8 ms·

A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness

171 points by jtaby 15y ago

spqr 15y ago
Definitely the dumbest article I've ever read on HN. I especially disliked the little math exercise at the end where the first 18-20 years of your life "spent learning" are removed from your total of possible happy time. Don't waste .000041% of your life by reading this post.
doctoboggan 15y ago
I just read a chapter of a Csikszentmihalyi book for my sociology class on creativity, I am currently reading "The Happiness Hypothesis" which just referenced Csikszentmihalyi, and now I read this blog post who quotes Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi must have something important to say.
- clyfe 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
kenrik 15y ago
This reminds me of "Think and Grow Rich" - Best book ever written. I cant even remember how many times I have read it. If I could I would purchase a million copies and give them away for free. It's that good.
- phreanix 15y ago
  It's actually free in the itunes bookstore.
  - MetaMan 15y ago
    can you provide a link. I found 2 books with the same title and neither is free. Thanks
    - phreanix 15y ago
      Apparently the free one is the one for Entrepreneur/Small Biz Owner edition. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-rich/id412247490?mt=11 http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-rich/id412247... Same author tho.
jayferd 15y ago
""" Spending 2 years doing something you don’t enjoy is a full 3.4% of your life. What are you getting back for that investment? Money? What are you going to do with that money that will be worth the non-refundable 3.4% of your life? An extra room in your house?""" This is beautiful. In a world where everything has to be justified by "the bottom line", it's easy to forget why we're making money. Along those lines, I also found "The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" to be very eye-opening. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/8419/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...)
- jtaby 15y ago
  Thanks for the link, glad you enjoyed the blog post!
- gabaix 15y ago
  3.4% of your life is not much if you get Facebook equity and end up with millions. The hardest part - I think - is that you are not assured at all to get rich. You might end up spend 3.4% of your life to buy you a new car and that's it.
  - jayferd 15y ago
    Hm. So say I got Facebook equity and ended up with millions. My question is why? What can I possibly do with that money that will make it worth it?
    - jerf 15y ago
      Not spend the next 34% of your life working on something you don't love, for one. Even in our current technological state, a life of toil on things you don't love is the default state of a human being.
      - techiferous 15y ago
        Or you could learn how to love the things you are already working on. That option is easily overlooked.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
When you stop worrying if you are happy or not, you are probably in the zone.
Rickasaurus 15y ago
Many are willing to suffer unhappiness so that their children might be more successful. At 31 it's something of a pattern I've begun to see in my peers.
- jtaby 15y ago
  I'm starting to realize that those who do what they love find more success than those who do what they "need" to do in the long term. I'm fairly sure that the children would also rather have parents who are having fun and are happy than those that are sad and bored but bring in an extra $20,000 a year. I don't have children though, so I can't really empathize on a deep level, I'm just going by intuition.
  - redschell 15y ago
    It's a fair point, but you need to consider the fact that the extra $20,000 a year could mean the difference between a big college loan and a smaller one (or no loan at all!), and the size of your college loan, which will in time become college debt, can have a profound psychological effect on what you want to do with your life. I'm not sure I'd be confident in a start-up as opposed to a stable job if I had $20,000 more in debt looming over me.
    - Rickasaurus 15y ago
      That's one reason I'm glad I did the community college -> public university transfer route. My years in community college were about 5K each, and my public university were more like 15K. I was able to pay it all off in about three years after getting out by just sticking with the college lifestyle while I worked.
- mdoerneman 15y ago
  Many may not be truly happy with what they are doing but they are not willing to risk the well being of their family in order to seek what truly makes them happy.
simon_weber 15y ago
"My identity and my thoughts are my own to have, control, and share. Happiness is a mindset for me to create." This concept reminds me of Feeling Good by Burns. He said that our thoughts control our emotions, and if we control our thoughts, we control our emotions.
ilaksh 15y ago
Both the Jobs quote and the Csikszentmihalyi quote are stimulating and useful perspectives on the same general topic, but Taby seems to be thinking rather fuzzily by relating the quotes and ideas so closely. Csikszentmihalyi is saying that happiness is an inner, private cultivation that is not dependent on outside events. However, Steve Jobs, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet (while he was alive), says he has been having his own way every day for 30 years. Jobs literally had the means to do just what he wanted to do each day for many years. The first idea is about being happy regardless of your circumstances. The second idea is about being happy because you figured out how to get what you want out of other people and insisted on it. And actually I don't see the other quote as being nearly as closely related as he thinks either. That one sounded like dying people were just admitting that they were depressed and wished they had tried harder to make more friends in their senior years. What I've heard is that genetic bio- and neuro- chemistry play a significant role in happiness, so you have to realistically incorporate that. However, obviously the core conception of the self's orientation towards the world must be partially learned and so training can affect contentment also. Studies have also shown that the higher one is on the social ladder, the less stress one experiences. So climbing the social ladder will lead to less stress and therefore greater happiness. And most people would agree that having friends is key to happiness also.
- jtaby 15y ago
  Csikszentmihalyi is saying that Happiness is a self-made choice. The quote from the dying people supported and added context to the same idea. The Steve Jobs quote is probably the most unrelated, you're right. I included it because I felt that it gave a good practical example of what it means to introspect, judge, and measure your own fulfillment. The overarching idea I'm trying to get across is to drop the social pressure to "keep your head down, don't make a lot of noise, and you'll get your paycheck every two weeks".
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  I agree on the Steve Jobs quote."Live everyday as if it was your last".. ok.. but what if I'm stuck with debt, have to work a dead end job to support my family? What if I can't? I'm doing it wrong? I have to be disgruntled about it? It's easy as heck to live everyday as if it was your last once you have the freedom.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand yourself and the world around you. The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoyed, Etc.) The weird thing is that if you look deeply at the feeling of feeling bad, its feeling bad that you feel good about something that someone else things you should feel bad about. How twisted is that? If you can change 'feeling bad' to feeling empathy for the person who doesn't understand how cool this thing is that you enjoy so much, you both don't lose your happiness, and you have a way to contextualize the other persons opinions that don't put your happiness at risk. That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are. But I read a great article in Reader's Digest about a guy who was being rushed to the emergency room for a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Along the way a nurse was taking a medical history and she asked 'Allergies?'. His response was "Lead apparently, I got some in my shoulder and it hurts like hell!" Here is a guy going into emergency surgery cracking jokes, he has chosen not to be negative or angry, he has chosen to be happy. That really struck me, I don't think I could be so charitable after being shot.
- jtaby 15y ago
  Your point about kids made me think of this story (Found out about it through The Talent Code) > http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  Well there's stoicism or buddhism and the realisation that you can control your reaction to events. And then there's clinical depression, where you realise this but the effort to think about trying is enough to make you want to cry. I don't want to undercut the self-governance model because it can make someone a better person. But it has boundaries.
- ilaksh 15y ago
  No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds. Our natural emotional reactions to our circumstances are there to provide a corrective feedback system. The fact that this type of perspective is still so popular just means that civilization has a long way to go towards making daily life more tolerable for average people.
joelrunyon 15y ago
Left my job 6 months after coming in, because of this mindset. Couldn't imagine, spending any more time working in an environment I didn't want to be in.
PabloOsinaga 15y ago
I want to share something that really impacted me in a big way, related to this notions being discussed here. It was something I saw in a museum in New York state, about 1 hour north of New York City - I cant remember the name of the museum or the artist or the piece. It was, literally, a matrix, where every point was a day in your life. The shocking thing about it was that you could see it in its entirety pretty well. To my surprise, it was not a HUGE matrix, but rather a pretty small one - that you could see quite clearly both holistically, and every individual cell. I tried to reproduce it in this excel spreadsheet. It is very shocking to see your life in such a way. It is scary. There are not that many cells! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22472889/yourlife.xlsx http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22472889/yourlife.xlsx
- splat 15y ago
  That sounds similar to this Abstruse Goose cartoon: http://abstrusegoose.com/51 http://abstrusegoose.com/51
  - hartzler 15y ago
    After I saw that comic I made: http://936months.appspot.com http://936months.appspot.com Really is amazing to see your life in dots.
    - nileshtrivedi 15y ago
      After I saw the comic and your site above, I made this: http://936months.staticloud.com/ http://936months.staticloud.com/ A months seems like a perfect unit of time to plan your life in.
      - hartzler 15y ago
        Very cool! The drop down for year/month is way better.
villagefool 15y ago
When you have a new child on the way, an extra room in the house could be a hell of a difference for more then 2 years of your life... is this advice realistic for people who need to support a family?
- spqr 15y ago
  It's advice from 20 year olds that think they know everything and that these "epiphanies" regarding happiness are really going to impact their lives.
scoofy 15y ago
I'm sorry, but i find this 'solution' to happiness rather myopic. I'm not saying it can't be helpful (it probably is), but doubt it's a cure. Now, generally speaking, for those of us that are well educated, entirely employable and rather wealthy in monetary terms and generally freedom, then achieving success seems to be up to us. I'd contend that happiness is most easily manifested in societally recognized success (thus, hard work + luck). In other words i'd contend happiness is easily derived for 'being respected'. If not achieved through work and good fortune, i'd say happiness can still be achieved with constant vigilance against some shitty cultural norms we hold as a society. Frankly, the illusion of control is astounding in wealthy countries, and so is constant marketing, that buying shit will make you happy or attractive, or that some product will give you some idealized life that is paraded in front of you every day on television (or the internet). I'd contend that many people are affected by these fake, shitty messages. Is it perfectly admirable to try and try and try and fail consistently throughout your life? Absolutely. Why should we look to the successful for advice on happiness? Probably the last place to look, survivorship bias will ruin any results. We can't all be popular published authors or start apple computers. I'm a Dvorak typist (*ducks), so i like to reference August Dvorak on the subject of failure. This guy dedicated his life to improving society, for both regular typists and notably, amputees, yet was stymied at every turn by something as simple as a coordination problem. I think it would be very difficult for someone with a life like his to not be entirely jaded at such unprecedented failure, even when you know what you are doing makes sense. Can you be jaded and happy? Well, maybe, this would cause a debate on what we mean by 'happiness', which is de facto the entire argument here. I would contend that it's difficult. Would ideas like Csikszentmihalyi's help? Probably, but i'd be very skeptical to look at them as actual solutions. Sometimes people fail, and it's okay to fail if you tried your best, and i don't mean that in the 'keep failing until you (obviously eventually) succeed' way. I mean really fail. Until that is mentally acceptable, which is really freaking hard to maintain in our society, then i think some people are going to be continuously frustrated and perpetually unhappy, and i don't think 'convince yourself to be happy' is an acceptable prescription. Again, while i think it will help, it's a rough world out there, and it's hard to maintain the mental composure suggested here in the face of real tragedy.
adrianscott 15y ago
Great sentiments. I would question this part though: "A final thought: On average, you have 78 years total to live." That is based on questionable assumptions imho, that there are not going to be dramatic increases in life expectancy within one's lifetime. Perhaps we should be thinking more long-term than we are... ;)
jhancock 15y ago
Many years ago someone gave me a self help tape..yeah a cassette ;). The only thing I recall is the speaker telling a story about him being woken up early in the morning by his father to go work on the family farm. As a boy, he would sometimes wake up groggy and grumpy, unhappy about milking the cows pre-dawn. His father would say to him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad day?" Now, I'm a father. My son has an easy life. No real responsibilities. But he has his moments of wanting to express his profound unhappiness with what the day holds for him. So I ask him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad day?" He tells me he wants to have a good day. I tell him that we have things to do and it may not be what he thinks he wants, but he can choose if he wants to be happy. This works surprising well on a four year old. He is almost seven now and I rarely have to remind him of this choice anymore.
sklipo 15y ago
I've been through a process of changing my emotional reactions, and I think my experiences are interesting enough to share. Just to situate you, I'm in secondary 5 (I'm 16), and back when I was in elementary school, I was super shy (I rarely ever said a word, and I hated talking because I would always notice some imperfection in what I would say which would make me feel stupid), and I was quite empathic (if another kid would cry, so would I). Also, I'm much happier now than back in elementary school. In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change. The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6. I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit waterry, and it would make me gulp. Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things, like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that.
SteveJS 15y ago
This is one of the founding ideas behind Positive psychology. Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great background.) Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most any common day issues into stark perspective.
yelsgib 15y ago
I guess this comment is going to be pretty unpopular, given the comments that most have left before it, but I find this post creepy in the extreme. For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault" is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most exciting times/places ever. For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration, comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner. Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time - feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic. I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes. The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail. PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out! Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.
- sklipo 15y ago
  I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I also mostly agree with what the post is saying. The point is that you can learn to control your reactions to things, and it's a good thing. I used to be extremely stressed out by any social situation. I eventually stopped being so through lots of practice at controlling myself and telling myself "who cares what other people think of me?". And I'm all the better for it. I also have learned to ignore insults and failure (well, ignore them emotionally, though I still try to analyze them rationally), because they give negative emotions that I don't enjoy. However, I still feel nostalgia when I realize "oh shit, that happened seven years ago?!!", and I still feel a rush of excitement when I succeed at getting everything done in a limited amount of time. Also, the fact that I'm a tiny speck in the universe is the reason I focus on myself. If nothing really matters, you get to choose what does. And I choose myself.
arocks 15y ago
So the concept of selfless Karma has been rediscovered?
cookingrobot 15y ago
I like the sentiment and intention of this post, but I don't agree with it. Good for you for trying to look at the bigger patterns in your life and really be deliberate about approaching things the right way. But I don't believe the answer is to disconnect the inner and outer world and be happy no matter what. The whole point of living is to be a part of things. The right approach is to improve or change your environment until you can live well inside it. Since we're quoting books, I recently found a passage that says this well. From The Timeless Way of Building by Alexander: This state cannot be reached merely by inner work. There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by "others". But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings. The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.
- danparsonson 15y ago
  >...his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings That's how I read the parent article though - not that you should float around in a happy bubble, oblivious to the outer world, but rather that you should 'greet each new day with a smile'; that is, good and bad stuff will happen regardless of what you do, but your reaction to it is what determines how you feel about it. This is not to say that the individual is completely self-sufficient, but rather that one can strive to maintain ones mental balance regardless of what's going on.
- mluiten 15y ago
  I think this is entirely the point: How do you improve or change your environment so that it 'fits' you? What does fit you? I hear many people say a certain level of salary would make them happy. Or that sportscar they always dreamt of. Just 5 more years of climbing the corporate ladder and then it's all wonderful from there. However, when you talk to them 5-10 years later, when some of them achieved those goals, they still do not seem to 'fit'; they have bigger and better goals now. Once they achieve those, they will be truly happy! It's a rat race. My opinion, and since adopting it I see it everywhere, is that the outer does not change the inner, but rather it is the inner that changes the outer. Take, for example, this part of Jobs' famous Stanford Commencement Address: "[After being fired from Apple] I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." Notice what changes first; he did not start working on Pixar and NEXT from his feeling of failure nor from a need to change his environment to get his brainchild back. He changed his inner mental state first to accept reality, figure what is truly important, and follow his heart. The environment changed as a result. Once he saw the pure crushing failure of being fired from his own creation, as an positive opportunity to pursue the things he loved to do, it opened new paths unimagined by his negative self. The inner changed the outer. Happy, for me, is a deep sense of belonging. It's about acceptance, perspective, creativity and finding interest and passion. The inside and outside will never disconnect; it's life, the one cannot exist without the other.
nodata 15y ago
A very positive article - but. I know people who pursue happiness above everything else. They are in debt and in denial. Somebody will come and bail them out, hopefully. Cover your costs first. With the rest of your time, pursue happiness.
chubs 15y ago
What a weird coincidence. This morning I was feeling inspired and wrote a blog on the exact same topic. Would it be spammy to put a link here? Anyway i love this kind of thinking, it really has helped my marriage a lot.
chandana 15y ago
I've read 'Finding Flow' By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Its the one book one must read to develop an attitude of not complaining about circumstances and of finding happiness no matter what.
lhnz 15y ago
There is a lot of good to be said about having a strong internal locus of control, yet a lot of what people were saying in this thread seems a little like self-deception: you can't always be positive about everything. You can try and be happy and you can help this by following stoic principles like negative visualisation, reducing your desires and keeping internal goals instead of externals ones. But this doesn't seem right. Your life is a story and it will have troughs as well as peaks. It's more honest to accept this and learn to experience everything that it offers fully. If somebody you love dies you should feel sad, and maybe you'll cry. There's nothing wrong with this. I think there is great strength in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and accepting things as they happen. Do whatever you can to make life enjoyable for yourself but you're going to have to give a little!

171 points by jtaby 15y ago

spqr 15y ago

Definitely the dumbest article I've ever read on HN. I especially disliked the little math exercise at the end where the first 18-20 years of your life "spent learning" are removed from your total of possible happy time. Don't waste .000041% of your life by reading this post.

doctoboggan 15y ago

I just read a chapter of a Csikszentmihalyi book for my sociology class on creativity, I am currently reading "The Happiness Hypothesis" which just referenced Csikszentmihalyi, and now I read this blog post who quotes Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi must have something important to say.

clyfe 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

kenrik 15y ago

This reminds me of "Think and Grow Rich" - Best book ever written. I cant even remember how many times I have read it. If I could I would purchase a million copies and give them away for free. It's that good.

phreanix 15y ago
It's actually free in the itunes bookstore.
- MetaMan 15y ago
  can you provide a link. I found 2 books with the same title and neither is free. Thanks
  - phreanix 15y ago
    Apparently the free one is the one for Entrepreneur/Small Biz Owner edition. http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-rich/id412247490?mt=11 http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-rich/id412247... Same author tho.

jayferd 15y ago

""" Spending 2 years doing something you don’t enjoy is a full 3.4% of your life. What are you getting back for that investment? Money? What are you going to do with that money that will be worth the non-refundable 3.4% of your life? An extra room in your house?""" This is beautiful. In a world where everything has to be justified by "the bottom line", it's easy to forget why we're making money. Along those lines, I also found "The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" to be very eye-opening. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/8419/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...)

jtaby 15y ago
Thanks for the link, glad you enjoyed the blog post!
gabaix 15y ago
3.4% of your life is not much if you get Facebook equity and end up with millions. The hardest part - I think - is that you are not assured at all to get rich. You might end up spend 3.4% of your life to buy you a new car and that's it.
- jayferd 15y ago
  Hm. So say I got Facebook equity and ended up with millions. My question is why? What can I possibly do with that money that will make it worth it?
  - jerf 15y ago
    Not spend the next 34% of your life working on something you don't love, for one. Even in our current technological state, a life of toil on things you don't love is the default state of a human being.
    - techiferous 15y ago
      Or you could learn how to love the things you are already working on. That option is easily overlooked.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

When you stop worrying if you are happy or not, you are probably in the zone.

Rickasaurus 15y ago

Many are willing to suffer unhappiness so that their children might be more successful. At 31 it's something of a pattern I've begun to see in my peers.

jtaby 15y ago
I'm starting to realize that those who do what they love find more success than those who do what they "need" to do in the long term. I'm fairly sure that the children would also rather have parents who are having fun and are happy than those that are sad and bored but bring in an extra $20,000 a year. I don't have children though, so I can't really empathize on a deep level, I'm just going by intuition.
- redschell 15y ago
  It's a fair point, but you need to consider the fact that the extra $20,000 a year could mean the difference between a big college loan and a smaller one (or no loan at all!), and the size of your college loan, which will in time become college debt, can have a profound psychological effect on what you want to do with your life. I'm not sure I'd be confident in a start-up as opposed to a stable job if I had $20,000 more in debt looming over me.
  - Rickasaurus 15y ago
    That's one reason I'm glad I did the community college -> public university transfer route. My years in community college were about 5K each, and my public university were more like 15K. I was able to pay it all off in about three years after getting out by just sticking with the college lifestyle while I worked.
mdoerneman 15y ago
Many may not be truly happy with what they are doing but they are not willing to risk the well being of their family in order to seek what truly makes them happy.

simon_weber 15y ago

"My identity and my thoughts are my own to have, control, and share. Happiness is a mindset for me to create." This concept reminds me of Feeling Good by Burns. He said that our thoughts control our emotions, and if we control our thoughts, we control our emotions.

ilaksh 15y ago

Both the Jobs quote and the Csikszentmihalyi quote are stimulating and useful perspectives on the same general topic, but Taby seems to be thinking rather fuzzily by relating the quotes and ideas so closely. Csikszentmihalyi is saying that happiness is an inner, private cultivation that is not dependent on outside events. However, Steve Jobs, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet (while he was alive), says he has been having his own way every day for 30 years. Jobs literally had the means to do just what he wanted to do each day for many years. The first idea is about being happy regardless of your circumstances. The second idea is about being happy because you figured out how to get what you want out of other people and insisted on it. And actually I don't see the other quote as being nearly as closely related as he thinks either. That one sounded like dying people were just admitting that they were depressed and wished they had tried harder to make more friends in their senior years. What I've heard is that genetic bio- and neuro- chemistry play a significant role in happiness, so you have to realistically incorporate that. However, obviously the core conception of the self's orientation towards the world must be partially learned and so training can affect contentment also. Studies have also shown that the higher one is on the social ladder, the less stress one experiences. So climbing the social ladder will lead to less stress and therefore greater happiness. And most people would agree that having friends is key to happiness also.

jtaby 15y ago
Csikszentmihalyi is saying that Happiness is a self-made choice. The quote from the dying people supported and added context to the same idea. The Steve Jobs quote is probably the most unrelated, you're right. I included it because I felt that it gave a good practical example of what it means to introspect, judge, and measure your own fulfillment. The overarching idea I'm trying to get across is to drop the social pressure to "keep your head down, don't make a lot of noise, and you'll get your paycheck every two weeks".
AznHisoka 15y ago
I agree on the Steve Jobs quote."Live everyday as if it was your last".. ok.. but what if I'm stuck with debt, have to work a dead end job to support my family? What if I can't? I'm doing it wrong? I have to be disgruntled about it? It's easy as heck to live everyday as if it was your last once you have the freedom.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand yourself and the world around you. The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoyed, Etc.) The weird thing is that if you look deeply at the feeling of feeling bad, its feeling bad that you feel good about something that someone else things you should feel bad about. How twisted is that? If you can change 'feeling bad' to feeling empathy for the person who doesn't understand how cool this thing is that you enjoy so much, you both don't lose your happiness, and you have a way to contextualize the other persons opinions that don't put your happiness at risk. That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are. But I read a great article in Reader's Digest about a guy who was being rushed to the emergency room for a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Along the way a nurse was taking a medical history and she asked 'Allergies?'. His response was "Lead apparently, I got some in my shoulder and it hurts like hell!" Here is a guy going into emergency surgery cracking jokes, he has chosen not to be negative or angry, he has chosen to be happy. That really struck me, I don't think I could be so charitable after being shot.

jtaby 15y ago
Your point about kids made me think of this story (Found out about it through The Talent Code) > http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html
jacques_chester 15y ago
Well there's stoicism or buddhism and the realisation that you can control your reaction to events. And then there's clinical depression, where you realise this but the effort to think about trying is enough to make you want to cry. I don't want to undercut the self-governance model because it can make someone a better person. But it has boundaries.
ilaksh 15y ago
No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad. When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends. We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds. Our natural emotional reactions to our circumstances are there to provide a corrective feedback system. The fact that this type of perspective is still so popular just means that civilization has a long way to go towards making daily life more tolerable for average people.

joelrunyon 15y ago

Left my job 6 months after coming in, because of this mindset. Couldn't imagine, spending any more time working in an environment I didn't want to be in.

PabloOsinaga 15y ago

I want to share something that really impacted me in a big way, related to this notions being discussed here. It was something I saw in a museum in New York state, about 1 hour north of New York City - I cant remember the name of the museum or the artist or the piece. It was, literally, a matrix, where every point was a day in your life. The shocking thing about it was that you could see it in its entirety pretty well. To my surprise, it was not a HUGE matrix, but rather a pretty small one - that you could see quite clearly both holistically, and every individual cell. I tried to reproduce it in this excel spreadsheet. It is very shocking to see your life in such a way. It is scary. There are not that many cells! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22472889/yourlife.xlsx http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22472889/yourlife.xlsx

splat 15y ago
That sounds similar to this Abstruse Goose cartoon: http://abstrusegoose.com/51 http://abstrusegoose.com/51
- hartzler 15y ago
  After I saw that comic I made: http://936months.appspot.com http://936months.appspot.com Really is amazing to see your life in dots.
  - nileshtrivedi 15y ago
    After I saw the comic and your site above, I made this: http://936months.staticloud.com/ http://936months.staticloud.com/ A months seems like a perfect unit of time to plan your life in.
    - hartzler 15y ago
      Very cool! The drop down for year/month is way better.

villagefool 15y ago

When you have a new child on the way, an extra room in the house could be a hell of a difference for more then 2 years of your life... is this advice realistic for people who need to support a family?

spqr 15y ago
It's advice from 20 year olds that think they know everything and that these "epiphanies" regarding happiness are really going to impact their lives.

scoofy 15y ago

I'm sorry, but i find this 'solution' to happiness rather myopic. I'm not saying it can't be helpful (it probably is), but doubt it's a cure. Now, generally speaking, for those of us that are well educated, entirely employable and rather wealthy in monetary terms and generally freedom, then achieving success seems to be up to us. I'd contend that happiness is most easily manifested in societally recognized success (thus, hard work + luck). In other words i'd contend happiness is easily derived for 'being respected'. If not achieved through work and good fortune, i'd say happiness can still be achieved with constant vigilance against some shitty cultural norms we hold as a society. Frankly, the illusion of control is astounding in wealthy countries, and so is constant marketing, that buying shit will make you happy or attractive, or that some product will give you some idealized life that is paraded in front of you every day on television (or the internet). I'd contend that many people are affected by these fake, shitty messages. Is it perfectly admirable to try and try and try and fail consistently throughout your life? Absolutely. Why should we look to the successful for advice on happiness? Probably the last place to look, survivorship bias will ruin any results. We can't all be popular published authors or start apple computers. I'm a Dvorak typist (*ducks), so i like to reference August Dvorak on the subject of failure. This guy dedicated his life to improving society, for both regular typists and notably, amputees, yet was stymied at every turn by something as simple as a coordination problem. I think it would be very difficult for someone with a life like his to not be entirely jaded at such unprecedented failure, even when you know what you are doing makes sense. Can you be jaded and happy? Well, maybe, this would cause a debate on what we mean by 'happiness', which is de facto the entire argument here. I would contend that it's difficult. Would ideas like Csikszentmihalyi's help? Probably, but i'd be very skeptical to look at them as actual solutions. Sometimes people fail, and it's okay to fail if you tried your best, and i don't mean that in the 'keep failing until you (obviously eventually) succeed' way. I mean really fail. Until that is mentally acceptable, which is really freaking hard to maintain in our society, then i think some people are going to be continuously frustrated and perpetually unhappy, and i don't think 'convince yourself to be happy' is an acceptable prescription. Again, while i think it will help, it's a rough world out there, and it's hard to maintain the mental composure suggested here in the face of real tragedy.

adrianscott 15y ago

Great sentiments. I would question this part though: "A final thought: On average, you have 78 years total to live." That is based on questionable assumptions imho, that there are not going to be dramatic increases in life expectancy within one's lifetime. Perhaps we should be thinking more long-term than we are... ;)

jhancock 15y ago

Many years ago someone gave me a self help tape..yeah a cassette ;). The only thing I recall is the speaker telling a story about him being woken up early in the morning by his father to go work on the family farm. As a boy, he would sometimes wake up groggy and grumpy, unhappy about milking the cows pre-dawn. His father would say to him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad day?" Now, I'm a father. My son has an easy life. No real responsibilities. But he has his moments of wanting to express his profound unhappiness with what the day holds for him. So I ask him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad day?" He tells me he wants to have a good day. I tell him that we have things to do and it may not be what he thinks he wants, but he can choose if he wants to be happy. This works surprising well on a four year old. He is almost seven now and I rarely have to remind him of this choice anymore.

sklipo 15y ago

I've been through a process of changing my emotional reactions, and I think my experiences are interesting enough to share. Just to situate you, I'm in secondary 5 (I'm 16), and back when I was in elementary school, I was super shy (I rarely ever said a word, and I hated talking because I would always notice some imperfection in what I would say which would make me feel stupid), and I was quite empathic (if another kid would cry, so would I). Also, I'm much happier now than back in elementary school. In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change. The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6. I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit waterry, and it would make me gulp. Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things, like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that.

SteveJS 15y ago

This is one of the founding ideas behind Positive psychology. Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great background.) Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most any common day issues into stark perspective.

yelsgib 15y ago

I guess this comment is going to be pretty unpopular, given the comments that most have left before it, but I find this post creepy in the extreme. For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault" is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most exciting times/places ever. For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration, comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner. Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time - feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic. I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes. The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail. PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out! Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.

sklipo 15y ago
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I also mostly agree with what the post is saying. The point is that you can learn to control your reactions to things, and it's a good thing. I used to be extremely stressed out by any social situation. I eventually stopped being so through lots of practice at controlling myself and telling myself "who cares what other people think of me?". And I'm all the better for it. I also have learned to ignore insults and failure (well, ignore them emotionally, though I still try to analyze them rationally), because they give negative emotions that I don't enjoy. However, I still feel nostalgia when I realize "oh shit, that happened seven years ago?!!", and I still feel a rush of excitement when I succeed at getting everything done in a limited amount of time. Also, the fact that I'm a tiny speck in the universe is the reason I focus on myself. If nothing really matters, you get to choose what does. And I choose myself.

arocks 15y ago

So the concept of selfless Karma has been rediscovered?

cookingrobot 15y ago

I like the sentiment and intention of this post, but I don't agree with it. Good for you for trying to look at the bigger patterns in your life and really be deliberate about approaching things the right way. But I don't believe the answer is to disconnect the inner and outer world and be happy no matter what. The whole point of living is to be a part of things. The right approach is to improve or change your environment until you can live well inside it. Since we're quoting books, I recently found a passage that says this well. From The Timeless Way of Building by Alexander: This state cannot be reached merely by inner work. There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by "others". But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings. The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

danparsonson 15y ago
>...his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings That's how I read the parent article though - not that you should float around in a happy bubble, oblivious to the outer world, but rather that you should 'greet each new day with a smile'; that is, good and bad stuff will happen regardless of what you do, but your reaction to it is what determines how you feel about it. This is not to say that the individual is completely self-sufficient, but rather that one can strive to maintain ones mental balance regardless of what's going on.
mluiten 15y ago
I think this is entirely the point: How do you improve or change your environment so that it 'fits' you? What does fit you? I hear many people say a certain level of salary would make them happy. Or that sportscar they always dreamt of. Just 5 more years of climbing the corporate ladder and then it's all wonderful from there. However, when you talk to them 5-10 years later, when some of them achieved those goals, they still do not seem to 'fit'; they have bigger and better goals now. Once they achieve those, they will be truly happy! It's a rat race. My opinion, and since adopting it I see it everywhere, is that the outer does not change the inner, but rather it is the inner that changes the outer. Take, for example, this part of Jobs' famous Stanford Commencement Address: "[After being fired from Apple] I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." Notice what changes first; he did not start working on Pixar and NEXT from his feeling of failure nor from a need to change his environment to get his brainchild back. He changed his inner mental state first to accept reality, figure what is truly important, and follow his heart. The environment changed as a result. Once he saw the pure crushing failure of being fired from his own creation, as an positive opportunity to pursue the things he loved to do, it opened new paths unimagined by his negative self. The inner changed the outer. Happy, for me, is a deep sense of belonging. It's about acceptance, perspective, creativity and finding interest and passion. The inside and outside will never disconnect; it's life, the one cannot exist without the other.

nodata 15y ago

A very positive article - but. I know people who pursue happiness above everything else. They are in debt and in denial. Somebody will come and bail them out, hopefully. Cover your costs first. With the rest of your time, pursue happiness.

chubs 15y ago

What a weird coincidence. This morning I was feeling inspired and wrote a blog on the exact same topic. Would it be spammy to put a link here? Anyway i love this kind of thinking, it really has helped my marriage a lot.

chandana 15y ago

I've read 'Finding Flow' By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Its the one book one must read to develop an attitude of not complaining about circumstances and of finding happiness no matter what.

lhnz 15y ago

There is a lot of good to be said about having a strong internal locus of control, yet a lot of what people were saying in this thread seems a little like self-deception: you can't always be positive about everything. You can try and be happy and you can help this by following stoic principles like negative visualisation, reducing your desires and keeping internal goals instead of externals ones. But this doesn't seem right. Your life is a story and it will have troughs as well as peaks. It's more honest to accept this and learn to experience everything that it offers fully. If somebody you love dies you should feel sad, and maybe you'll cry. There's nothing wrong with this. I think there is great strength in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and accepting things as they happen. Do whatever you can to make life enjoyable for yourself but you're going to have to give a little!