of capitalism continues to improve hundreds of millions of lives.

Today, it’s only for us lucky richest 20% that the bad often outweighs the good. 

The ugly

And then we get to the three genuinely ugly aspects of this type of motivation:

1. Environmental destruction

The threats from environmental degradation and climate change are well documented. Up to now, humans have behaved much like a mindless bacterial culture in a Petri dish, consuming its limited store of resources and excreting wastes with no thought for tomorrow.

If pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is free, capitalism simply does not care about climate change. This tragedy of the commons is one of the biggest challenges facing society today.  

We must acknowledge some encouraging signs of progress though. The question is just whether we can change quickly enough. 

2. Social injustice

The massively unequal distribution of the spoils of capitalism is also well documented. As much as we’d like to believe in self-determination, the stats say that the single biggest predictor of your material success is the social class into which you are born. 

Objectively speaking, the poor are also benefiting greatly from capitalism. But they see the wealth of the upper classes (largely gained through the lottery of birth) all around them, naturally causing great unhappiness. 

There is also a deeply disturbing injustice related to environmental destruction: those who are least to blame will suffer the worst consequences. 

3. Self-destructive behavior

Lastly, humanity’s incredibly rapid rise from a simple animal to god-species means that our evolved instincts are poorly suited to our modern world.

This has resulted in a wide range of serious physical and psychological ailments closely related to a wide range of irrational self-destructive behaviors.

The search for solutions

My dedication to sustainable development is nothing more than an attempt to mitigate the bad and the ugly, while the good continues to lift billions of people to decent living standards. 

For us fortunate 20%, the good has become essentially useless. Further increases in material success will bring no greater life satisfaction.

This leaves only the bad and the ugly, creating a clear need for us to break our deep bond to these primitive motivations that have driven human progress for centuries. 

Tomorrow’s post will discuss how this can be done. See you then!

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Chasing Happiness

This final week of the psychology sub-chapter of Supermorning will tackle a very complicated subject: happiness. 

People have been chasing happiness for centuries. In this quest, we’ve built a world of riches beyond our forefathers’ wildest dreams. And yet, the search for happiness has grown more intense than ever. 

Will we ever find nirvana? Probably not.

Is it worth continuing the search? Definitely! 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the basics. 

For starters, let’s reduce global suffering

We may never find the key to everlasting happiness, but we can definitely do a lot to reduce global suffering.

About 70% of the global population still lives in conditions of material lack (<$20/day), and more than half of those in serious poverty (<$5/day). 

Aside from poverty, there remains a lot of exploitation and discrimination against those unlucky enough to be born into disadvantaged social classes. This only compounds the suffering brought by poverty.  

I maintain an extremely frugal lifestyle that costs me a little over $30/day (adjusted for purchasing power). It really pains me to see how many people still reside below this mark in the graph above. This is one of the key motivations behind my dedication to sustainable development. 

People reading this are probably with me safely above the $30/day mark (you can easily calculate your number by dividing your average daily living costs by the purchasing power of your country’s currency given here). 

Be very grateful for your good fortune of being born into affluence. 

Rich world problems

Us fortunate few who have enough income for a comfortable life (and don’t face serious exploitation or discrimination) can move on to the next step in the quest for happiness. 

And we do give this our very best shot, spending trillions on various happiness-on-demand activities like entertainment, sugary and fatty foods, alcohol and other drugs, luxurious treatments and holidays. Then we spend trillions more on status symbols like oversized houses, fancy cars and fashionable clothing.

But despite all this effort, that blissful state of happiness remains elusive. If anything, the rich world has a higher incidence of mental disorders than the developing world. 

This is not all that surprising, given that the three topics coming up most frequently in happiness studies have little to do with such direct pursuits of happiness: 

  1. Nourishing relationships
  2. Stimulating work 
  3. Physical and emotional health

In fact, keeping these elements of your life in good shape often requires plenty of effort and sacrifice. But they provide one decisive benefit: meaning. 

Those who find real meaning in caring for themselves (health), their friends and family (relationships) and their community/society (work), can find contentment in almost any situation.

Without such a clear sense of purpose, no amount of pleasure can ever bring lasting happiness. 

Chasing ghosts

Yep, the more directly you pursue happiness, the less likely you are to find it. In fact, the amount of time and money you spend on happiness-on-demand products and services is an excellent measure of unhappiness. 

This bring us to possibly the biggest fraud of our modern civilization: the false promise of happiness through consumption. But let’s leave that for tomorrow.  

See you then!

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Recap: Permanent Stress Reduction

Following last weeks’s techniques for managing existing stress, this week focused on proactive strategies for not getting so stressed in the first place. 

Let’s see how this can be done. 

The checklist

There are four main techniques for long-term stress reduction:

  1. Proactively prevent overwhelm.
    • Overwhelming yourself only reduces your ability to get things done. 
    • It’s important to understand the fundamental driving force behind your overwhelm. 
  2. Take special care of your health and relationships. 
    • Environments for automatic healthy diet and fitness are great stress reduction tools.
    • Master the key moments to prevent relationships from going sour and causing lots of stress for all involved.
  3.  Win over your biggest critic: yourself. 
    • Invest, fail, learn, repeat. 
    • Getting comfortable with this cycle is key to the healthy self-respect needed to stop stressing about your own life. 
  4. Make a big stress reduction move if really necessary.
    • Sometimes you need to get out of things like a damaging relationship or a bad career choice.
    • Such a big stress reduction move should be considered carefully and executed professionally. 

These four strategies can combine to permanently bump your stress down to a healthier level. They might take some time to implement properly, but offer great rewards in the long run. 

May you enjoy a long-term future of less stress and more action 🙂 

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Big Moves to Remove Big Stressors

Sometimes, you need to do something big to permanently reduce stress in the longer-term future. Such big moves should be thought over very carefully, but they can often be very valuable.

Let’s take a look. 

Permanent stressors

There are several things in life that can result in permanent unhealthy stress levels. Possibly the three biggest ones are:

  • An unhealthy relationship
  • An incorrect career path
  • An unsuitable place of residence 

Getting out of any of these can be really tough. But if you’ve tried everything else and still experience unhealthy stress levels as a result of your permanent stressor, such a big move could be worthwhile. 

Look before you leap

The grass is always greener on the other side. In other words, you should put in plenty of thought and research to make sure that your life will genuinely be better after your big move.

If you just want out at any cost, you can easily end up jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. 

Execute like a pro

Taking the plunge will be tough, but there’s no need to make it any harder than it needs to be. Plan carefully and execute everything by the book to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible. 

Making a big move not only takes up a lot of mental resources, but also a lot of time. So be sure to give up some other responsibilities to give yourself a fair shot at making your move stick. 

Big moves like these don’t become necessary very often – perhaps once every decade. So, when the time comes, you can afford to invest the effort required to execute like a pro. 

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Win Over Your Worst Critic: Yourself

Our third permanent stress reduction technique is an interesting one: winning over your inner critic (a.k.a. achieving true self-respect). 

If you regularly stress about all the things you don’t have and compare yourself unfavorably to others, today’s post could be an important one. 

So, let’s take a look at ways to silence that inner critic. 

Life is long

The human mind instinctively wants things to happen immediately. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what’s needed to build a good life in today’s society. 

Indeed, our modern world belongs to those who manage to consistently and intelligently invest, be it in themselves, in their relationships or in the markets. By their very nature, investments bring little or no instant gratification. But over a decade or two, they grow enormously valuable. 

This realization is the first step to healthier self-expectations. True success never happens overnight, but, if we’re patient, each one of us has the capacity to build a life we can be genuinely proud of. 

Just get started. You have time. 

Patiently keep investing

If you want to win yourself over, stop obsessing about everything you lack. Instead, focus on building habits and environments that will keep you moving in the right direction day after day. 

In everyday life, it may sometimes feel like you’re going nowhere slowly. But if you look back after a year of consistent constructive daily actions, you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve developed.  

And when you’ve earned that realization, you’ll automatically see yourself in a much better light. 

Fail like a pro

Many of your initiatives and investments won’t amount to anything noteworthy. But the way you respond to this perceived failure goes a long way to determining your level of self-respect. 

As the old saying goes: “If you want to succeed, increase your failure rate.” Indeed, failure really is nothing more than life giving you valuable negative feedback, helping you continuously improve. 

If you keep responding well to failure, your inner critic will eventually see it as a good thing. And when you master this skill, this former inner adversary actually becomes a valuable ally.

Invest, fail, learn, repeat

There’s this amazing sense of invincibility that kicks in when you have this awesome cycle running smoothly. 

With each completed cycle, your mind will go to a slightly higher plane. Your ideas will become more interesting, your resources more capable of realizing your elevated ideas, your self-image more comfortable with negative feedback, and your inner critic more positive about your efforts.

This is the path to genuine self-respect. If you’ve not done so already, start your cycle today. 

And always remember: You have time.  

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Health, Relationships and Stress Management

Good physical health and nourishing relationships are excellent sources of long-term mental health. On the other hand, poor health and unhealthy relationships can have the direct opposite effect. 

If you regularly experience excessive stress, take a good hard look at these elements. They might hold plenty of potential for permanent stress reduction. 

Health

Many people stress about their weight, appearance and general health. An environment that makes healthy diet and fitness automatic can help a lot in this respect. 

Also, as we discussed last week, exercise is an excellent stress management tool. But this awesome tool only becomes fully accessible if you’re already in reasonable shape. This is yet another great reason for building healthy fitness habits. 

Lastly, many people stress about how much they stress. Taking concrete actions to improve your mental health according to the ideas shared this week and last week can be highly beneficial. 

Relationships

Being on bad terms with someone you spend plenty of time with can be very stressful (especially if you really care about what that person thinks of you). 

Many times, it’s best to just swallow your pride and compromise a little more than you might want to. Not stressing about a soured relationship is often worth a lot more than winning an argument. 

But the best is to prevent serious relationship setbacks in the first place. Challenge yourself to become mindful enough to catch yourself in that moment when things start going seriously wrong. 

In that critical moment, chances are that both parties have become defensive and irrational. Further escalating the situation can only end in tears. 

Either postpone the discussion to a time when everyone has calmed down or at least get yourself back to a calm and objective state (stop – breath in deeply – breath out slowly – think – speak). If you become calmer, chances are that the other person will too. 

And if the other person keeps responding poorly, accept that, like you, they’re just a caveman stuck in the future. Practice some tolerance or, if there really is no other solution, consider permanently moving your life away from that person. 

An extra incentive

We all know that we should look after our health and occasionally check our egos at the door for the good of our relationships. The tricky thing is actually doing it. 

If you have trouble following through, your own mental health can be a great added incentive. Adding stress reduction to the long list of other reasons might just get you over that crucial tipping point 🙂

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Proactively Prevent Overwhelm

Last week’s list of stress management techniques can be quite effective, but they’re still just band-aids to cover deeper issues. 

This week, we’ll address those deeper issues directly. This is the only way to permanently lower your stress to healthy levels.

Let’s start with an obvious one: the stress originating from that horrible feeling of overwhelm. 

Why are you overwhelmed?

Many people today feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities or by life in general. 

There are several possible reasons why you might end up overwhelmed. So, the best place to start is to actually understand which one applies to you. Here are three likely candidates:

  • The fear of losing your income. Knowing that you won’t be able to make ends meet if you temporarily lose even just a fraction of your income makes it much easier to end up overwhelmed.
  • Impatience and fear of losing out. Wanting things to happen unrealistically quickly is another good way to become overwhelmed. 
  • Complicating your life. Perhaps your responsibilities in each area of life look OK in isolation, but when you put them all together, it becomes obvious why you’re overwhelmed. 

Let’s look at each one in turn.

Fear of losing your income

Apparently, 4 out of 5 Americans live paycheck to paycheck. In this modern age of abundance with sound financial advice all around us, this is a truly unbelievable statistic. 

A worker living paycheck to paycheck has no leverage. And a worker with no leverage is generally a stressed worker.

If you’re too worried about your income security to turn down tasks, chances are that you’ll routinely end up with too much responsibility and, more importantly, all the most tedious and/or stressful tasks. 

This is a big problem because overwhelm strongly decreases long-term performance. Taking on too much (often demotivational) responsibility in the fear of losing your job therefore increases the chances that your fears come true. 

There are two ways to take back your leverage:

  • Become indispensable. Do everything within your power to control your responsibilities and give yourself a fair shot at consistently delivering your highest quality standards. Then get to work on building a reputation for quality and integrity.
  • Build a financial buffer. A solid investment portfolio that can sustain your lifestyle for an extended period of time releases a lot of tension.  

Impatience and fear of losing out

Competition can be a very healthy driving force behind progress, but it can also be taken too far. Just like the previous section, overloading yourself is an excellent way to ensure that you fall behind the competition. 

In this case, you need to work on the skill of prioritization. Make sure you only spend your time on tasks that can have the greatest impact. Defer, delegate or delete other tasks. 

On a more philosophical level, it’s critical to accept that all good things take time. In day-to-day life, it often feels like we’re going nowhere slowly. It’s only when we step back and view life on a year-to-year basis that progress becomes clearly visible. We’ll be talking more about this in two days’ time. 

A complicated life

Life has many aspects aside from work. And it’s very easy to let several of these grow to the point that, collectively, they become totally overwhelming. 

The key here is to see your life as a whole. Whenever you’re thinking about taking on a large new responsibility, you must be very clear about what other responsibility you will give up. 

Starting a family is the most obvious example. This is a massive undertaking, greatly increasing both your responsibilities and your expenses. Don’t commit to this if you can’t give up a large chunk of your existing responsibilities. 

Other aspects like hobbies, social life, social media use, and side-hustles can also easily grow too large. Keep a close eye on these.

The example of this blog

I have a lot of painful experience with pushing myself to (and beyond) the point of complete overload. It’s super stressful, but somehow also very easy to keep doing over and over again. 

It took me many years to reach the level of mindfulness required to break this cycle. Now, I diligently adhere to the principle of giving something up for every new responsibility I take on. 

For example, I would never have started this blog if I did not reduce my degree of employment at my current job to 60%. Without this trade-off, this blog would probably have lasted no more than a month or two. 

So, please think carefully through your responsibilities and your future commitments. In many cases, less is more 🙂

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