Things I do to be consistently happy

One thing that I am impressed with is that Joel (OP) is good at following advice.

About 7 days ago I commented that I thought his post was inappropriately named (I took issue with Joel using "How to name your startup" rather than "my experience with how I named my startup" (because of what I felt was his limited experience in this area).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4371318

On this post he titles correctly "6 Things I do to be consistently happy".

I think there exists a terrible confusion about emotions in general fueled by pop culture. People should understand that emotions are just a form of motivation and not something magical. Unpleasant emotions don't have purpose to make you feel bad, they are here to help you to better adapt to your environment. Pleasant ones mean that you are well adapted. Simple as that. Also I would like to add that on the topic of happiness and other stuff related to positive psychology there is an excellent course from prof. Tal Ben-Shahar.

I have two issues with this advice. One is, it's incredibly robotic. The same routine every day, the same times doing the same things, the same route every evening. Basically he is creating boredom. I have no trouble believing that it makes the st of his life more interesting. Would I want to follow that? Hardly. Responding to my environment, doing unexpected things, improvisation, these are things that make me happy. I get bored doing the same thing twice, there is no way on earth I joule be able to robotically do the same freaking routine every day.

Second: this life advice clearly comes from someone without a family. I read some comments stating that his routine is conductive to a family friendly life style, and in theory it is. But young children do not care about theory. They have dreams, don't want to sleep yet, throw up, get sick and a million more things. Every one of which would ruin this guy's schedule. Also, he never goes out, a movie or dinner? There's never a concert in town? Friends and family to visit?

Seriously, it's advice from a person with no social contacts (IRL) who has discovered bliss by living like a monk. Thanks, but no thanks.

I think you missed your parent's point. I don't think his comment was a knock against the OP at all or even that he implied that Joel's list was some kind of self help advice along the lines of those "6 essential things to make you happy" type books. It seems that Joel's post only reminded him of such nonsense and he commented about that and not the actual post.

I know where he's coming from too. I really liked this post and enjoy all of Joel's writing but every now and then I see enough happiness advice on the front page that I get burnout from it and am reminded of all the crappy, empty advice there is.

I find it somewhat interesting how often people profess that their key to happiness essentially boils down to living the sort of "good life" that in many ways is the Christian ideal, regardless of whether or not they are personally religious.

Although there are habits and rituals that can lead to a more positive outlook, such as exercising regularly, there are deeper aspects to this way of life. This includes helping others, which is featured in this article, but also includes dealing with others fairly and honestly (aka the Golden Rule), being willing to put others above yourself (at least part of the time), optimizing for long-term gain (the religious may be looking beyond death but there's also value in a somewhat shorter view), and so on.

Add in hard work and self-betterment ("Learn new skills") and it's not just a Christian outlook, it's downright Protestant.

But given the complexity of human nature, surely there are other ways to be happy. One option, generally only successfully exercised by the very rich, is to engage in constant luxurious pleasure. In spite of the fact that a majority of the planet's humans likely would be happy to adopt this way of life, we're told that the individuals who do are not actually happy and would be better off living like hard-working American Protestants.

At the other extreme is asceticism, which supposedly can lead to a life of satisfaction and contentment, if not happiness, but it generally seems to be a case of extreme long-term optimization, with little if anything in the way of short-term rewards. In any case, it's not a realistic life choice for me, since I have a family and no desire to leave them behind to live in a desert monastery.

So besides living the life of a monk, living the Protestant work ethic, and living the life of a dissolute jetsetter, what else is there that seems to offer a convincing chance at happiness?