The pursuit of happiness -- psychological resilience

[Fluidic Kimbo]

The way I see things, a person who is psychologically resilient finds it easy to become happy and to stay happy. A person who is not psychologically resilient has difficulty attaining and maintaining happiness. As we go through life, and as a result of our life experiences, our psychological resilience can increase and decrease. Typically the most psychologically resilient people have some sort of religion or faith which acts as a safety net when they fall -- but there are agnostics and atheists too with supreme resilience.

People with psychological resilience don't give up. I think the greatest inspiration we can take is from the people who've continued with their lives after developing 'locked in syndrome'. There was a French guy named Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke, and afterwards he could only communicate by blinking one eye. He went on to write a book, and later there was a film made "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly".

And also there's a competitive bodybuilder with locked-in syndrome (do a web search for Nick Chisholm).

So I figure for the rest of us here who still have the use of our body, it might not be a bad idea to prepare ourselves for the eventuality that we get locked-in syndrome, for two reasons:
(1) Just in case we actually do get locked in syndrome (it's very rare but it happens).
(2) To instill a mindset of planning to continue life in the worst of circumstances.

I've been working on computers since I was a kid, and that's what I do for a living now, so I'm going to devise a system of communication based on how 'binary coded decimal' works.

The English alphabet has 26 letters, plus 10 digits, also let's put in a few symbols like ! ? ,

One bit of information has two possible values, 0 or 1. Six bits of information has 64 possibilities. I'm going to express 1 as a long blink, and 0 as a short blink.

So here's how I encode the numbers and the first few letters of the alphabet:

000000 = zero
000001 = one
000010 = two
000011 = three
. . .
001000 = eight
001001 = nine
001010 = a
001011 = b
001100 = c
001101 = d
001110 = e

So if I want to express the letter E, I do:
short blink, short blink, long blink, long blink, long blink, short blink

But if 6 blinks per letter gives us a total of 64 possibilities, then we have about 24 of them left over not being used. So I'll use these for the 24 most common words and phrases in the English language, such as:

111000 = The
111001 = When
111010 = How
111011 = Why
111100 = It doesn't matter
111101 = At least that's what I heard
111110 = Let me know when it's done
111111 = I've had enough blinking for today

I will finalise my system of communication and then share a video of myself blinking a message. Anyone reckon they can interpret my blinks?

[JaneDoe]

This is something interesting, I didn't even know