If your life is pleasant, who cares if it could be considered boring?
Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#22- non-boring: skip things you find boring
- pleasant: skip things you find unpleasant
In other words: resist outside pressure, experiment by yourself, take responsibility.
Taking responsibility could be seen as the first step. Once you're OK with the idea, it's easier to experiment out of the box, and to resist outside pressure that would force you into a boring, unpleasant life.
That's how I do it. I'm 46, live happy, in a happy couple for 7 yrs, nomading, currently in Malaysia, remote software engineer, working as little (<1wk/m) as possible to sustain this life. I own nothing and don't crave anything, I did nothing as they said, I learnt to not care about what they think, I'm responsible for my own fate. My priorities changed a lot after an ischemic stroke 14 years ago: life is short, too short to let others tell you how boring your own life should be.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#23Do more of what makes you happy, right now, despite whatever "society" says you should do instead.
Happiness is a fleeting feeling that's frustrating to hunt down. Too many happiness highs can leave you feeling disgusting. Better to aim for "contentedness".
Candy TV/popular advice always tells you to try to be happy, happy, happy, which seems criminally misguided to me.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#24Explore, discover, travel, experience, create, contemplate and hopefully improve the world or at least someone else's time on it in the process.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#25Get married, have kids, dedicate your life to making theirs better. There’s a reason the vast majority of people in history have gone this route - it’s very fulfilling.
Marriage has been shown to increase happiness. Having kids decreases happiness....
http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/mothers-marriage-parenthood/
Comparing couples with and without children, researchers found that the rate of the decline in relationship satisfaction is nearly twice as steep for couples who have children than for childless couples. In the event that a pregnancy is unplanned, the parents experience even greater negative impacts on their relationship.
It’s even worse for women than for men.
I for one do not like small children. Everything about small children and babies irritate me and I never wanted to be a father for that reason.
On the other hand, I became attached to my now step children from the first day I met them and I would move heaven and earth for them. But, they were already 9 and 14. Luckily, my wife also didn’t want more kids when we met. I’ll freely admit that it’s mostly caused by selfishness. Not financial selfishness, but with a teenager and a preteen, we never had to find babysitters when we wanted to go out and my wife and I could have plenty of alone time.
When I hung out with just my (step) children we could actually relate. In a lot of ways, I’m a big kid and they always joke when I say something that “this is reason number X that I will never make father of the year”.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#26A lot of people are living the lives others expect them to, like their parents. That includes a lot of people with kids, too.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#27Get married, have kids, dedicate your life to making theirs better. There’s a reason the vast majority of people in history have gone this route - it’s very fulfilling.
Marriage has been shown to increase happiness. Having kids decreases happiness.... http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/mothers-marriage-parenthood/ Comparing couples with and without children, researchers found that the rate of the decline in relationship satisfaction is nearly twice as steep for couples who have children than for childless couples. In the event that a pregnancy is unplanned, the parents experience even gr…
I've always found this a strange statistic. My children bring me greater joy and satisfaction than anything else I've ever done in my life and my relationship with my wife has only strengthened.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#28Challenge yourself to discover the joy in "now". Regardless of the activity you're doing, whether or not you like it. The idea is to change prospective. When you start enjoying the work, and not worry about the fruits of it, you'll begin to develop unexpected peace and happy state of mind.
Simplify your life. The less clutter/complication without, the less the same within
On a more concrete level you may experiment with doing following things daily: A bit of exercise, charity, meditation, reading and learning.
With charity I mean random act of kindness toward someone. Help someone, be it physically, emotionally, financially or in whatever way.
Re learning, to be expert in any new skill it takes 10k hours, so pick something you're passionate about and keep learning/practicing it daily for couple or so hours.
Experts experience different state of consciousness and unexplicable joy while doing the mastered activity.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#29A bicycle is a wonderful thing.
Re: Ask HN: Your subjective takes on living a non-boring and pleasant life?
#30[deleted]