A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life • Hacker News Board

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#151

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

lynnetye wrote: post #71

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? A lot of the people I know who've accomplished significant things did so not because they were happy, but because they tried harder than anyone else. They were not satisfied with the way things were and put a lot of effort into changing them. I myself didn't lose half my bodyweight because I was happy, quite the contrary, I hated --and still hate-- my body. That kind of motivation is incredibly helpful for o…

I didn't read the book the OP quotes, but it rings true to me on many levels. While happiness doesn't guarantee success, it sure has hell makes it easier to work hard! The darkest year of my life was sophomore year in college. I wasn't doing well in my classes, so I dropped some hobbies to make more time to study. I got out of shape, gained weight, lost touch w/ my friends, put more pressure on myself to make all of…

> Progress is one of the only things that reliably and consistently makes me happy.

My experience is that if you rely on progress for your emotional wellbeing you will not have a good time. Progress too easily slips backwards or plateaus for long periods of time. It sounds like the kind of ting someone would say during the easy beginning stages of of a thing.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#152

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:41 PM UTC

sabas123 wrote: post #139

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we seek happiness instead of achievement and get neither. Probably because we've been conditioned (through billions of dollars, spent yearly, on marketing) to believe that happiness comes with the acquisition of certain items, status or experiences. We've conflated happiness with dopamine rushes and short-lived pleasure, and believe the feeling can be elongated by merely emulating the actions which either provided b…

But fuck this world if mastering your craft turns out to be just as stressful and painful as seeking happiness from material wealth.

there is no long term happiness from material wealth, unless you heavily redefine what happiness means

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#153

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #67

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? A lot of the people I know who've accomplished significant things did so not because they were happy, but because they tried harder than anyone else. They were not satisfied with the way things were and put a lot of effort into changing them. I myself didn't lose half my bodyweight because I was happy, quite the contrary, I hated --and still hate-- my body. That kind of motivation is incredibly helpful for o…

They say a journey of 10,000 steps starts with a single step. And then you have a journey of 9,999 steps, which starts with a single step. That is, there's never a time when you take 10,000 steps in one go, or when you do an entire journey in one go, the whole journey ends with a single step as well. Given that the entire journey is single steps, if you take one step and then beat yourself up because one step is noth…

> Given that the entire journey is single steps, if you take one step and then beat yourself up because one step is nothing...

When did I ever say to do that? What I'm saying is, if you're so happy, and happiness is so important as people claim, then what motivates you to go through the pain of 10000 steps in the first place?

No, I submit that happiness is at best orthogonal to success.

> You've worked hard to go from self-hate to self-hate

Yes, and now without the comfort of being able to eat a pint of ice cream when I've had a bad day or pick up a pizza on the way home from work, or enjoy a carefree dining experience with friends. Such is life. One must sacrifice to attain goals.

> Why not feel happy and successful at every moment of calorie counting

Good fucking luck with that.

> If every moment you play a tune, you hate how badly you play, and it drives you to play more precisely, but you hate playing and feel bad afterwards, are you better off or worse off than someone who plays imprecisely, but loves every moment they play and can't wait to play more and feels better afterwards?

That depends on if your goal is to play better or be happy. To attain success one must not be satisfied with being not successful or one will have too little motivation to succeed. The fact that people put themselves through miserable, agonizing slogs to succeed at things should tell you something about happiness: it isn't actually what people want, deep down. If it were, I know from first hand experience that opioids are a great way to make yourself feel good pretty much all the time without doing anything.

No, people want to be satisfied, and are sometimes confused into thinking that satisfaction will bring happiness, but it won't. Likewise, if someone wants to accomplish something, happiness and failure will not satisfy.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#154

Post by badpun » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

ido wrote: post #130

m463 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned the most about life from "character building experiences". They are usually unpleasant. They could be as simple as somone telling you not to be stupid, or as complicated as finding lessons out the hard way. The experiences give you the resolve or clues or whatever to avoid bad choices, or appreciate good ones. Or help others understand (if they're receptive).

It could! And it can also fuck you up for life. My grandfather was a teenager during WW2. He was a Polish Jew and lucky to have seen the writing on the wall and fled eastwards when the Nazis invaded (almost the entire rest of his large family died in the holocaust - his only living relative was his brother, who died as a soldier in 1948 in the Israeli war of independence). He had a horrible time during the war but ev…

Pretty much the same story here. My granda was a Polish teenager who got thrown into Stallinist right prison after surviving 5 years of German WWII occupation. I think the abuse there pretty much wrecked his psyche for life, with signs of mental illness and a pretty miserable character in general afterwards.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#155

Post by badpun » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

retube wrote: post #28

Diederich wrote: post #23

I was raised by my grandparents. They were born in the 1910s, and grew up in the midwest during the dust bowl and great depression. My grandfather lost most of his buddies in Guadalcanal and Burma during World War II, and, in his own words, fully expected to become worm food himself. He said little, but one phrase he did repeat more than any other was simple: "Any day you're breathing is a good day." To him, every da…

Indeed. To select one data point: had you been born in Russia in 1923 you had only a 32% chance of making it to 1946. infant mortality, famine and then WW2 meant that 68% of the 1923 cohort died before they were 23.

> infant mortality, famine and then WW2

Don't forget the Stallinist terror (innocent people dying in concentration camps).

EDIT: why the downvote? Wikipedia estimate for the victims of The Purge is at 600k-1.2m level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge), certainly enough to make a dent in the stats.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#156

Post by bamboozled » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

honzzz wrote: post #135

bamboozled wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you might be the one who is over sensitive? I didn’t mean it to be condescending at all, I genuinely found that story super disturbing and I didn’t want to put others through it unless they wanted to be put through it. The scene the guy is describing real sounds like an apocalyptic hellscape, if you’re not somewhat disturbed by it, then I’m not sure what to say.

I am not the one who finds what you wrote condescending but I would like to ask you a question - you seem to believe that being disturbed by an article is something bad - where does this come from? Is this common where you live? It is just that this view seems to be gaining popularity and I don't get it. Being disturbed by something is an emotion and emotions serve to orient us. They are useful - both pleasant and un…

I think climate change and the current climate emergency will cause more unimaginable suffering, as bad as imaginable, if you read the article you’d might realise the fires are a result of severe drought predicted by climate scientists and caused by climate change.

Therefore I feel some will find this article disturbing because humans and many living beings have suffered horrible deaths in what I’d call unnatural ways (fire isn’t new to these animals, the intensity of the fires is). It’s also a glimpse of more very tragic times ahead.

I put a link to the article and a warning, what do you find so concerning about it ? Maybe people don’t read hacker news to feel like shit? Maybe some people are reading who have been directly affected too. So I gave people the option to skip that article and the details if they weren’t in the mood for it right now Who cares? I just wanted to give people the choice.

I agree with your point about good and bad emotions. I mean, I read the article in the first place.

If you have trouble seeing why some would find a forest full of crying animals who has been partially burned to death sad or troubling with more to come, maybe you’re someone who has trouble feeling empathy? Which is ok, but you would have trouble understanding people that might.

By the way, I am from Earth, just like you. I don’t see how that question was relevant.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#157

Post by pi-squared » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

TLDR: Have fun. Otherwise: ad/clickbait for author's startup.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#158

Post by papeda » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #106

retube wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. To select one data point: had you been born in Russia in 1923 you had only a 32% chance of making it to 1946. infant mortality, famine and then WW2 meant that 68% of the 1923 cohort died before they were 23.

Do you have a citation for this? That’s a remarkable statistic, but I want a source before I go telling people.

Here is a source [1]. That analysis roughly breaks down as 1/4 loss each from infant mortality; famine and Stalin’s terror; and WWII.

[1] https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_sovie...

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#159

Post by honzzz » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #156

honzzz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the one who finds what you wrote condescending but I would like to ask you a question - you seem to believe that being disturbed by an article is something bad - where does this come from? Is this common where you live? It is just that this view seems to be gaining popularity and I don't get it. Being disturbed by something is an emotion and emotions serve to orient us. They are useful - both pleasant and un…

I think climate change and the current climate emergency will cause more unimaginable suffering, as bad as imaginable, if you read the article you’d might realise the fires are a result of severe drought predicted by climate scientists and caused by climate change. Therefore I feel some will find this article disturbing because humans and many living beings have suffered horrible deaths in what I’d call unnatural way…

>>> If you have trouble seeing why some would find a forest full of crying animals who has been partially burned to death sad or troubling with more to come, maybe you’re someone who has trouble feeling empathy?

I have no trouble seeing why some would find it troubling - what I do not get is why you would think this is a reason to put there the warning. You say it yourself - we are going to have a lot of problems. Shouldn't you encourage people to face them? Is it not a good thing to be disturbed by disturbing things? What is better - that people face the hard truths or that they cover their eyes in front of them? This is what bugs me on those warnings - that I perceive them as making our society more fragile and less able to handle the problems. There is such a thing as too much sensitivity. Coddling is not good for us.

Re: A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

#160

Post by gfs78 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

Happiness is not about achieving your goals or having a stress free life or anything related to wealth.

Happiness is about being able to live in the present moment and share your life with the people that you love. Of course a minimum of wealth, health, etc. is needed and that minimum could be quite an effort to reach depending on where you start with.

I´ve never met a happy unloved person no matter how rich or powerful.