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Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

woodfromeden.substack.com

21–30 of 89 posts

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#21
post #10

I sincerely hope that nobody assumes that because this is on the top of HN that this isn't batshit crazy garbage. HN is an echo chamber that can turn a logical mind into one that starts assuming every premise upvoted on here is acceptable. Don't fall into that trap.

Can you elaborate on what you think is "batshit crazy garbage"? I'm not challenging the notion, I just think your post would have much more value if, instead of dragging HN's populace through the mud, you concentrated on specific points in the article that you think are prime examples of its impracticalities.

[deleted]

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#22

> In Swedish... someone happy in the moment is called glad... Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term... Just because you don't have a dedicated word for something, doesn't mean that it is a foreign concept. In Arabic and…

Yet other times the lack of that word denotes a different perspective on that subject.

Short term or long term happiness isn’t differentiated in the untied states. I don’t think of happiness in terms of long or short term. Just as a temporary state that hopefully last a long time.

Think of all the words we use to express love in English. In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#24
Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#25
So weird when people with such obvious limited life experience try to surmise "how things work" based on that limited experience.

That's not science, that's how we got severely warped things like religion.

Long-term happiness is for some of the same reasons we have long-term psychotics.

Consciousness simply allows the fourth dimension of time applied to emotions.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#26

I sincerely hope that nobody assumes that because this is on the top of HN that this isn't batshit crazy garbage. HN is an echo chamber that can turn a logical mind into one that starts assuming every premise upvoted on here is acceptable. Don't fall into that trap.

Can you expand on why you think this is a batshit crazy garbage?

The statement is misusing words, in that rewards make you happy by definition. This is a typical postmodern statement, trying to reorganize deep rooted cognitive structures, with words, which is completely backwards.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#27
On the subject of different kinds of happiness, I enjoyed reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He talked of eudaimonia, ie “good spirit”, “good condition of the personal daimon.” A sort of “thriving” or doing well. This is, in his language, the human good.

But what fascinated me was the brief mention of another good, a good more proper to a god than to mankind, “makarios.” We might translate it “blessed.”

In the everyday language of the ancient Greeks, the word could be used in other ways too. One could call the carefree lives of children, or of the rich and beautiful, “blessed” in this sense.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#28

> In Swedish... someone happy in the moment is called glad... Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term... Just because you don't have a dedicated word for something, doesn't mean that it is a foreign concept. In Arabic and…

Yet other times the lack of that word denotes a different perspective on that subject. Short term or long term happiness isn’t differentiated in the untied states. I don’t think of happiness in terms of long or short term. Just as a temporary state that hopefully last a long time. Think of all the words we use to express love in English. In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people m…

Interesting point about English. You're right, having a single word for "I am happy the light turned green just as I approached the intersection" and "I have 10 children and I am proud of the kind of people they turned out to be" really blunts the nuance.

In my parlance, I'd call the second thing "meaningful" but not everyone strives for meaning (or think it matters) so it kinda doesn't have the same mindshare as the "by-default-short-term" happy.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you think is "batshit crazy garbage"? I'm not challenging the notion, I just think your post would have much more value if, instead of dragging HN's populace through the mud, you concentrated on specific points in the article that you think are prime examples of its impracticalities.

I can’t speak for GP but I laughed out loud when I read about how the author of this article knows how to “cure depression”. Aside from the ignorance of brain chemistry, situational factors that can contribute to depression, and the glaringly obvious fact of the subjectivity of how depression is experienced, the hubris to assert that this blogger ~knows the cure ~ inspires very little confidence in their credibility.…

He didn't say he knows _the_ cure he says he cured himself.

It's like someone loses weight and sticks to it, they don't know _the_ cure for obesity, but they managed to go from being obese to not being obese and staying there for some time and then wrote a blog wherre they say "wow, i found i was over eating due to eating shitty lunches at my desk and not doing exercise so then i switched to salads and cycling to the office, turns out i cured obesity in myself"

It's completely different from putting forward an intervention and then claiming, against all scientific evidence, that this is a reliable and repeatable cure.

A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first:

"I don’t expect this to work for everyone or even most people who are inexplicably unhappy. But I believe that most people can gain some insight by reflecting over how their lives correspond to evolutionary history. " blah blah blah..

This is an incredibly weak claim, it's basically saying "[most] people can gain insight into their emotional state by reflecting on their basic needs and for some people (not all, or even most), that might make them not be unhappy, my evidence is a sample size of yours truly, plus maybe a few people i've talked to who agree".

Wow.

One can often get a different impression of articles by reading only the headline or the first para, which tend to be loaded with attention-getters or rhetorical tricks that are designed to be provocative and hook a reader in. It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions.

Article seems to me, just to be full of rather banal truisms masquerading as science.

But so is just about everything else written on the topic.

Re: Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

#30
post #25

So weird when people with such obvious limited life experience try to surmise "how things work" based on that limited experience. That's not science, that's how we got severely warped things like religion. Long-term happiness is for some of the same reasons we have long-term psychotics. Consciousness simply allows the fourth dimension of time applied to emotions.

Yes, how dare people write about their life experiences :)

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