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A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

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Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#31

Post by jpulgarin »

jneen wrote: post #14
gabaix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.4% of your life is not much if you get Facebook equity and end up with millions. The hardest part - I think - is that you are not assured at all to get rich. You might end up spend 3.4% of your life to buy you a new car and that's it.

Hm. So say I got Facebook equity and ended up with millions. My question is why ? What can I possibly do with that money that will make it worth it?

1. Save thousands of lives by donating to charity (it costs about $2000 to save a human life: http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF).

2. Do whatever you wish to do, every single day, such as spending a year studying philosophy while travelling the world, or deciding to learn salsa for a year and a half.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#32

Post by jpulgarin »

jneen wrote: post #14
gabaix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.4% of your life is not much if you get Facebook equity and end up with millions. The hardest part - I think - is that you are not assured at all to get rich. You might end up spend 3.4% of your life to buy you a new car and that's it.

Hm. So say I got Facebook equity and ended up with millions. My question is why ? What can I possibly do with that money that will make it worth it?

1. Save thousands of lives by donating to charity (it costs about $2000 to save a human life: http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF).

2. Do whatever you wish to do, every single day, such as spending a year studying philosophy while travelling the world, or deciding to learn salsa for a year and a half.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#33

Post by maxerickson »

pestaa wrote: post #27
ilaksh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make…

I believe the main point was to isolate your emotional state from impacts, and not to "be happy about bad things." You have to maintain your well-being in the long term by being friend to good people and, well, not being shot, but in the short-term reinforcing positive thinking might just save you from a worse situation.

I had a similar thought recently, that it is a good thing to accept my emotional reactions, but that I did not have to embrace them.

(further explanation would involve rambling about the reaction being part of who I am but the embracing making it a bigger part of who I am)

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#34

Post by spqr »

villagefool wrote: post #29

When you have a new child on the way, an extra room in the house could be a hell of a difference for more then 2 years of your life... is this advice realistic for people who need to support a family?

It's advice from 20 year olds that think they know everything and that these "epiphanies" regarding happiness are really going to impact their lives.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#35

Post by paganel »

ilaksh wrote: post #23
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand yourself and the world around you. The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoye…

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make…

> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view).

Ok, so now that I know that I suck at metaphors and to put it more directly, all I want to say it's that maybe the last 50-80 years of relative prosperity that the West has experienced were an exception, not the norm, the same as Pax Augusta around the times of the early Roman Empire and Seneca was also an exception of sorts. So, as a guy who grew up in a post-Communist European country in the '90s, with inflation averaging 100% each year for over a decade, and who has seen his parents go from respectable middle class to subsistence agriculture in the same timeframe (and my story is not at all singular in that part of Europe), you cannot just magically hope that things will get better. In most of the cases they go from bad to worse, and in that case you really have to adapt to the new conditions (like making jokes when being shot at), because it doesn't get any better than that.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#36

Post by sliverstorm »

ilaksh wrote: post #23
ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand yourself and the world around you. The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoye…

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make…

No one is saying "Be happy when bad things happen to you". Rather, let it roll off you, like water on the back of a duck.

I for one find serious injuries much easier to cope with when I crack jokes about them. If you're around me when I've hurt myself, I'm not grinning and laughing awkwardly for your benefit.

Everyone is different, but for me it's crack jokes, mock myself, and wear a stupid grin OR let the fear bubbling in my stomach take control. Maybe you feel I should "be human" and "give in", but when I'm half an hour from the nearest ER and on my own, screw that.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#37

Post by shanemhansen »

paganel wrote: post #35
ilaksh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make…

> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds. The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view). Ok, so now that I know that I suck at met…

I think the appropriate metaphor here is a callus, they can be handy when someone rubs you the wrong way.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#38

Post by scoofy »

I'm sorry, but i find this 'solution' to happiness rather myopic. I'm not saying it can't be helpful (it probably is), but doubt it's a cure.

Now, generally speaking, for those of us that are well educated, entirely employable and rather wealthy in monetary terms and generally freedom, then achieving success seems to be up to us. I'd contend that happiness is most easily manifested in societally recognized success (thus, hard work + luck). In other words i'd contend happiness is easily derived for 'being respected'.

If not achieved through work and good fortune, i'd say happiness can still be achieved with constant vigilance against some shitty cultural norms we hold as a society. Frankly, the illusion of control is astounding in wealthy countries, and so is constant marketing, that buying shit will make you happy or attractive, or that some product will give you some idealized life that is paraded in front of you every day on television (or the internet). I'd contend that many people are affected by these fake, shitty messages.

Is it perfectly admirable to try and try and try and fail consistently throughout your life? Absolutely. Why should we look to the successful for advice on happiness? Probably the last place to look, survivorship bias will ruin any results. We can't all be popular published authors or start apple computers. I'm a Dvorak typist (*ducks), so i like to reference August Dvorak on the subject of failure. This guy dedicated his life to improving society, for both regular typists and notably, amputees, yet was stymied at every turn by something as simple as a coordination problem. I think it would be very difficult for someone with a life like his to not be entirely jaded at such unprecedented failure, even when you know what you are doing makes sense.

Can you be jaded and happy? Well, maybe, this would cause a debate on what we mean by 'happiness', which is de facto the entire argument here. I would contend that it's difficult. Would ideas like Csikszentmihalyi's help? Probably, but i'd be very skeptical to look at them as actual solutions. Sometimes people fail, and it's okay to fail if you tried your best, and i don't mean that in the 'keep failing until you (obviously eventually) succeed' way. I mean really fail. Until that is mentally acceptable, which is really freaking hard to maintain in our society, then i think some people are going to be continuously frustrated and perpetually unhappy, and i don't think 'convince yourself to be happy' is an acceptable prescription. Again, while i think it will help, it's a rough world out there, and it's hard to maintain the mental composure suggested here in the face of real tragedy.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#39

Post by hrktb »

techiferous wrote: post #30
jerf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not spend the next 34% of your life working on something you don't love, for one. Even in our current technological state, a life of toil on things you don't love is the default state of a human being.

Or you could learn how to love the things you are already working on. That option is easily overlooked.

True, though that option is also a lot easier with a bunch FU money as a back up.

Re: A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

#40

Post by ilaksh »

paganel wrote: post #35
ilaksh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make…

> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds. The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view). Ok, so now that I know that I suck at met…

Thanks for that perspective. You're probably right, this relative prosperity is more of an exception.

I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

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