31–40 of 108 posts
I really resent the fact that, in my older age, I care way too much about politics. Causes me nothing but stress.
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Are you objectively sure that miserableness is "seeing the world for what it is" not "seeing the world how in a biased-the-other-way view"?
Information and emotion are orthogonal. If you want to connect them you can, but you don't have to. In other words, you can use more or less information to make yourself happier or unhappier. The ability to manage your emotions is different than the ability to process information, but it can be learned just as well, they just don't teach it in school.
I can demonstrate that time passed and population create a common trend line, but it's absurd for me to state that time is responsible for creating people.
Whilst I've been to college, listen to NPR every day, keep up-to-date on the lastest news in my field via Hacker News and various blogs I can still be happy. I do this in the face of NPR telling me people are dying in Japan from radiation, my clients walking in and complaining all day about random x feature being broken when they simply don't know how to use it (even with clear warnings and arrows pointing to unfilled out fields).
It's a matter of what you choose to think about, I choose to focus heavily on what I love such as music, StarCraft 2 and creating beautiful software. If I decided to focus on suffering in the middle east, or how my programming language of choice simply doesn't perform as well as "x" programming language of course I'm going to be unhappy or unsatisfied with what I do. I know this information I just don't focus on it all the time. It's something for me to bring up in a conversation with people to discuss rationally and use in my job to better my work but not dwell on and make myself unhappy.
But once I got older and saw first hand how clueless the "adults" were (in the financial sector, in the travel industry, in software development, in politics) - I began to long for the days when I thought everyone else had the right answer and all I had to worry about was to make sure the teams were fair for football at recess. When you're young(er) and not aware of how things really work and the problems that exist out in the real world, life is good.
I, also, have noticed a lot of the older generations growing up without the internet to have this idea that the world is going to shit.
But whenever you ask someone who's been used to this epic proliferation of any news since early childhood, the compounding bad news doesn't really seem to have an effect. We see a tsunami happening and an earthquake and a ship sinking and new riots rising and we don't think to ourselves "Wow, the world really sucks" instead the thought process seems more like "Oh cool, that's interesting. I wonder if there are any new lolcats"
You might say we've become less sensitive to people's suffering, but really we've just learned that not all news is our news.
The micro scale doesn't represent the macro scale. The relationship has not been proven. Long-term and short-term impact were not explored. Motivation models for happiness were not explored. Multiple repeatable cases where it was indeed information and not just "Bad stuff happens, here's a bunch of it at once" was not explored.
An underlying theme here is that knowing of less than favorable events in the world impacts your quality of happiness, and that people strive for happiness through greater consumerism and status. I flatly disagree with this whole premise. It's a lovely read, but it's (and I don't use this word often) total bunk.
If you are more informed and less happy you aren't doing something right. Information doesn't make you unhappy, you thinking about certain information is making you unhappy. Whilst I've been to college, listen to NPR every day, keep up-to-date on the lastest news in my field via Hacker News and various blogs I can still be happy. I do this in the face of NPR telling me people are dying in Japan from radiation, my cli…
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"This is why I LOVE being depressed. I feel like I'm living in reality." That feeling of access to reality isn't unique to depression. You can feel like you're living in reality when you're not depressed. All of the advantages you claim for depression can be had from other emotions, like happiness or enjoyment, with few or none of the disadvantages. Calling your perception reality and someone else's fantasy doesn't m…