Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Habits of Highly Miserable People

alternet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 321 posts

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#121

Post by vkou »

Fricken wrote: post #93
selestify wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm... seeing how the homeless live, it really would be as bad as I think. Probably even worse, since I don't see all of it.

Most homeless people are suffering from a cocktail of problems with abuse, mental illness and drugs. If you woke one one morning to find yourself on the street with ragged clothes and empty pockets in a foreign city, but you still had your wits about you, you likely wouldn't be there for long.

Yeah, it's because I would figure out how to call someone I know to come and get me.

You don't end up homeless when you have someone to call to come and get you. You end up homeless when you've burned through that bridge.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#122

Post by nikkwong »

RIMR wrote: post #111
DoreenMichele wrote: post #104

Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me…

I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were str…

[redacted]

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#123

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

foxhill wrote: post #71

having been, for want of a better term, ‘highly miserable’ in the past, the entirety of this article comes across as insidiously toxic and detrimental to the mental well-being of those who are suffering. there is a.. loosely similar CGP Grey video, which approaches the matter in a much more rational context [1] for anyone suffering, i emplore you to not read this and watch this instead; [1] - https://youtube.com/watc…

Amen.

I didn't watch your linked video, but I definitely agreed with your post. As someone who has also been highly miserable (aka clinically depressed) in the past, various sentiments along the line of "come on, life is great, why can't you appreciate it?" and "that's no so bad, suck it up" most definitely did NOT help me overcome my depression.

Which makes me wonder: if the purpose of this post is to belittle "miserable" people, well I guess it succeeds, but then that seems a pretty miserable thing to do in the first place. If the purpose is to ironically remind folks that there are easy things you can do to not be miserable, I don't think it's doing it in a particularly effective way.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#124

Post by [deleted] »

kgwxd wrote: post #30
maerF0x0 wrote: post #6

>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"...

Those things never really scared me. Do they also meditate on being sick, in constant crippling pain and come to the same conclusion? I get a stomachache and recognize a bad personality change in myself. I dont imagine id be able to draw on the same mental skills while in that state for prolonged periods.

[deleted]

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#125

Post by kazinator »

huangc10 wrote: post #4

> 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.

Maybe dwelling for a long time on those things is how some people learn. Not everyone can think about something in the past for a brief moment, learn everything and then discard it. Sometimes it takes years to interpret everything, and put the pieces together.

Thinking about something briefly and then moving on cold turkey is often completely phony: basically a form of denial. You're not free if you have "off limits" areas that you don't let yourself think about.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#126

Post by DoreenMichele »

nikkwong wrote: post #122
RIMR wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were str…

[redacted]

Their health is not improved by having everyone they meet tell them they are unfixable and utterly ruined for life.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#127

Post by philwelch »

drawnwren wrote: post #110
mobilefriendly wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This just isn't true. They felt exactly the same as OP up until the moment they died. A sudden death is, by definition, something that can not be regretted.

I'm sure some of them felt some amount of regret in the last, terrifying moments between when they realized that they were going to die and when they finally lost consciousness.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#128

Post by wcarron »

Tade0 wrote: post #37

> 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…

My SO and I do something similar. When it (almost never) gets contentious, one of us will just yell: "I Declare Disagreement!" in the same manner that Michael Scott declared bankruptcy on The Office.

Instantly breaks up the tension and we can take a breather before resuming more rationally.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#129

Post by RickS »

hexane360 wrote: post #82
dominotw wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

How does your first paragraph connect to your second at all ?

By buying fish obtained this way, the consumers in the second paragraph economically empower the perpetrators of the first paragraph to continue, allegedly because of food demand created by overpopulation.

Not endorsing the argument, but there is a connection.

Re: Habits of Highly Miserable People

#130

Post by deviationblue »

This article exists with the value judgement that being not miserable is some kind of boon or "positive" or "good thing". Anything that starts with that kind of implied value judgement w/o anything substantive can be disregarded.

Edit to add: Seriously though, a healthy amount of cynicism is required for critical thinking. If you try too hard to be something, whether that's happy or positive or whatever, you're depriving yourself from thinking of everything that might comprise a reality, and thus looking at just half of it. But yeah, too much of anything is bad.

[Also, I get sarcasm, you should too, hopefully].

Post reply on HN