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

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

#51

Post by japhyr »

yters wrote: post #20

When I step back and look at my life, I have to say it is pretty good. I get agitated when I lose perspective and magnify some particular bad thing. Also, as a Christian, this gives me the ultimate relief, because I can step back and say whatever unimaginably horrible thing is happening God is ultimately in control orchestrating things for maximal good, of which maximal good is also at some fundamental level in line…

As an atheist, I take quite a different approach. There is no God with an ultimate plan of good, so the only ones who can address "unimaginably horrible" things is us.

Yes, in the end nothing matters, but in the present and near future many things matter.

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

#52

Post by r00fus »

Scapeghost wrote: post #47

The secret to a happy life is ignorance. As in not caring about stuff. There's too much depressing shit in the world, too many injustices happening to other people and lifeforms, to truly be happy with that knowledge even if your own life is perfect.

I would say it's more about sifting out the wheat from the chaff. Sturgeon's Law [1] is very applicable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

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

#53

Post by keyle »

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…

Similar experience from me,

my grand father was a resistance veteran back from WWII in Europe. He didn't talk much about it except to express the famine and misery they went through those years. He had it rough, lost his first wife young and just about everything.

He never told me how to be or who to be, or what to think, he just was content to have me around, grateful for everything.

Later in life, he became blind for many years, and just kept trucking along, not the complainer type. Always keeping it light-hearted basically, humouring and never judging, just caring deeply for others but himself, never wanting to be in the way of anyone, even the people paid to help him.

He is to this day my biggest inspiration.

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

#54

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

m0zg wrote: post #42
yters wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean something more practical, not based in religious reasoning. If you think about it, if God does not exist, then death has no threat, since once you are dead you cease to exist and no longer care about anything. I believe this was pointed out by Epicurus.

You can't think "rationally" about death. It's literally incomprehensible to a human mind, when the object of death is that mind itself.

What do you mean when you say you can't think about it rationally? There are enough survivable experiences physiologically similar to death that we can make some pretty good guesses as to what the experience leading up to it is like. And it would be incoherent to talk about the experience of being dead, because it is no experience at all (as before we were born). We know quite a bit about what happens when we die, and we have literally billions of exemplars of the event. I would say in almost every meaningful way we can think about it fairly rationally. (Whether we choose to is another question.)

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

#55

Post by anon9001 »

david-gpu wrote: post #34
anon9001 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, because as an atheist, I can step back and say that for whatever unimaginably horrible thing that's happening, it's all just a random walk. So I find satisfaction in that nothing matters anyways, and the best we can do is try to live a good life while we're here, and not take any of it too seriously. Because it's all random and largely out of my control, there's no rational basis for worry. It's nice to…

> I can step back and say that for whatever unimaginably horrible thing that's happening, it's all just a random walk Can you, really? Say your kid disappeared a week ago after soccer practice, and the police has no leads about their whereabouts. Could you really distance yourself and "not worry because everything is just a random walk"? Or would you spend all night restless, like a normal human being?

Maybe? Let's say I had a kid that got kidnapped, and I spend all night restless like a normal human being. Where has that actually gotten me? And if the kid never comes back, what's an appropriate "normal human" duration of restlessness?

People go to therapy for years to get over that restless stuff and replace it with some version of accepting that the world is not under your control.

No doubt that upsetting things are upsetting, but the guiding principle is that you have to accept the things you can't control, and do the best with the things you can control.

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

#56

Post by Scapeghost »

theli0nheart wrote: post #49
Scapeghost wrote: post #47

The secret to a happy life is ignorance. As in not caring about stuff. There's too much depressing shit in the world, too many injustices happening to other people and lifeforms, to truly be happy with that knowledge even if your own life is perfect.

Well, there are some things you really ought to care about (health, friendships, etc.), otherwise you won’t have much of a reason to live.

Yeah, make that not caring about bad stuff then :)

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

#57

Post by topmonk »

I think human emotional state is nature's tool to get us to procreate and improve the chances of our offspring to survive.

If at anytime we become truly happy this hurts these goals. For example, if an old man could be building a wall or an arsenal of bows an arrows, or inventing a better way to go fishing, his tribe would be more likely to survive. But if he just sat there, content to being alive, this is bad for his offsprings' future.

You could say, well why can't he do these things and be happy at the same time? I can't really explain why not being happy leads to a better outcome for the safety and procreation of society in general, but I would assume that it must serve some purpose in that goal, or the whole concept of it would have been removed by evolution long ago.

So, I think it's better just to resign yourself to the fact, barring using mind altering drugs, that you'll never be much happier than you were on average before, or much sadder, either.

And as far as this 70 yo lady is concerned, I'd bet when this was written she was simply riding the high of accomplishing something, and probably soon crashed back down below her baseline, only to recover back to it sometime later.

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

#58

Post by WalterBright »

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…

> 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 day, every year, every one of the six decades past 1944 was a cherry on top gift.

My father, B-17 navigator, said he accepted that he was going to die in combat. The odds at the time of surviving were terrible (about 80% casualties).

He did survive (hence my existence), and told me that whenever he felt down about something he'd remember his buddies who died in the war and how he'd been given a chance to live through it, and he'd re-appreciate his life.

Upon his return to the states, the crews were led to tables to eat. There was nothing to order, the staff assured them "we know what you want." Sure enough, they did - steak, eggs, tomatoes, etc.

Upon return to civilian life, he said he was astounded by the triviality of peoples' everyday life concerns. They were going to live another day, what did they have to be concerned about?

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

#59

Post by NeoBasilisk »

david-gpu wrote: post #30
yters wrote: post #20

When I step back and look at my life, I have to say it is pretty good. I get agitated when I lose perspective and magnify some particular bad thing. Also, as a Christian, this gives me the ultimate relief, because I can step back and say whatever unimaginably horrible thing is happening God is ultimately in control orchestrating things for maximal good, of which maximal good is also at some fundamental level in line…

> And if God doesn't exist, then nothing matters anyways, so why worry? I'm not trying to start a pointless debate, your comment really made me curious. Let's imagine the Christian god doesnt't exist. How does that logically lead to nothing mattering? As a lifelong atheist there are plenty of things that matter to me: the well-being of people (particularly those around me), peace, justice, climate change, etc. Are th…

Things can matter to you, but they are not things that objectively matter.

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

#60

Post by keyle »

Scapeghost wrote: post #47

The secret to a happy life is ignorance. As in not caring about stuff. There's too much depressing shit in the world, too many injustices happening to other people and lifeforms, to truly be happy with that knowledge even if your own life is perfect.

You might find that stoicism is the better approach rather that pure ignorance.

Living in ignorance and seeking to learn nothing is just fueling the dystopian world we're walking into.

The most content people in the world are people who know everything there is to know about physics, philosophy, chemistry etc. That deep knowledge opens their eyes to the big picture.

Ignore the news, but learn everything there is to know about humanity.

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