Any of you seen this kind of miserable people? or this is stretching our imagination?
Habits of Highly Miserable People
81–90 of 321 posts
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#82>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 saw this documentary on cnbc about modern day slavery on fishing boats[1]. Ppl are promised jobs, entrapped and sold to shipping vessels as slaves where there are worked to death. When someone falls sick or dies from overwork they simply throw the body out in the ocean. I am still traumatized by this documentary, I can't imagine anything worse that could happen to a human being. I can shop at whole foods that does…
How does your first paragraph connect to your second at all?
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#83Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people are just different. To some, thinking through the worst case scenario is a way to face and overcome their fears. To others, it's a way of instilling fears.
I think the idea behind the exercise, from a Stoicism standpoint, is to mentally expose yourself to the fear of being homeless (or whatever about the exercise creates anxiety for you). Eventually you desensitize yourself to that feeling and begin to realize it wouldn't be as bad as you think. This is also an aspect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Parodied on TV sketch comedy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNx_gU57gQ4
Occasionally there is a moment where the character extrapolates from some minor failure to dying "homeless, penniless, and alone" and then recovers.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#85> 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…
Reminds me of the Principle of charity [1] that "requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation".
I've found adopting this mindset to be one of the most important habits I've picked up, and eliminates so much drama.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#86Love the list, hate the attitude
The attitude is what makes the list useful to those who might benefit from it.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw this documentary on cnbc about modern day slavery on fishing boats[1]. Ppl are promised jobs, entrapped and sold to shipping vessels as slaves where there are worked to death. When someone falls sick or dies from overwork they simply throw the body out in the ocean. I am still traumatized by this documentary, I can't imagine anything worse that could happen to a human being. I can shop at whole foods that does…
Why wouldn’t the slaves just rise up and mutiny against the captain??
See also: Why didn't the victims of the African slave trade rise up against the plantation owners? Or: Why didn't she fight back?
General form: Why don't victims behave the way I think they should, in circumstances I've never experienced?
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, it seemed a bit random and confusing to me. I didn't think drugs or gambling obviously made people miserable - aren't they purpose made for pleasure? They don't really annoy other people either which turned out to be what the list was actually about - it should be called "Behaviors I don't like in other people because I don't know how to handle them".
They are purpose made for pleasure, but not happiness.
Put another way: those things are constructed to induce a point-in-time pleasurable state of mind; not create lasting happiness—in fact, they are often at odds with sustainable positivity due to their risk/feedback/reward cyclic nature.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#89>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 spent three months traveling through Central America. You really quickly get used to a constant sense of danger — the water and food can kill you, the bugs can kill you, the roads can kill you, the police and gangs could kill you — hell even taking a hot shower there is tempting fate since they have electric heaters in the shower heads and basically no electrical safety standards to speak of. You either have to cow…
Survivor bias...I wonder if all the people who died hitchhiking or cliff diving feel the same way. We won't know because they're dead.
Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People
#90Love the list, hate the attitude
A couple people I showed this to immediately got upset by #3.
I get that it comes off as another "Just stop being depressed/anxious" argument, which is undoubtedly tone-deaf, but there's still a point to be made here.
Depression and Anxiety are real issues, and you can't just "get over it". However, being in control of oneself and refusing to define yourself by things like depression and anxiety are important to besting things like depression and anxiety.
Just because it is an affliction doesn't mean you should allow yourself to be defeated by it. It doesn't mean that you are doing any good using these problems as an excuse, because no matter how unfair it seems, depression and anxiety isn't an excuse for willful misery.