51–60 of 108 posts
Information and emotion are orthogonal. If you want to connect them you can, but you don't have to. In other words, you can use more or less information to make yourself happier or unhappier. The ability to manage your emotions is different than the ability to process information, but it can be learned just as well, they just don't teach it in school.
Ignorance is bliss
If you are more informed and less happy you aren't doing something right. Information doesn't make you unhappy, you thinking about certain information is making you unhappy. Whilst I've been to college, listen to NPR every day, keep up-to-date on the lastest news in my field via Hacker News and various blogs I can still be happy. I do this in the face of NPR telling me people are dying in Japan from radiation, my cli…
What he observes is that people who are connected to their communities are happier. People who are disconnected (or even dislocated) from their community and obsessed with "stuff" are less likely to be.
The idea that people living in a favela are uninformed demonstrates ignorance in the same way that shouting at people who don't speak English would. They are simply informed about a different set of facts - and in general that set of facts may make their lives richer because it is about people they know - i.e. who their cousin has a crush on rather than the Jonbenet Ramsey's of the world.
I've seen escalator's, but knowing how to find potable water that doesn't come with a monthly bill would make me better informed.
" For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. " - Ecclesiastes 1:18
Side joke: C# in the Nutshell 4.0 is way thicker than the Bible yet the technical book will be outdated soon.
I think it boils down to this: very rarely will you receive just plain vanilla information, if such a thing exists. Almost always the information will be wrapped in some kind of value system. As you absorb the information, you end up taking in the value system as well.
Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do. Same goes for the other channels - military, cooking, whatever. These channels are purveyors of information, sure, but what they're really selling is indoctrination.
That's fine if you understand it. You should be able to compensate (without having fits about "the man" or "the system") After all, why would they spend time sharing information with you that they felt wasn't trendy and something you'd want to emulate? There might be a boring stuff nobody cares about channel, but I've never seen it.
Truly happy people can filter out the value system from the information. They can watch MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. They just compare sources and make their own value decisions.
It's like this guy got halfway to the actual state of things, then just gave up. Yes, if you have no information you have no external values being pimped out to you, but you also are missing a huge amount of learning about your fellow man and other ways of thinking about things. No information means no choices. You don't want that.
Experience and research show that looking at examples of people with "more" (for some definition of "more") and comparing your own lifestyle to that of those people, is a recipe for resentment, envy, and frustration. These emotions tend to work against a person experiencing happiness and inner peace.
On the other hand, looking at what's good in your own life situation - regardless of how it compares to anyone else - and deliberately seeking out opportunities to feel gratitude for those things, this tends to increase subjective well-being.
This habit is simple, but not easy. The challenge is greater with so much media attention on those people who have more than others (Hollywood red carpet, MTV Cribs, Forbes 400, etc). The key to happiness and inner peace is to tune out the noise and focus on specific opportunities to feel grateful within your own life situation.
You can hear all day long about how much money other people make, but if you take it merely as a fact and do not construct a personal identity/story from it ("I am upset because others earn more than me", "Life is unfair" etc.), the information will not affect your happiness at all.
I believe the article is flawed as it seems to require of us to artificially restrict the amount of information we are exposed to, when the key is to manage one's perception of the information.
Seems that many Chinese have developed a strong "Keeping up with the Joneses" mentality lately; I would suspect that is the source of the unhappiness, rather than the wiring in their new homes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is why I LOVE being depressed. I feel like I'm living in reality." That feeling of access to reality isn't unique to depression. You can feel like you're living in reality when you're not depressed. All of the advantages you claim for depression can be had from other emotions, like happiness or enjoyment, with few or none of the disadvantages. Calling your perception reality and someone else's fantasy doesn't m…
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You're not describing depression, you're describing your experience of depression. It's important to keep that in perspective lest other's understanding of the illness be skewed.