Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A researcher on how to live a happy life

ox.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 199 posts

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#161

Post by at_a_remove »

vertak wrote: post #159
at_a_remove wrote: post #154

Over the many, many years, I have thrashed around with ... well, almost every suggestion that usually comes up on these articles and threads responding to these articles, as well as many unorthodox ideas. The pills and the preaching, the assorted practices recommended and the acting, going through the motions of joy hoping something will catch, the focuses outside oneself cast like grappling hooks onto any ship not s…

This is an important but deeply tragic point. I have friends who I would bet heavily will be unwellbeing their entire lives. Even if it is true though, is it worth the total loss of hope that would accompany the resignation to the endless night? To me it seems worth the ups and downs of hope and defeat, if only that it promises some points of positive change whereas if you resign yourself to unwellbeing then you will…

Ah, there are no ups of hope, not after a while. What you have, instead, is sickening suspicion that, as much as you might commit to it, no matter how radical the changes, and with no regard to the time you have spent doing whatever it is, it won't work. It becomes an unrewarding hobby: what will I try this time? It's lavender oil aromatherapy for your pancreatic cancer and sure you can try it but ... no ups, only periods of struggle and exhaustion alternating, coming in like the phases of the moon.

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#162

Post by Thorentis »

slothtrop wrote: post #151
minkzilla wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Catholic perspective this is not true. People do not Earn heaven, it is a gift. And doing the right thing is good for it’s own sake.

This seems like a murky area even for Catholics. My understanding was that it is still contingent on faith and all the rituals.

Yes, but the Catholic position is based on St James idea of "living faith". E.g. Faith without works is dead. It also is based on Jesus' instructions about "he who loves me, does my commands". The grace and love are free gifts, but what is love without good actions?

The best analogy I can think of is if a husband says they love their wife, but they never help them, show affection, do anything to serve them, do they really love them? Now in marriage, love should ultimately be unconditional (to a point, all analogies fall down at some point). If a wife loves their husband freely, but the husband says they return the love but do nothing to show it, what can we infer about his love?

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#163

Post by benn0 »

hprotagonist wrote: post #9

I have long regarded happiness in the same category as grace: it is an undeserved and unasked for free gift. An epiphenomena that is not a consequence of, but happens along with, other positive actions. And for me that's living a less self-centered life. I am happy when what I do with my life enriches the lives of others. But being transactional about this ruins the game. It is, among other things, the opposite of ze…

Just wanted to say I find this a really great framing, particularly:

> Do the thing for the exuberant joy of the thing itself

It's something that I've started to act on recently, and I'm finding that thinking about activities in this way overcomes the paralysis I often feel when thinking about trying something new. Framing it this way gives me permission to try something, and not feel negatively if I fail or am bored by it. I've discovered so many things that I can enjoy purely for the experience of them, that none of my friends know I do (and that I don't need external validation for), that also happen to be beneficial to other people who I would otherwise have never interacted with.

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#164

Post by eeh »

serniebanders wrote: post #75

I can confidently say that I am happy. Everybody close to me thinks that I was born happy and positive but they couldn't be more wrong. Achieving a permanent state of happiness took years of active mental exercises. Since I don't have any credible psychology background, nobody listens to my suggestions in real life. I doubt anybody would take me seriously here as well, but... all I have is time so this will help some…

> Since I don't have any credible psychology background, nobody listens to my suggestions in real life.

The reason I prefer listening to researchers is because they study populations and try to account for confounding variables.

I'm glad to hear you're happy, but I'm skeptical of how well you're able to attribute that to particular circumstances/actions.

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#165

Post by menybuvico »

neoplatonian wrote: post #94

I've realised the simple things: good diet, restful sleep, ample sunlight, a little exercise, and nourishing friends make a TON of difference, more than any of the things listed.

This.

I also noticed quite a bump up when I actively decided to try to not be a cynical asshole _all_ the time. Meditation, on the other hand, never did it for me.

But hey, as long as it works. :)

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#166

Post by vorpalhex »

hinkley wrote: post #44

There's a bit of a trap here that I find myself standing in. Parts of our culture are participatory. You get social benefits from going through the same things as your peers. When you stop getting sucked into things by your insecurities, you become non-participatory. You miss out on chances to connect with other people. There is no bonding experience for you, but there is for everybody else. It can be kind of alienat…

You don't form connections by bludgeoning yourself into a different mold, but by finding a way to connect while being yourself. I see things very differently than most of my friends, and I'm still good friends with them and they with me.

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#167

Post by travisjungroth »

pdimitar wrote: post #107
travisjungroth wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I had a very different 13-14.

Certainly. Question is, now that you are at your current age, don't you feel that if you practice meditation now, it would you bring more benefits compared to back then?

That seems like a very different question than the point of the comment that I replied to. In my short reply, I made it about you and me, but my point was that lots of kids have real "conflict or hardship". If I told you about the stuff that was going on in my house at that age and replaced "family" with "roommates" and "school" with "work", you'd probably think of it as pretty rough. My life is much easier now at 31.

But enough about me. About 1 in 7 US children are food insecure [1] and will go hungry at some point this year. One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult.[2] There is a lot of pain experienced by the world, and there's no age cutoff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States#Ch... [2]David Finkelhor, Anne Shattuck, Heather A. Turner, & Sherry L. Hamby, The Lifetime Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse and Sexual Assault Assessed in Late Adolescence, 55 Journal of Adolescent Health 329, 329-333 (2014)

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#168

Post by mettamage »

hugey010 wrote: post #111
saltedonion wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very insightful. Please share more. I’ve been taking up meditation and bubiddism but still very much a novice. I find that as you open your mind and see through more things, in a way things gets less interesting. It’s that feeling that you’ve seen this movie before. Maybe this is normal for older people but I’m in my 20s and it feels very odd. How do you deal with that and not feel like a zombie.

It's often referred to as mindfulness, and it falls under cognitive behavioral therapy. I've had trouble finding useful links, so I'll repeat the practical info I was taught. Pretend your active focus or attention is like a fishing line. Pick a single thing, usually a physical object like a tree, and "cast" your focus onto that. Focus on specific parts of the tree, the bark, leaves, how the wind moves through it, how…

Mindfulness is not CBT, it has been integrated into it. CBT normally works in the thought, emotional or behavioral level.

Mindfulness reconditions the subconscious conditioned level in which thoughts and emotions lead to automatic behavior (i.e. conditioned behavior).

It’s subconscious because most people aren’t aware of how they are being swept away by thoughts and emotions. The reconditioning happens by training your awareness through breathing meditation, body-scan meditation (IMO better name than mindfulness/vipassana) and other meditations. Now you’re more aware which is how you’re reconditioned and with that you can decide to not act on your old habits.

CBT is a thing from psychology. Meditation is taken by psychologists from Buddhism and integrated into it. But IMO it doesn’t follow the philosophy of CBT. So to say it us CBT or falls under it ignores what it really is: a technique from religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism.

Search Inside Yourself is a good book to read more about it from or positive psychology from Harvard (2006, taught by Tal Ben Shahar, it’s on YouTube).

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#169

Post by xxmarkuski »

asciimo wrote: post #37

So if you ask people if they’d be happier living in California or the Midwest, most people say California. Actually the regions have comparable life satisfaction, but people say California because they think of the weather and fail to take account of other things, such as the fact that California is full of tedious hippies. The author does not cite research about about how "tedious hippies" make people sad, nor demog…

The part about hippies is just an example, think of it as an figure of speech. The point he is making has nothing to do with the weather or hippies, it's that peoples believes on what makes them happy are not in alignment to what actually makes them happy or they fail to take account for lots of variables changing, while they believe only one changes.

Re: A researcher on how to live a happy life

#170

Post by ralls_ebfe »

indigochill wrote: post #73
dr_dshiv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some of my favorite Epictetus quotes: Chapter 8 Don’t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whatever way they happen: this is the path to peace. Chapter 9 Sickness is a problem for the body, not the mind -- unless the mind decides that it is a problem. Lameness, too, is the body’s problem, not the mind’s. Say this to yourself whatever the circumstance and you will find without fa…

> ...avoid things that other people control, because then you must serve as their slave. A good mantra for self-hosted FOSS as well, come to think of it.

But is it really? I just read a german translation, which says to neither wish to have, nor to wish to avoid. Does anyone here know enough greek to clarify this?
Post reply on HN