Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out

I had a Charizard card, but I bought it from a local hobby store for some insane price with birthday money. I don't remember how old I was, elementary school I think, all the adults in my life told me it was a terrible decision but I had poor impulse control, wasn't one to listen to anyone, and my parents tended to let me learn my own lessons, so I ended up buying the card anyway. Ultimately all the card collectors at school worshipped me for having a Charizard, it was totally worth it and the lesson I took from it all ended up being 'don't listen to your parents' combined with 'money will buy you happiness' or something along those lines.

This is quite misleading. Yes, letting your anger out can make you angrier in the long term - providing the right circumstances.

Why? Because if anger becomes socially acceptable, you're more likely to express it. However, saying everyone should bottle it up is trying to take an extreme and apply it to everyone.

Anger is an emotional response to a situation, much like depression. If you don't change your situation, you will become angrier or more depressed. If this "venting" makes someone feel better, and prolongs their stay in this bad situation, then of course they're going to get angrier.

This is like someone who's depressed because they're in an abusive relationship taking antidepressants rather than leaving the relationship. You're treating symptoms, not dealing with causes.

So suppressing that anger is going to promote you to resolve the situation rather than tolerate it.

I'll point out that you're linking to a blog post and not a peer reviewed study, so the actual merit is zip without sources, which he provides none.

I however, would like to provide an analogy that is well studied. Porn. The availability of pornography is a well known reducer in rates of both rape and violence against women. Enacting the fantasy - Aristotle's method - IS a proven way to release sexual frustration and thus reduces the resulting violence. At least as far as the general population is concerned.

However, overconsumption of porn is linked with a progressive increase in aggression against women, decreased sympathy to rape victims, etc. Although, this is a chicken and egg issue is the porn delaying the persons aggression or causing it. Basically is porn preventing men from becoming Jack the Ripper, or is it causing them. We don't know because all we have is a correlation between overconsumption of porn and increasing violence.

To put it simply, for the average person "venting" their anger in a healthy way is going to be beneficial if their situation isn't producing the anger but an isolated incident did: your hot water heater rusted through, you've got a new one now but you're pissed about the flood. Getting that anger out is going to be beneficial if you do it in a healthy way (go to the batting cages or driving range and hit some balls). It's the same as porn, your girlfriend went away for two weeks over christmas to see her parents is a very different mental state compared to someone who's watching porn to see women have the shit beat out of them.

To me, it's looking at the chicken and the egg problem and saying "oh my god, eggs cause more eggs! Let's get rid of all the eggs." It's wholly naive. If you don't want eggs, just get rid of the god damn chicken!

Aren't you are proving the parent's point there? You say that only articles depicting their own culture are seem as relevant to the american reader, which is what he claims.

That's absolutely not the case in other places of the world. In some cases, even the opposite problem arises (that is, discriminating against your own country/culture and favouring a foreign one)

> He also passed up the opportunity to make millions of more dollars in merchandising.

If you had enough money, would you realize it?

In the US, one study found that income is positively correlated to happiness only up to $75,000/year. If the $50K/day claims are true, in the 41 days between January 1 and February 10, he made enough money to live at $75,000/year for the next 27 years, without investment of any kind.

It's reasonable to guess that he will invest the money, and that the money/happiness plateau is significantly lower in Vietnam than in the US due to a lower cost of living. So he could be living at the happiness plateau for the rest of his life.

So why exactly should he care that he's passed up millions of dollars in selling stuff nobody needs? Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727770.101-money-can...

He did not throw away $50k/day. He walked away from it because he had enough money already and did not need any more of it (especially since he did not particularly enjoy all the attention that came with the money, but even if he did not mind it, that would not change my point).