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A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

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Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#141

Post by ImprovedSilence »

singular wrote: post #133
ImprovedSilence wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed.. I'd say just try to be genuinely interested in and caring for other people, your confidence will grow, you'll have brighter days, and it'll come. Attitude is everything. Just be a all around good guy, and doors will open (romantic, and otherwise). Also ya might not get a 9 or 10, but there are plenty of girls out there that don't mind. Heck, I've dated girls with 2" on me.

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. How tall are you compared to the average in your country? For somebody who doesn't have this disadvantage, it simply doesn't exist. I refer again to http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/MessagesPerWeek.png - it's not 100% but it's indicative. Also I refer you to walking down the street in your town. If you were correct, then there'd be a big variation (or at least one resembling the normal di…

ooof... or be a debbie downer the rest of your life, and focus on all the negatives you can't control, and be a total victim. Maybe there are other reasons unseen to yourself that explain your lack of romantic partnerships.... you sound like an 8 grade anorexic girl, complaining about being fat and unpopular. Man up and learn to play with the hand you've been dealt instead of making excuses and searching for validation in all the wrong places. You've got one shot at life, it's up to you weather you want to brood over things you can't change, or keep your head up and make the most of it.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#142

Post by meester »

hackerpolicy wrote: post #19
MarkMc wrote: post #4

Paul Tough's book, "How Children Succeed" [1] has a great section on how mothering style has a large effect on offspring throughout their lives: "Parents and other caregivers who are able to form close, nurturing relationships with their children can foster resilience in them that protects them from many of the worst effects of a harsh early environment. This message can sound a bit warm and fuzzy, but it is rooted i…

What can the child do once he starts to ask himself what the hell is wrong with him, and little by little, starts to associate some wrongs with his childhood? Is it possible to revert bad parenting?

Albert Ellis has already proven the answer to this is "yes". In short, we are the ones typically responsible for our own neurosis as we maintain flawed thinking or understandings of reality. People with loving parents have turned out screwed up kids, just the same.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#143

Post by saraid216 »

tomp wrote: post #88
saraid216 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, the answer is "No, but". No, you're never going to able to have no effects from your formative years with your parents. BUT, it's rarely impossible to deal with this productively. I suspect such a child will always be asking zirself what's wrong with zir, but hopefully ze can also develop an answer to that question, usually in the form of a reliable support network.

After having read your comment, I googled "zirself"... Is is a commonly used pronoun, or more of a quirk/very new feature of the language that gets used rarely? Interesting concept though!

No, it's not common. Language drift happens through usage, though. I happen to like gender-neutral pronouns, because I like messing with linguistics and conlangs, so I use them in hopes that other people will use them, just like any other neologism.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#144

Post by saraid216 »

alxhill wrote: post #106
mseebach wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that comes from linguistic relativity, i.e. the philosophy that the language we use to talk about a subject defines the way we think about it. Thus, by using "he" as the gender-neutral pronoun, we're prejudiced towards a male-centred society. No, "zirself" is not commonly used, but obviously proponents want to change that. At the end of the day, it's just another branch of political correctness.

Is there anything wrong with them, they and themselves?

It's ambiguous.

"You are in a dark forest. A disembodied voice speaks to you. They want you to follow."

How many voices? Would it have been more correct to say "They wants you to follow"? Should you contort the sentence to drop agency, saying "You should follow"? Is the pronoun referring to some group of people not included in this paragraph?

s/They want/Ze wants/ solves all of these questions immediately and simply.

In most cases, it comes down to stylistic preference. Some people like to use "it". Some people like to alternate "he" and "she". My preference is ze/zir/zirself. Some people feel threatened by it, as if someone else coding in a new language means their old standby of C90 is not good enough.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#145

Post by singular »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #141
singular wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. How tall are you compared to the average in your country? For somebody who doesn't have this disadvantage, it simply doesn't exist. I refer again to http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/lies/MessagesPerWeek.png - it's not 100% but it's indicative. Also I refer you to walking down the street in your town. If you were correct, then there'd be a big variation (or at least one resembling the normal di…

ooof... or be a debbie downer the rest of your life, and focus on all the negatives you can't control, and be a total victim. Maybe there are other reasons unseen to yourself that explain your lack of romantic partnerships.... you sound like an 8 grade anorexic girl, complaining about being fat and unpopular. Man up and learn to play with the hand you've been dealt instead of making excuses and searching for validati…

I don't like to waste my life on internet arguments (nicely in alignment with your comments, there), but seriously?

I hate to join the 'hacker news is going downhill' parade, but this is pretty bad. Go read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :-

    When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.:-

    "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Note you didn't even respond to my points, you just gave me the minimally informed personal attack bit.

I wrote a fair bit here in response to your 'points', but to be honest your lack of civility doesn't warrant it. Feel free to disagree, but try + do it politely, this isn't reddit.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#146

Post by fragsworth »

calinet6 wrote: post #125
LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> became little shits no child just becomes a "little shit". It takes a lot of time and effort to create one. Children have some certain negative aspects in them and have some positive aspects in them. Parenting is all about making good aspects stronger and negative aspects weaker. Recently, my child started yelling like crazy. She will just start screaming at a restaurant thinking it's fun (3 year old). Or just yell…

It really is. There are people who believe people are predestined and struck in stone, and that there are good people and bad people, and that if someone is bad or lazy or has bad characteristics there's nothing that can be done, it's just who they are. Those people are wrong and make horrible parents.

The world isn't black and white. We're born with predispositions. Upbringing has some influence. But consider that all the parenting in the world can't make a retarded kid smart. How do you know there aren't other things in our brains that are difficult or can't be controlled?

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#147

Post by fragsworth »

nitrogen wrote: post #74
fragsworth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; this study seems to only find correlations between parenting and happiness/success in life. What if some children grow up in certain ways regardless of how they're raised, and this is what causes them to have shitty relationships with their parents? Maybe some kids don't get good parenting simply because they became little shits? And then this carried on into their lives?

Unless you don't believe in a physicalistic universe, in which case there's not much point in science, a child's personality is formed entirely by its environment and genetics, both of which start with the parents.

Only one of these (environment, genetics) is something you have control over. At least for now.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#148

Post by tomprince »

JDDunn9 wrote: post #14

These are the kind of studies that make me think social-psychology is just a psuedo-science. If you want to understand human-nature, read Shakespeare over Freud. If you want to influence people, read Dale Carnegie over B.F. Skinner. I'll gladly eat crow if this study results in a 6% increase in loving relationships or a 5% decrease in alcoholism...

Certainly, social-psycology isn't as certain as hard sciences. One problem, is that in some ways, they are much more complex than the hard sciences. So, to reach the kind of conclusion and laws that you get in hard sciences, they need much more data. Certainly, we can't draw any firm conclusions from this one study, but doing a bunch of similar studies, over several centuries (note that this study took 75 years), might lead to the start of social science becoming a hard science.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#149

Post by alanh »

meester wrote: post #142
hackerpolicy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can the child do once he starts to ask himself what the hell is wrong with him, and little by little, starts to associate some wrongs with his childhood? Is it possible to revert bad parenting?

Albert Ellis has already proven the answer to this is "yes". In short, we are the ones typically responsible for our own neurosis as we maintain flawed thinking or understandings of reality. People with loving parents have turned out screwed up kids, just the same.

I’m sorry, but your comment is quite confusing. Would you mind clarifying your points?

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#150

Post by alanh »

cafard wrote: post #95
ma2rten wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would interest me is what effect this has on parents. I would suspect that caring for a child has an equally good effect on the parents as it has on the child.

I don't think that the parents could tell you, and I am not sure how researchers could. To raise a child even from birth to first grade takes about six years, a period that will change anyone, parent or not. One does learn many things in caring for a child, though I can't say that is the only way to learn them.

Because you cannot immediately think of a study does not mean one is not possible.

Consider: Measure changes in parents during child-rearing and correlate with measures of amount and style of "care" given to children. Are those that are more caring parents happier, on average, than those who are not? Control for anything you can think of controlling.

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