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Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#381

Post by sprkv5 »

rococode wrote: post #40

Video walks on Youtube. If you haven't heard of them before, they're simple first-person videos where the filmer walks around some area with a stabilized video camera - no talking, just walking. I've really missed traveling and watching video walks while exercising has been a great way to satisfy that travel craving a bit and also trick my brain into experiencing some semblance of normalcy (not sure I could remember…

This. This is exactly what I started watching last summer to keep myself calm and optimistic through the pandemic. The channels I watch are - Nomadic Ambience[1], NIPPON WANDERING TV[2] and IURETA e[3].

Here are my favorite[4] video[5] walks[6] from Japan. Hope you like it. As for other places, here's two from NYC[7][8] and another from Olympic National Park[9] which is not a video walk per se, but would appeal to folks who love the wilderness.

Last but not least, thank you for videos you shared :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/NomadicAmbience/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/NIPPONWANDERINGTV/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/IURETAe/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7O5-CzJZg

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpxJSvgHysA

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JCNn_4-Ap4

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21HKaqA1rpo

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOan6RRvOi4

[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jGX1oUADhg

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#383

Post by gonehome »

Viker wrote: post #352
mft_ wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What downside(s) did you experience, that led you to want to give it up? From an outsider’s perspective, I’m wondering why spending time watching porn is ultimately much different from time spent with any other sedentary pastime?

Because you end up feeding a primate/reproductive prime control system, using unlimited and synthetic input. The system was never designed for the this kind of "bandwidth". Since we are biological machines, other parts of the organism need to compensate... This compensation is very dangerous in the long run both from a personal and a social side. You could argue the same about entertainment. But seeking it is not a p…

And yet it’s still possible to eat ice cream even though such a thing would not be found on the savanna.

Some people can’t control this and become wildly obese, but others eat ice cream, understand what it is, and get on with their life.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#384

Post by codegeek »

don-code wrote: post #344

Buying a home. But not for any of the typical reasons. If you told me back in February that I'd buy a home in 2020, I'd have told you to get lost. I lived alone in a small apartment, with a "necessities" mentality, and homeownership was on my radar for 5-10 years out. Why invest in exercise equipment when I go to a gym, a decent WFH setup when I work in an office, or kitchenware when most of my meals are eaten at wor…

Good for you. Stories like yours should be a good example of WHY to buy a home. Now there are plenty of reasons why NOT to buy a home. Bottom line is that buy a home to Live, not invest (primary home at least). A lot of us are made to believe that one should buy a home because of equity/investments/saving rent etc etc. All that is true BUT you need to not buy for those reasons. You need to buy when you want your own space, can afford it reasonably and are not using it as a casino.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#385

Post by kilroy123 »

lykr0n wrote: post #325
csixty4 wrote: post #264

Transitioning my gender. Living my truth. Coming out to everyone in my life and being forced to confront the shame that held me back for decades. It took a lot of reflection and was cause for a lot of growth. But now I'm not only mentally happier, I'm taking better care of my body because it finally feels like it's my own.

My co-worker/friend did the exact same thing. I had to double check you were not her. It feels like the Pandemic has left a lot of people worse off, but there are also a lot who are a lot better off now. Kinda weird?

I definitely agree that this has left a lot of people worse off. I fear it will take a long time for many to recover from. :-/

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#386

Post by gozzoo »

pothrow wrote: post #329

Quitting porn. At age 45, having been addicted since first finding I could download over 1200 baud dialup on my parents phone line and watching Cinemax late night through the static, it has just been a thing in my life almost daily and honestly I'd given up on caring whether it was a bad thing or not. I'd felt guilty about it sometimes, and sure, tried to quit on a number of occasions, but always ended up back within…

If you are referring to porn, despite the general perception I think it's quite harmless. Things like drugs, smoking, alcohol and even spedning time on Facebook and Instagram have much worse effect on someone's wellbeing. People use it mostly for stress relief and that's much better strategy than smoking pot or even casual drinking.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#387

Post by enriquto »

globular-toast wrote: post #341
giantg2 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially sad that our societal views are so far off the data due to stereotyping. According to some CDC studies, more men are victims of domestic abuse than women are. It's just that men do not report much of it, and there are more cases of severe injuries when it comes to women (40/60 split). I think one of those CDC studies even said that men are more likely to have a deadly weapon used against them in a dom…

The problem is how we deal with outliers. Statisticians know that outliers need to be excluded from their results, but society tends to focus on outliers, letting everyone else lay in their shadow. We're all guilty of it. We have competitions with the sole purpose of finding these extreme outliers. We look up to them, turn them into household names, reward them with great wealth and accolades. It turns out if you loo…

> Statisticians know that outliers need to be excluded from their results,

offtopic, but this is not true in general. This is one of my strongest pet peeves. For many distributions (e.g. Cauchy, power laws, Levy stable...) it turns out that all samples are "outliers" and you cannot really exclude them. It is only on the "degenerate" case of finite variance that you can exclude outliers. But some statisticians may still argue that this is still wrong: there are no outliers, only incomplete models.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#390

Post by notsureaboutpg »

gozzoo wrote: post #386
pothrow wrote: post #329

Quitting porn. At age 45, having been addicted since first finding I could download over 1200 baud dialup on my parents phone line and watching Cinemax late night through the static, it has just been a thing in my life almost daily and honestly I'd given up on caring whether it was a bad thing or not. I'd felt guilty about it sometimes, and sure, tried to quit on a number of occasions, but always ended up back within…

If you are referring to porn, despite the general perception I think it's quite harmless. Things like drugs, smoking, alcohol and even spedning time on Facebook and Instagram have much worse effect on someone's wellbeing. People use it mostly for stress relief and that's much better strategy than smoking pot or even casual drinking.

Most people are realizing it is not in fact quite harmless
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