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The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

theguardian.com

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Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#151

Post by AlwaysRock »

snarf21 wrote: post #83
vorpalhex wrote: post #3

There is nothing which will make you happy. You must choose to be happy. There is no job, no amount of money, no relationship, which will make you feel whole and happy and content and done. The opposite doesn't hold - there are jobs and relationships and financial strains which will certainly keep you from being happy. The goal isn't for a job or a relationship to make you happy. It's to enable other things which are…

This reminds me of a quote from Stewart Brand during an interview with Tim Ferris. ".... and being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."[ https://tim.blog/2018/02/03/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts... ] Teach yourself how to cook, get in shape, draw a picture, write a story, help someone less fortunate, teach someone something you know, learn how to juggle... In the end it doesn't really matte…

You're touching on something I can relate to. Being proud doesnt make me happy. But the sense of progression that comes along with learning or mastering something does. I enjoy nothing more than taking a skill I am okay at to something that I am great at.

The issue is this is hard and takes a lot of dedicated work to do.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#152

Post by vinceguidry »

nybble41 wrote: post #146
vinceguidry wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are irrational until we understand the dynamics behind them. Then they become rational. When she decided not to press the issue, that wasn't a rational decision made on logic, it was an emotional one where she prioritized one kind of truth, that it was her hurting her child, over another kind of truth, that it was the hand licking that was hurting her child. Only in retrospect did the actuality of the situatio…

>> Finally, I had this moment where I felt that my efforts to ramp up the pressure to force him to stop had crossed some line. I felt I was turning into an abusive parent. >> At that moment, I decided this had to stop. I didn't care if he licked his hands the rest of his life. It couldn't be worse than this. > Rational analysis failed, some other way of deciding how to handle it took hold. Notice the semantic shift h…

> I see the original exclusion of empathy and emotion from the decision-making process as irrational.

This is because you're reifying rationality onto past events, conflating correct with rational. When she made the decision to stop, she didn't have a rational basis to make that decision, rational means you can connect a decision to logic. She didn't discover that logic, those reasons, until a full year later. That's when she finally had all the pieces.

> doesn't require committing to a particular version of the truth and rejecting all others as false.

This is a non-sequitur. Whatever you choose is going to have consequences. The very course of action is what does the rejection of all the other forms of looking at it, not your mindset. Your actions belie what you consider to be important.

> When one is actually ignorant, admitting ignorance is the rational choice; proceeding as if one were not ignorant (for example, by choosing one version of the truth over another when there is nothing to distinguish them) would be the hallmark of an irrational mindset, not an "over-rational" one.

What if you don't even know what you're ignorant of or that you are in fact ignorant? This is how this ties back to money, job, marriage. You can have these things, and be happy, or you can have these things, and be unhappy. I'm arguing that the reasons why you chase them are important, and you have to make the decision anyway.

If you are comfortable with irrational ways of gathering information, like listening to your gut, then you're way better off than trying to force rational ones.

So is your next argument going to be that "going by your gut" is a rational approach?

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#153

Post by mmsimanga »

If only people who are happy would shut up enjoy their happiness without telling the world. Okay you can tell your wife and brother but leave the rest of us out of it. I think this creates pressure on the rest of us to emulate you to be as happy as you or even worse some people fake happiness and this makes situation even worse because we are chasing fake happiness.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#154

Post by docker_up »

assblaster wrote: post #103
docker_up wrote: post #84

Our combined income is about $600k USD, but funny enough we don't consider ourselves "rich". We consider ourselves "upper middle class" at least for the Bay Area, because we both work very hard, probably 10+ hours a day. Our mortgage on our house is less than 1 year's income so it's relatively low compared to others in the Bay Area. If one of us lost our jobs, we could still comfortably afford our mortgage but we wou…

If your mortgage is $600k, you should work towards paying that off more quickly, depending on the interest rate, so that you can be free from that burden. Once your house is paid for, then your daily work can decrease if you want, or have extra savings available for earlier retirement or maybe doing more fun things. I won't be "happy" until I'm debt free with $10mil in savings/investments, but I am definitely happy r…

The cost of capital for the mortgage was reasonably low, and my expectation is that it will approach 0% real interest rates in the near future. Therefore it doesn't make sense to me to pay it off when I would be essentially paying 0% in real rates for the mortgage. I could be wrong but I'd rather have a below 4% interest rate when rates are between 5 and 6%

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#155

Post by djohnston »

sethammons wrote: post #122
djohnston wrote: post #30

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yours…

I disagree. I wrote this in another thread just yesterday I think. My philosophy: make the best choice you can given the information you have, and you'll not have cause to regret anything in your life. Some choices might hurt and you might not like the outcome, but you did what you felt was best. You can learn from it, but there is never cause to regret it.

in my experience regret is never something I can reason my way out of. it is sort of an intimate and reptile-brain oriented sadness that is initiated by high level thoughts but is then quite difficult to erase.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#156

Post by sethammons »

rubatuga wrote: post #130
sethammons wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I wrote this in another thread just yesterday I think. My philosophy: make the best choice you can given the information you have, and you'll not have cause to regret anything in your life. Some choices might hurt and you might not like the outcome, but you did what you felt was best. You can learn from it, but there is never cause to regret it.

You can't just "logic" away regret. We make bad choices, no matter what, and that causes regret.

not sure what to tell you. I don't have regrets. It's nice. No "logic-ing" it, I believe it.

Edit. Thought I'd expand on that. I grew up poor. Had a kid at 15. I've had to ward off wild animals from eating my food. I've injured myself doing stupid stuff (some injuries that have not fully healed even years later and they limit me near daily), I've been fired, I've changed careers, I've gone into debt when I should not have, I've not tended some friendships I should and I've lost them, I've made bad purchases. I could cry a river. I don't. I always try to make the best decision given the information I have. This year, I made a financial choice that had I not, I could have put an additional year's salary into my bank account. No regrets. I've done the best I can. Sometimes it hurts. I learn from it, and continue living.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#157

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #101
AznHisoka wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, and while a good % of HN readers probably are making a lot, the vast majority of people (at least in the US) are living month to month.

I live month to month, as should everybody. Financially secure people just have their savings plans in order, so what is left over after all their savings is what they live on. Financially insecure people don't keep money going into savings. You can't take it with you, and you don't know how long you have to live. So there is no point in saving money for the sake of saving money. There are few religions that disagree…

[deleted]

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#158

Post by thatoneuser »

afpx wrote: post #99

As an outlier poor kid who made money, I can really relate to this. This is a thought-provoking piece, and hits on a lot of things I think about often. But, I think some of us aren’t necessarily in the hedonic treadmill game. Some of us keep working to gain more wealth not be of higher social status but because we fear being relegated back to poor-guy status. Now, I often do want to be the non-rich guy again. I see m…

Sorry you’ve had that experience. I can relate to it as well. You don’t need to be rich per se, you just don’t want to be poor. You want to have autonomy rather than having to follow extra archaic rules because society doesn’t trust you.

Privileged people don’t get how much of a trap the world is when you aren’t privileged.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#159

Post by rthomas6 »

watwut wrote: post #142
thedaemon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many religions with monks, they do not share the same rules. To which one are you specifying?

Catholics. I mean nun and monks not sisters and brothers specifically.

FWIW, I had Buddhist monks in mind. I don't have any direct empirical evidence this is true, but their methods have been and continue to be empirically validated (to increase subjective wellbeing, decrease stress markers, increase empathy, and improve health), so it's not unlikely this is the case. Full disclosure, meditation helps me in my own life, so I am definitely biased.

Re: The money, job, marriage myth: are you happy yet?

#160

Post by rthomas6 »

satokema wrote: post #76
rthomas6 wrote: post #8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill We spend a lot of our time trying to add pleasure to our lives to (temporarily) boost us above our baseline happiness level, when really we should be spending that time learning how to change the baseline level itself. Isn't it odd that there are monks who live with nothing who are probably happier than any of us?

How do you know those monks are "happier"? How can you measure something like that? I can't even measure my own "happiness" most of the time, and it's a different part of my brain giving that report (usually full of crap and not realistic) from the part that actually experiences "happiness".

Subjective wellbeing, stress hormone levels, and fMRI readings would all be good ways to measure happiness in my opinion. When I wrote the above, I was thinking of Buddhist monks, but I didn't want to imply other monastic disciplines were somehow lesser, so I just said "monks". I do not have any direct proof of monks being happier, but there are TONS of scientific studies showing better results for experienced meditators on the indicators mentioned at the beginning of this comment.
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