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Nine things I learned in ninety years

edwardpackard.com

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Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#371

Post by fuzzfactor »

shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

When tragedy and pain are far more prominent than anything else, it kind of reduces to positive resolve.

If others can not feel joy from that in person, you're doing it wrong.

Never forget what it feels like when fate smiles on you, even when it's almost never.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#372

Post by fuzzfactor »

twelvechairs wrote: post #103
mi_lk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't explain how you define joy and happiness, can you elaborate how they are different

I think in short: - big things (e.g. someone dies) you cant avoid being sad - small everyday things (e.g. someone cuts you off at the intersection) you have a choice to smile and treat it lightly or go all passive aggressive and spiteful.

Sometimes you have to find some middle ground wherever you can get it.

Like why curse a slow driver when you can have a 100% positive attitude?

"You can do it! You can do it! There is a gas pedal. You're almost there, don't give up!"

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#373

Post by adammarples »

tirant wrote: post #110
adammarples wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they said, they said a default state. You can't always be happy, but you can default to it when you have nothing else going on.

I would call that more content than happy. Interestingly in languages like Spanish, 'contento' is almost overlapping semantically with the word happy ('feliz') in its day-to-day usage, and I find it a more adequate usage of the concept. So content is basically the baseline when no needs are impacting your state-of-mind, and happy would be the consequence of a positive event or result.

I agree

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#374

Post by fuzzfactor »

psychoslave wrote: post #74
shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

Pleasure is not the same as happy. Probably no one, even the luckiest entity in the universe, can avoid to go through some painful emotion. But how we handle raw emotions, within interpretation processes, is what makes all the difference. Actually, an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly co…

>an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.

I don't think it's that rare.

Fortunately, the opposite is also true.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#375

Post by fuzzfactor »

ronbenton wrote: post #128
shark1 wrote: post #59

> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind." I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.

Default state doesn’t mean all the time though?

So much of the time it's only when launching the app.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#376

Post by imiric »

efsavage wrote: post #326
kinnth wrote: post #267

I really love reading the wisdom of older people. Society really dismisses everyone over 80, but I find myself having deep interesting connections with a few people much older than myself (38). Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if…

> they really have done a lot of it all before Not even just done it before, but done it multiple times . This is where experience is forged into wisdom.

> This is where experience is forged into wisdom.

That is not guaranteed, though. There are many experienced yet unwise people, and sometimes viceversa.

I agree with the sentiment of listening to older people, but age alone is not a good criteria to determine whether they're worth paying attention to. Old people can be as ignorant and unwise as young people, sometimes even more so.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#377

Post by reyqn »

SoftTalker wrote: post #353
ropable wrote: post #36

> what an outsized role is played by luck This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.

Luck is ambition and preparation combined with opportunity. Lots of people pass or aren't prepared to do what is neccessary when opportunity presents itself. The people who are, are called "lucky"

I'm lucky. I'm lucky because I didn't ever have to try hard at anything in my life, and I have a good life.

I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck

In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck

I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck

I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck

All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck

I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.

That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.

Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#378

Post by dasil003 »

unfitted2545 wrote: post #336
dasil003 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone. Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?

There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck. It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he…

Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.

So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#379

Post by kakacik »

kinnth wrote: post #267

I really love reading the wisdom of older people. Society really dismisses everyone over 80, but I find myself having deep interesting connections with a few people much older than myself (38). Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if…

You are of course absolutely right, but its more complex. When I look around me at my family, people there and already gone, one of the issue is communication and whole mental model of reality.

Younger generations live emotionally richer lives. Or maybe thats not the best description, but something along that. I can't talk about deeper emotions even with my parents, the generational gap is absolutely huge. They never talk about theirs, and trying to start the talk ends the talk, they simply are not wired for such introspection. Both proper university educated which is a small miracle given how they and their parents were viewed as potential enemies of communist state.

They lived their whole lives under soviet oppression, never left Europe, don't understand modern world and technologies, they lived their whole lives in single monolithic culture. Critical thinking outward and especially inward is not in their runbook. I live past 20 years away from my home country, travelled the world that changed me (for the better) permanently. i tried psychedelic drugs a bit in the past, also a profound and probably permanent change they never had a chance to go through. I was/still am doing a number of potentially dangerous mountain sports that expose you to fear of death regularly, and one has to overcome that fear and move on, over and over - definitely a personality-changing experience. And so on.

Its hard to find people to talk about ie backpacking travelling to exotic undeveloped remote places even within my peers, who did that. I gathered more life experience living in 3 countries, dating ladies from various cultures, raising my kids in a foreign culture than they ever could. I understand psychology and people way better than them.

The roles reversed some time ago - I am helping them, however I can. As long as they are actually willing to listen, not every topic is like that. I can't talk politics to them, russians did a very good job in subverting public opinions of large portions of population into absolutely illogical self-harming position, and just stating truth leads nowhere.

Re: Nine things I learned in ninety years

#380

Post by kakacik »

sdeframond wrote: post #345
titzer wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice point. A society where everyone makes everything just a little bit better for the next random person will be a society full of nice surprises, rather than nasty ones.

So an answer to the prisoner's dilemma would be a shared belief in doing good? Interesting.

Western Europe (not only) social system is based on such belief. It kept working till a lot of immigrants from pretty bad corrupted countries came in, abusing the system in ways it wasn't planned for.

So it works, sometimes, on limited populations.

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