This is perspicaciously cynical. I love it.
> perspicaciously
That's not a word you see every day.
Habits of Highly Miserable People
51–60 of 321 posts
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#52I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.
Well, I appreciated the presumably intentional humour in this comment even if no-one else did so don't consign yourself to abject misery over the reactions.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#53Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#54It seems like many people in this thread missed the sarcastic tone of the article...
Well, I just about stopped reading at > Let’s exclude some obvious ways, like doing drugs ... Not entirely, though. But I did get disgusted not long after, by the smug tone. Maybe it's all sarcastic ranting about self-help literature. But even if so, I didn't find it very funny.
What the hell did you expect from AlterNet?
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#55> 12. Glorify or vilify the past. Do not do this. Do not live in the past. Do not think about what might, what could, what should have happened. Learn from it and move onwards. Nothing good comes from constantly dwelling on things that can't be changed.
Goes to identity. Telling people not to do this is pointless unless you can suggest another way to construct identity. A person without a past is... an interesting thought experiment, but not something that exists in the real world. Identity builds up in layers -- what is your nation, your religion, your favorite team, your hometown, your college, your spouse, your child. If you give all of that up, then who are you? What are your goals? What do you believe in? What are you willing to fight for? What gives life meaning?
A better bit of advice is "avoid ruminating" and this applies to every thought, not just the ones that involve the past. But even that is not easy, especially for those who create things, since to create something you have to ruminate on it heavily, for months or years -- this is probably why there is an overlap between depression and creativity.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#56This is super good, thank you very much for having shared it.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#57> 5. Attribute bad intentions. Me and my SO have serendipitously discovered a great way to defuse arguments: it's the question "Are you accusing me of foulness?" (any sufficiently Victorian synonym works here) For some reason most people reflexively deny this in reply and realise that they've been attributing bad intentions groundlessly. Unfortunately this doesn't work on people who have a mindset which requires ther…
Nice hack. Doing this with an upper class British accent could help defuse the situation further.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#58>Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter. really roughly this is what stoics do, yet somehow they come to the conclusion "actually, what was i fearing? Proceed with adventure"...
I had a sign: Act now or homelessness later. Choose. Homeless shelters here are terrible TBH. I’d rather sleep rough. Living in a van for me is better than a house or apartment because: - no rent, no mortgage - no noisy neighbors sans the phony-“tough,” backwards-hat teenager act - less space to fill it up whth $crap I don’t need - always mobile - able to leap tall buildings in a single bound - dual burner stove and…
> leap tall buildings
what ?
ps: oh, comics
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#59This reminds me of the great book "The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious" [0] by the Austrian-American psychologist Paul Watzlawick. Excellent use of reverse psychology, let's you realize how many of those approaches you tend to use in your daily life. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Hopeless-Serious-Pursuit-Un...
I've been unsuccessfully trying for a couple of minutes to identify the movie where I first heard the joke of the title.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#60It seems like many people in this thread missed the sarcastic tone of the article...
[deleted]