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

Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

hintjens.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 171 posts

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#71

Post by globular-toast »

I agree with all of the points, apart from one:

> Do things you are bad at

I would actually offer the opposite advice: do things you are good at. The world today is full of "anyone can do anything" and awards for participation etc. But nothing feels better than being good at what you do. I attribute a large amount of my happiness to doing a job that I'm actually good at. I'm better than 99% of people at doing what I do. I don't feel like I'm struggling. I don't feel like I'm inadequate. I feel like I'm useful. I feel appreciated and respected.

I'm all for continual learning and pushing one's boundaries, but start by finding what you are good at. Otherwise you're forever going to feel mediocre and out of your depth.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#73

Post by gonehome »

BasDirks wrote: post #27

I don't like his proposed end goal. His happiness sounds like a mere absense of pain, but other methods will get you there more reliably. I like the first items on his list: go into the world and mess around, but then he begins to prescribe mental cleanliness: finish your plate, associate only with good people, don't cling to material possessions. It's like he's picking arbitrary chapters from Hesse's Siddhartha. I f…

He was dying as he wrote this (Pieter Hintjens died from cancer in 2016). I’m happy to see his blog here again, but I suspect what he was going through at the time influenced his writing.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#74

Post by MauranKilom »

I personally subscribe to the advice given in The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck: You only get to choose your struggles in life. Happiness is the transient feeling in having dealt with a problem. You'll never run out of problems to deal with, therefore, the one thing to care about is what problems you end up engaging with (i.e. "give a f*ck about").

To that end, the ten items presented in the article are decent pointers towards "good" problems you might want to have (and which "bad" problems you'd want to avoid). It's part framing and part steering your life circumstances.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#75

Post by Communitivity »

dandanua wrote: post #35
drclau wrote: post #14

Every time I hear or read about happiness, I remember this quote from Thomas Metzinger. I hope you’ll find it useful, too: “Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill t…

> happiness was never an end in itself It's even worse than that. From an evolutionary point of view happiness is a dead end . There is no reason to evolve if you are happy.

You can evolve to bring happiness to others.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#76

Post by heywherelogingo »

One step toward happiness: dismiss these articles. My default browser page shows these endlessly - how to happy, how to worry less, how to live longer, how to get over this, how to embrace that, ... nine times out of ten highly uninformative, targeting every possible little concern or fear, an incessant bombardment of anxiety media. I immediately dismiss all anxiety media.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#77

Post by Communitivity »

The man is still a beacon, after dying in 2016, as an engineer and as a person. He wasn't perfect, but he is responsible for a number of things. He co-founded ZeroMQ, created AMQP, was CEO of Wikidot, helped create RestMS and wrote many insightful and illuminating articles, especially on living well and dying well. Every once in a while I find something he wrote that I haven't seen and save it. This is one of those.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#78

Post by bserge »

Communitivity wrote: post #75
dandanua wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> happiness was never an end in itself It's even worse than that. From an evolutionary point of view happiness is a dead end . There is no reason to evolve if you are happy.

You can evolve to bring happiness to others.

Everyone else talking about having kids is doing this. Helping others brings a sort of happiness that can't be experienced any other way.

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#79

Post by JKCalhoun »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #76

One step toward happiness: dismiss these articles. My default browser page shows these endlessly - how to happy, how to worry less, how to live longer, how to get over this, how to embrace that, ... nine times out of ten highly uninformative, targeting every possible little concern or fear, an incessant bombardment of anxiety media. I immediately dismiss all anxiety media.

I should have thought these were anti-anxiety media but perhaps not for everyone.

I enjoy these reminders about what is important in life and find I agree with their tenets (just unable to put them into practice to the degree I would like).

Re: Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

#80

Post by JKCalhoun »

virtualritz wrote: post #12

'Commute less' should be taken with a grain of salt unless one talks about cars. Any form of transport I take where I am not driving the vehicle myself gives me time to read, relax, think – even meditate (trains are great for this). I know for a fact that I read most books/month in my life in times I had a job that included at least 20 mins of commute (one way) on public transport.

I have found that having more free time does not necessarily allow me to be more productive. Productivity, creative pursuits, still require down-time, pauses between creative activities where, like dreaming, you can process and consider your next steps.

Commuting, walking, can be those break times between productive bursts.

Post reply on HN