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Habits of Highly Miserable People

603 points by gscott 8y ago

cheshire_cat 8y ago
This reminds me of the great book "The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious" [0] by the Austrian-American psychologist Paul Watzlawick. Excellent use of reverse psychology, let's you realize how many of those approaches you tend to use in your daily life. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Hopeless-Serious-Pursuit-Unhappiness/dp/0393310213 https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Hopeless-Serious-Pursuit-Un...
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
  I liked How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use. Which also helped with showing underrated strategies for upping happiness. https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Miserable-Strategies-Already/dp/1626254060 https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Miserable-Strategies-Already/d...
  - lbrtfxcug 8y ago
    What's the point of posting a link to Amazon? Why are you doing free marketing for them? You told us the name of the book, if I'm interested I know how to search. I find this incredibly depressing.
- narag 8y ago
  I've been unsuccessfully trying for a couple of minutes to identify the movie where I first heard the joke of the title.
strict9 8y ago
>Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss. I've always made a mental connection between permabears/zerohedge readers as likely miserable and unhappy people. The wild conspiracy theories and general hatred of certain groups in comment sections doesn't help, but noticed online and in person that people who are always predicting/worrying about the next catastrophe (financial or otherwise) generally lead unhappy lives.
- beat 8y ago
  Historically, the market has been great across the board for as long as most people have been alive (do you know anyone who was alive during the Great Depression and is alive today?). But doom-and-gloom negativity about the economy is a great marketing approach. It hits some button people have, gets them to buy gold or whatever other paranoid nonsense will save them from the Coming Economic Collapse.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Hits a button that some people have... most people don't appear to have that particular button.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    I know where you're coming from, but here in the states a lot of real people are struggling to afford real goods and services that they need to stay alive: housing, healthcare, education, etc. I wouldn't say economic anxiety is just 'nonsense fueled by conspiracy theorists.'
    - beat 8y ago
      I'm not saying economic anxiety is nonsense. I'm saying scenarios of imminent collapse of the economy are nonsense.
- narag 8y ago
  There is this hypothesis in psychology, depressive realism, that says that depressed persons see reality more clearly but this better vision isn't an advantage, on the contrary it's useless.
huangc10 8y ago
> 12. Glorify or vilify the past. Do not do this. Do not live in the past. Do not think about what might, what could, what should have happened. Learn from it and move onwards. Nothing good comes from constantly dwelling on things that can't be changed.
- bowmessage 8y ago
  That's the whole point of the article... don't do any of these things!
- mwaitjmp 8y ago
  Nostalgia isn't all bad...in fact it's believed to improve your mood.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Yeah, for a short moment. Longer tern it likely leads to not appreciating the present.
    - ljm 8y ago
      Comparing your past self to your present self can be extremely destructive if you think you were in a better place then than you are now. Maybe sometimes it’s abjectly true - you became homeless and in the past you weren’t so it was better back then. In a lot of cases you’re probably looking back on a high moment while in the middle of a low moment. Either way, the comparison does far more harm than good and it might well hold you back.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Haha, this has to be high satire. I am thrilled to read it.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  Goes to identity. Telling people not to do this is pointless unless you can suggest another way to construct identity. A person without a past is... an interesting thought experiment, but not something that exists in the real world. Identity builds up in layers -- what is your nation, your religion, your favorite team, your hometown, your college, your spouse, your child. If you give all of that up, then who are you? What are your goals? What do you believe in? What are you willing to fight for? What gives life meaning? A better bit of advice is "avoid ruminating" and this applies to every thought, not just the ones that involve the past. But even that is not easy, especially for those who create things, since to create something you have to ruminate on it heavily, for months or years -- this is probably why there is an overlap between depression and creativity.
maerF0x0 8y ago
>Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter. really roughly this is what stoics do, yet somehow they come to the conclusion "actually, what was i fearing? Proceed with adventure"...
- konschubert 8y ago
  I think people are just different. To some, thinking through the worst case scenario is a way to face and overcome their fears. To others, it's a way of instilling fears.
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    I think the idea behind the exercise, from a Stoicism standpoint, is to mentally expose yourself to the fear of being homeless (or whatever about the exercise creates anxiety for you). Eventually you desensitize yourself to that feeling and begin to realize it wouldn't be as bad as you think. This is also an aspect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
    - selestify 8y ago
      Umm... seeing how the homeless live, it really would be as bad as I think. Probably even worse, since I don't see all of it.
      - Fricken 8y ago
        Most homeless people are suffering from a cocktail of problems with abuse, mental illness and drugs. If you woke one one morning to find yourself on the street with ragged clothes and empty pockets in a foreign city, but you still had your wits about you, you likely wouldn't be there for long.
        vkou 8y ago
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s-shellfish 8y ago
More people in the field of mental health should have a sense of humor like this.
asdsa5325 8y ago
It seems like many people in this thread missed the sarcastic tone of the article...
- mirimir 8y ago
  Well, I just about stopped reading at > Let’s exclude some obvious ways, like doing drugs ... Not entirely, though. But I did get disgusted not long after, by the smug tone. Maybe it's all sarcastic ranting about self-help literature. But even if so, I didn't find it very funny.
  - milankovic 8y ago
    What the hell did you expect from AlterNet?
  - lopmotr 8y ago
    Yes, it seemed a bit random and confusing to me. I didn't think drugs or gambling obviously made people miserable - aren't they purpose made for pleasure? They don't really annoy other people either which turned out to be what the list was actually about - it should be called "Behaviors I don't like in other people because I don't know how to handle them".
    - zbentley 8y ago
      They are purpose made for pleasure, but not happiness. Put another way: those things are constructed to induce a point-in-time pleasurable state of mind; not create lasting happiness—in fact, they are often at odds with sustainable positivity due to their risk/feedback/reward cyclic nature.
      - bernardino 8y ago
        Maybe it’s just semantics but what is the distinction between doing something like drugs for pleasure versus doing something like drugs for escapism? Do they overlap? I’m now oddly reminded of Freud’s Civilisation and It’s Discontents, where he talks about the pleasure principle, etc — I should pick it up again but it felt tedious.
hypertexthero 8y ago
Reminds me of the end of John Cleese’s talk on creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
inoop 8y ago
Why do I get the feeling that whoever wrote this just came out of a bad relationship?
- bcoates 8y ago
  Yeah, I feel like every headline is missing a ", Sharon!" at the end.
star0zero 8y ago
15. Click on any of the links in the Trending Now section at the bottom of the article.
cjen 8y ago
CGP Grey made a great video [0] pretty similar to this, it has a bunch of points about physical things (changing sleep schedule, staying indoors) and keeps the same sarcastic tone. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
havemylife 8y ago
This is perspicaciously cynical. I love it.
- mda 8y ago
  I think tone of the article is disgusting.
  - havemylife 8y ago
    What disgusts you about its tone? I found it informative and probably from honest experience. It's superficial chearful embrace towards problems people create for themselves is instructive towards correcting those habits.
    - gowld 8y ago
      Sarcasm is simply obnoxious.
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  - guskel 8y ago
    Same. I find it making appeals to the just-world fallacy, not understanding that some people really do experience extended hardship without deserving it.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      I don't speak for anyone besides myself when it comes to mental illness, but I've come to a point in my life where I'm just like 'Jesus fucking Christ can this shit please be just over with - can I please just be happy with the life I have left and not live my entire life being miserable over what used to exist or what terrible things may happen?' Because when you dwell on suicide often enough, when you attempt suicide multiple times, when you get to that attempt where you are really sure, 'this is it - I actually have to say goodbye' eventually you realize 'I'm going to die one day. I'm convinced that day is today. Is this all the life I get? Was that it?' And hopefully for others who go through something similar, and luckily in my case, I didn't die. Because even if I'm stuck in my head and think 'it really would be better if I was just dead', I don't want my whole life to be a combination of empty and shallow happiness I only realize I had, once it's gone entirely. Hardship sucks for all of us. But the point is, don't focus on it when things are good. Life flies the fuck by otherwise, and what kind of an experience is that? Only happy when reminiscing, always sad when you actually have happiness, because you knew so well, that happiness is fleeting, and everything good in life must end eventually? Mental illness is no joke to overcome, life is full of turmoil, sadness, pain, misery. But I'm sure this will come across as callous and cruel to those still suffering with it, just as I felt when my family kept telling me to 'get over it' or how it's weakness or whatever the fuck people say to others to prove they are fed up with being miserable. It comes out fucked up, from anyone. People who go through it and come out the other side sound unsympathetic, but that's often because they are still suffering, but they want to feel like they have a choice. Not just a label they feel permanently stuck with until they die. What kind of a life is that to look forward to? Same patterns, same habits, same sickness. Same guilt and fear of proving the contrary - how will others take my triumph over misery? Will that make them feel defeated? People with enormous amounts of sadness often have enormous amounts of empathy, and letting go of their sadness can seem like letting go of their empathy. So they cling to it. But it's something everyone with that kind of heart, I suppose, can choose to go through, or not, I don't know. I know myself. I know I'm sick of being miserable. I know talking about every sad and miserable thing I've ever been through only makes me more miserable. I know it affects others around me. I know it's a cycle one can be afraid of - how do I affect others when I feel so much pain? How can I be allowed to have my own feelings and get through them, without watching them dissipate across everyone around me? I don't know if I'm better, I don't know if I'm worse. It's a curse, and a burden. But I know wholeheartedly, if I keep all of it in, it's going to kill me. And if I don't try to 'get over it' (again, the words can seem callous, but take this to mean whatever it should for the individual), in whatever way I can, it's going to hurt me and hurt everyone I try to connect with and love. So sometimes I have to fucking laugh at it. Because, isn't that so fucked up? That I get what it does, and I can't do shit about it? I'm sure that's how this author feels.
kristianc 8y ago
I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.
- chapium 8y ago
  If you use safari its a perfect setup for readability mode! Its a simple document and gets parsed perfectly.
- zackangelo 8y ago
  If you tap the icon with the horizontal lines on the left side of the address bar, it'll activate reader view.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  It's fine on my 4.6" phone.
  - kristianc 8y ago
    15th miserable habit: Buy a phone that is too big for you.
- phs318u 8y ago
  Reader view works in this page and is perfectly readable.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  "14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything."
  - jamiegreen 8y ago
    Oh come on, we can recognise a joke here on HN. We don't have to be serious 100% of the time. It was funny!
bambax 8y ago
> Have an affair (...) Don't enjoy life's pleasures So... which is it? > Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Why is sex not listed in "life's pleasures"?
- gowld 8y ago
  "affair" in this context means "cheating on your partner". The list of life's pleasures is not exhaustive.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Personally, I’m horrifically offended that skydiving and slacklining wasn’t listed there either.
himom 8y ago
This article alludes to the importance of ego death: the entire spectrum of positive to negative self-perceptions are entirely mutable. You might’ve thought you were an awkward dork at one point, so you fulfilled your own expectations with subtle self-sabotaging behaviors to reinforce this identity persona. More importantly, FIUYMI is a perfectly-viable strategy because it sells a persona to the practitioner’s self via repeated exposure. Another consideration is to do all that is possible, while impossible, to remove ego from thoughts and instead focus as a trained observer: perceiving and gathering data.
fwip 8y ago
Number 3, "Give yourself a negative identity," just sounds like "I don't like when people have mental health problems. Get over it already."
- pagnol 8y ago
  Are you practicing number 5? If so, great job!
  - placebo 8y ago
    not necessarily - he could just be invoking the "do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity" rule It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      The counterpart to the rule is that stupidity is widespread and almost unfixable in general. Did I invoke one of the stupid rules from the article just right now? :)
    - eric-hu 8y ago
      > It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do. I wholly agree with this. There's something deeply insightful, subtle and difficult about recognizing one's own control in a situation. I've thought about this a lot in the last year. The way I phrase it right now is: people don't have a choice until they realize they have one.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Not fully. The point (I think) is not letting oneself be consumed by a problem & constantly identifying to be about it. There are way more things to define you.
Tade0 8y ago
> 5. Attribute bad intentions. Me and my SO have serendipitously discovered a great way to defuse arguments: it's the question "Are you accusing me of foulness?" (any sufficiently Victorian synonym works here) For some reason most people reflexively deny this in reply and realise that they've been attributing bad intentions groundlessly. Unfortunately this doesn't work on people who have a mindset which requires there to always be someone at fault.
- asciimo 8y ago
  Nice hack. Doing this with an upper class British accent could help defuse the situation further.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  important point, I very often get angry because I interpret some usual sign as the usual paranoid cause ..
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  Reminds me of the Principle of charity [1] that "requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation". I've found adopting this mindset to be one of the most important habits I've picked up, and eliminates so much drama. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
  - dwcnnnghm 8y ago
    This is also the basis of the Steel Man Argument [0] [1], as opposed to Straw-manning. Instead of attacking (basically nitpicking) the easy missteps in your opponent's reasoning, find the best form of their argument, and then argue with this. It seems to me as the ideal way to both win over those on the other side and provide yourself with a solid ground. You present yourself as avoiding undermining their position (really listening and caring to understand where they are coming from) and present a better argument yourself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning [1] https://lifehacker.com/utilize-the-steel-man-tactic-to-argue-more-effectivel-1632402742 https://lifehacker.com/utilize-the-steel-man-tactic-to-argue...
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ppeetteerr 8y ago
Love the list, hate the attitude
- Bakary 8y ago
  The attitude is what makes the list useful to those who might benefit from it.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    You'll have to take my word that the list has the opposite effect of being helpful. It's rather off-putting to read despite being quite accurate.
    - bfhd 8y ago
      It's okay - you aren't one of the people who would be helped by this article. But some people would be.
- RIMR 8y ago
  A couple people I showed this to immediately got upset by #3. I get that it comes off as another "Just stop being depressed/anxious" argument, which is undoubtedly tone-deaf, but there's still a point to be made here. Depression and Anxiety are real issues, and you can't just "get over it". However, being in control of oneself and refusing to define yourself by things like depression and anxiety are important to besting things like depression and anxiety. Just because it is an affliction doesn't mean you should allow yourself to be defeated by it. It doesn't mean that you are doing any good using these problems as an excuse, because no matter how unfair it seems, depression and anxiety isn't an excuse for willful misery.
- gowld 8y ago
  Giving advice in a deeply sarcastic form just obscures the message. It's OK if it's for a silly lighthearted topic, but for anything serious it's just tacky.
bthrm 8y ago
This is super good, thank you very much for having shared it.
narag 8y ago
I used to know the person that probably served as a model for this article. Not only does this method work to make yourself miserable, but also all the people around you. If you detect this behaviour, run like hell.
- seszett 8y ago
  I did not think these things were so simple, but... yes, I used to know someone that could have served as a model for the article as well. Every single point seems to apply to this person. This list can hurt some feelings, but it sure could help some people if it was more widely known.
  - narag 8y ago
    It seems to me that the people with hurt feelings are not exactly the same as the ones described by the article. 4, 5, 7, 9, 13 and 14 are definitely hostile behaviours. They're also self-damaging because, as I advised, people runs. But these behaviours are firstly and foremost against others. If someone gets hurt feelings about those, I'm fine with it.
foxhill 8y ago
having been, for want of a better term, ‘highly miserable’ in the past, the entirety of this article comes across as insidiously toxic and detrimental to the mental well-being of those who are suffering. there is a.. loosely similar CGP Grey video, which approaches the matter in a much more rational context [1] for anyone suffering, i emplore you to not read this and watch this instead; [1] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
- jsmo 8y ago
  This was a wonderfully witty and almost equally sarcastic take on happiness. Good guffaws guaranteed.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Amen. I didn't watch your linked video, but I definitely agreed with your post. As someone who has also been highly miserable (aka clinically depressed) in the past, various sentiments along the line of "come on, life is great, why can't you appreciate it?" and "that's no so bad, suck it up" most definitely did NOT help me overcome my depression. Which makes me wonder: if the purpose of this post is to belittle "miserable" people, well I guess it succeeds, but then that seems a pretty miserable thing to do in the first place. If the purpose is to ironically remind folks that there are easy things you can do to not be miserable, I don't think it's doing it in a particularly effective way.
  - creddit 8y ago
    Having been both clinically depressed and just generally negative and miserable, I think there's a large difference. This article addresses the latter of those two situations in a way that resonated pretty deeply with me. Clinical depression is drastically different and should be treated more as a disease than a state of mind. I don't believe this article comes across as suggesting its conclusions can treat clinical depression but rather are the symptoms of highly negative and miserable states of mind.
    - deleted 8y ago
Bakary 8y ago
I think the sarcastic tone of the article is extremely effective at getting its message across. It felt like been repeatedly slapped in the face but ending up grateful for the experience at the end.
the_arun 8y ago
Any of you seen this kind of miserable people? or this is stretching our imagination?
- jamesissac 8y ago
  I can identify with a couple of the points and I can be quite miserable at times. I'm working on addressing it.
zpallin 8y ago
This is the modern "Modest Proposal".
dsego 8y ago
All the borderlines in this thread getting triggered (you know it's true).
aidaman 8y ago
Can confirm.
davesque 8y ago
Clever article. Although it's a bit ironic that it appears on that site, which seems to be dedicated to anxiety-inducing political news.
jhsu 8y ago
reminds me of this by dandelion hands - how to never stop being sad: https://open.spotify.com/track/6ZLt6fyonW1xOGMBC9vJPJ?si=PGM3sZFZS_ujYGgB3xQnSg https://open.spotify.com/track/6ZLt6fyonW1xOGMBC9vJPJ?si=PGM...
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me miserable. So I spent the next few years focused on Getting A Life and practicing the art of Living Well Is The Best Revenge. And it's one of the wisest moves I ever made.
- RIMR 8y ago
  I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were stripped of some sort of human value in the process. We speak of rape very matter-of-factly about how it ruins lives, ruins women for marriage, emasculates men, and follows you for life. For a victim, this almost feels like the world telling you how defeated you are supposed to feel. I feel like way too much of society's response is about pitying the victim, and not enough of the response is about moving forward and getting past the trauma and living a normal, happy life. I am also an American, and we tend to focus more on the negative. Many times, when I have expressed this opinion, people have been upset because my feelings don't put enough negativity on the actions of the attacker - but really, the attacker means nothing to me, only the recovery and wellbeing of the victim.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I agree with you. I have often gotten reactions of pity and the like for speaking openly of my experiences. I do my best to give polite push back against it. I was raised with the idea that the shame is on the rapist, not the victim. I was raised with the idea that people who treat the victim in a shaming way are part of the problem. Being open about this aspect of my life is probably the single most "political" thing I do. I strongly agree with the things I was taught on this subject. FWIW, I likely did not lose my virginity to rape insofar as the detail of my hymen being ruptured. That probably occurred many years earlier when I fell at age 4 while trying to use a chair as a ladder.
zerostar07 8y ago
Well great advice so i should follow it: If you are a stoic, positive person who doesn't negatively affect the life of others and your own, do not make the mistake to think you have it good. You re just a convenient person, transparent and invisible to everyone because people like drama, they don't like rocks.
- SZJX 8y ago
  Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Some people want drama and arguments which do them and others no good. You are staying out of it. You're achieving your aims, making contributions that you think matter, and living a fulfilling life even though some others might not be so close to you much. What's the big deal? Isn't that exactly the point of stoicism?
deviationblue 8y ago
This article exists with the value judgement that being not miserable is some kind of boon or "positive" or "good thing". Anything that starts with that kind of implied value judgement w/o anything substantive can be disregarded. Edit to add: Seriously though, a healthy amount of cynicism is required for critical thinking. If you try too hard to be something, whether that's happy or positive or whatever, you're depriving yourself from thinking of everything that might comprise a reality, and thus looking at just half of it. But yeah, too much of anything is bad. [Also, I get sarcasm, you should too, hopefully].
- tlynchpin 8y ago
  ".. a healthy amount of skepticism is required .."
dragon96 8y ago
I feel like this article offers a lot of good points and factors to be aware of when sad, but it doesn't really point at ways to change. Anyone want to help compile a list of actionables or things to consider that you've personally found helpful? I'll start: > 2. Practice sustained boredom. I find that a pretty decent solution to being bored is to do something that I've been trying to avoid for a while, like running an errand or trying to learn something very technical. I find that feeling reluctant/frustrated often ends up being better than feeling like there's nothing to do, and usually doing this comes with a pretty handsome feel-good when you finally finish that errand or figure out what the darned textbook is trying to say.
agumonkey 8y ago
n+1) accuse every blog articles of plagiarism
elipsey 8y ago
PULIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: author trolls the mentally ill in standard way, says they're doing it for attention. If you have serious psych diagnosis like BP etc., please avoid this content; your loved ones know you're trying and only a handfull of contrarians strike this pose. Get some exercise and a good night's sleep, and stay on your meds. I'm rooting for you. P.S. This trash should not be on HN. It has nothing to do with tech and it could kill somebody.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  I've known people who have been on upwards of 40 different medications throughout their life. It's a choice, not an obligation. If you have had to cycle through being on 5+ medications all to balance out effects of the others of which, might help, might not, not sure - for decades, and you wind up feeling like 'I don't even know who the fuck I am without all of this', then that's a place to be in life too that can be therapeutic and helpful. Not to mention the trends of psychiatric medication offering addictive substances and then basically, punishing you when you become addicted to them, backpedaling and then offering something no more effective than a placebo, then cycling you through groups and various other forms of 'healthcare' that is more comparable to being herded like cattle than it is therapeutic, while telling you 'now you're an addict' and basically laughing when you say 'but yes, because I took the drugs you gave me to get well, and then I got addicted, because they made me well, and I don't know the difference anymore between health and illness mentally'. The mental healthcare system in many areas of the world are fucked up. You can blame those things for some portion of your life and silently blame yourself for the rest of it. That's what I do anyway. Or be loud about it, on the internet. Life sucks, sometimes. I'm rooting for you too.
  - elipsey 8y ago
    Yep, meds are terrible. My comment is for that small fraction of the population for whom "Just knock it off" is a dangerously wrong but appealing idea -- like curing cancer with coffee enemas. These folks have a high mortality rate. (If you're reading this you know who you are. Stay away from the article :)
abvdasker 8y ago
The reason this list is so relatable is because all of these behaviors are things normal, healthy people do. It's just a matter of degree, which is true of just about any behavior. If you take anything too far it will make you miserable. It's possible to reframe every single one of these behaviors in a positive light.
darkkindness 8y ago
> 3. Give yourself a negative identity. Allow a perceived emotional problem to absorb all other aspects of your self-identification. If you feel depressed, become a Depressed Person; if you suffer from social anxiety or a phobia, assume the identity of a Phobic Person or a Person with Anxiety Disorder. Make your condition the focus of your life. I think a couple of us in comments are rightly angry about this point, since it's easily read as a "hide and get over it" to those with real mental health conditions. But it isn't. It's saying to not wholly "identify as a Depressed person". It's making sure you know the difference between living like "It's harder for me to get out of bed" and "I can't get out of bed, I'm depressed." The first one is an attitude that makes recovery an option. The second lifestyle is the trap that highly miserable people find themselves in. I think this difference is really important. Kudos to the author for highlighting it.
overton 8y ago
Take from this what you will: If you don't have a serious mental illness, you can't even imagine the excruciating agony.
empressplay 8y ago
This is from 2013 (I checked because I thought I was having deja vu) https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/14-habits-highly-miserable-people https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/14-habits-highly-mi...
wb36 8y ago
"when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity." On the contrary, Tribe by sebastian junger has me fairly convinced me that the irony here is that people band together, find a sense of belonging and often psychological well being under strenuous circumstances more naturally than they do in peaceful, every man for himself and his or her own pursuit of happiness times.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
  It's almost as if we were hardwired through millions of years of evolution to enjoy and thrive struggling through difficult conditions... Interesting!
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Karunamon 8y ago
The rest of the list notwithstanding, this one got me thinking: >Well-meaning friends and relatives will try to sabotage your efforts to be thankless. For example, while you’re in the middle of complaining about the project you procrastinated on at work to your spouse during an unhealthy dinner, he or she might try to remind you of how grateful you should be to have a job or food at all. Am I the only person who finds these sorts of pithy attempts to be colossally irritating? Feeling sad/depressed? Cheer up! Feeling overwhelmed? It's not so bad! Job annoying you? At least you have a job! Yes, thank you for the comment and completely shutting down my attempts at commiserating. Now am I not only still bothered by what I was originally bothered by, I'm annoyed at the interlocutor. Perhaps I'm only 1/14th miserable? :)
- dsego 8y ago
  > It’s inevitable that as you make yourself miserable, you’ll be making those around you miserable also, at least until they leave you—which will give you another reason to feel miserable.
texan 8y ago
Should be titled: How To Drive Yourself To Suicide
arcturus17 8y ago
It's ironic how the author comes across as utterly condescending and miserable herself. I don't see how this article may be helpful to anyone struggling with mental health issues, nor to their loved ones or therapists. Completely uninspired in its tone, exaggerated in its content, and unintelligible in its objectives.
jokoon 8y ago
I get that it's a satirical article, but I don't understand the point it's making. This is the result of people having the psycho rigidity to assume happiness is the golden standard of life, the moral standard of "things that are good, and things that are bad". "Things could be worse" is a good enough way to look at things, but ultimately, when people have bad feelings, remember it can stem from their biology, education or way of life. It's important to concede that certain things can be deterministic in life. What is worse is this obsession to always get better in every minute of your life. Cults have similar obsessions. Just let go a little.
dm319 8y ago
This article muddles association with causation. I think it's dangerous to assume that these traits cause unhappiness, even if that might be true for some people in particular cases. If you are less happy, you are probably less likely to take a risk with your job. If you are less happy, you a probably more likely to start a fight or fall out with your partner. If you are less happy you are likely to give yourself a negative identity. etc etc etc etc.. I don't get the feeling that this article is written by someone who has brought themselves on a journey out of unhappiness, but rather by someone who is irritated by someone else's unhappiness.
HeavyStorm 8y ago
Not sure why that article has made anywhere on HN. The writer shows a lot of contempt for "feeling miserable", and foster the illusion that people are actually in total control of their feeling and emotions.
ponderatul 8y ago
Please add lose yourself in your world of unrealistic fantasy. Watch porn, a lot of it. Allow yourself to get consumed by it. See people as objects. Then watch more porn. Start gambling, with your money first, then with other peoples' money. You are entitled to that money even though it's theirs. Society owes you a lot already. Even better, combine the two, do online strip poker. Do anything but face the often less colourful reality.
yousuretalkalot 8y ago
Gaahguhgh. (Yes that's a sound.) As I'm going down the list I'm just "haha right!... fools... wait... ...fuck." My feelz just got domerocked. A few of these (and by a few I mean at least half) I can easily say I've either done before - in one way or another - or I still engage in regularly. And obviously, I'm miserable! And good god. I have been really blind lately... The habit about therapy: "...and if there's still that one person who loves you so much that they're clinging to some hope of a counselor helping you..." ah jeeeez, Last night the love of my life and father of my child said I'm pushing him away, that I push everyone away; and last week while I was crying to my mother about how stressed I was over my finals, my mom mentioned finding a therapist for me to talk to. I felt immediately resistant, and it upset me and I was probably rude to her... as far as my dude, I asked him how I push people away, saying "I want to know what it is that I do so that I can stop doing it," and he says "well you freak out all the time," and WHAM! here comes the emotion. "What do you mean freak out? Because I have panic attacks? Because I don't know how to handle my emotions?! Well maybe if people loved me more I wouldn't feel so anxious!" - the worst part is I really believe myself sometimes. Holy fuck I don't want to be this person. I've been an active blogger before and written about my "depression," my "anxiety" - I've been going through these weird emotional spats since I was maybe 4 or 5, and I guess I just never got over them? (side note: this is where the maternal blame comes in) - and I would say a lot of the things that are sounding so ridiculous in this moment. "My mom wasn't good to her kids, my mom's mom wasn't good to hers - it's just in my blood. Therefore it's my mothers fault that I'm an alcoholic." WTF? Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with me? People have mentioned at various times throughout my life that I'm addicted to sadness. And I thought, yeah it's true, in an "I'm an artist living in Seattle, I play acoustic guitar, only wear black, and hate it when movies have happy endings" kinda way. I could identify with that hipster-like and almost-endearing cliche, if we're going that far... I digress.. The fucking point is that I have never genuinely realized that I am a shithead, living my life and trying to do something with it but "somehow everything seems to not work out," and "why does this keep happening to me?" Hooo. Lee. FUCK! I've been playing the victim, making unnecessary accusations, then causing a scene when the accused (understandably) wants to get the fuck away from me, and then falling into holes of rage sorrow self-hatred and whatever the fuck else that basically equals MISERY. And I've been telling myself, and anyone else who will listen to me, that I can't help it. And goddamnit I believed it when I said it. Fucking thank god I read this right now. I really need to turn some shit around. And I know I can. I'm a recovering alcoholic - I've been a shithead for as long as I can remember - so I've spent a lot of time, too much time, talking about self-improvement. And I've made progress before; I've been happy. But this regression I've slipped into has gotten way outta control, and I am actually grateful for the first time in a while that I randomly clicked on this thread. Alright I'm gonna stop now. I bookmarked the article and I'm making a commitment to myself right now to think about this when my emotions start to run wild. I'm changing my attitude right now, and I am gonna go kiss that wonderful man on the head... the one who I've been treating like shit and pushing away for months ...and start to act in love again. Maybe I'll report back later.
adultSwim 8y ago
Alternet <3
SZJX 8y ago
It's a really helpful list pointing out some of the cognitive traps people might not be aware of having/might not understand that somebody around them needs help on. One gripe I have with it is that some stoic traits seem to also have been thrown in here which is a bit off. Being stoic/always be prepared for bad possibilities while working towards the good ones doesn't mean being miserable, pessimistic or depressed. It's just a way to keep on sailing in your life no matter what the conditions are. Also I'm not so sure about "quit your job, clean out your savings account, and move to a state you know nothing about." I guess it's a matter of how this person is exactly treating it: Whether as a new chapter in one's adventure for a life-loving person or just a getaway from one's undesired and perennial boredom then.

603 points by gscott 8y ago

This reminds me of the great book "The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious" [0] by the Austrian-American psychologist Paul Watzlawick. Excellent use of reverse psychology, let's you realize how many of those approaches you tend to use in your daily life. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Hopeless-Serious-Pursuit-Unhappiness/dp/0393310213 https://www.amazon.com/Situation-Hopeless-Serious-Pursuit-Un...

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
I liked How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use. Which also helped with showing underrated strategies for upping happiness. https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Miserable-Strategies-Already/dp/1626254060 https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Miserable-Strategies-Already/d...
- lbrtfxcug 8y ago
  What's the point of posting a link to Amazon? Why are you doing free marketing for them? You told us the name of the book, if I'm interested I know how to search. I find this incredibly depressing.
narag 8y ago
I've been unsuccessfully trying for a couple of minutes to identify the movie where I first heard the joke of the title.

strict9 8y ago

>Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss. I've always made a mental connection between permabears/zerohedge readers as likely miserable and unhappy people. The wild conspiracy theories and general hatred of certain groups in comment sections doesn't help, but noticed online and in person that people who are always predicting/worrying about the next catastrophe (financial or otherwise) generally lead unhappy lives.

beat 8y ago
Historically, the market has been great across the board for as long as most people have been alive (do you know anyone who was alive during the Great Depression and is alive today?). But doom-and-gloom negativity about the economy is a great marketing approach. It hits some button people have, gets them to buy gold or whatever other paranoid nonsense will save them from the Coming Economic Collapse.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Hits a button that some people have... most people don't appear to have that particular button.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  I know where you're coming from, but here in the states a lot of real people are struggling to afford real goods and services that they need to stay alive: housing, healthcare, education, etc. I wouldn't say economic anxiety is just 'nonsense fueled by conspiracy theorists.'
  - beat 8y ago
    I'm not saying economic anxiety is nonsense. I'm saying scenarios of imminent collapse of the economy are nonsense.
narag 8y ago
There is this hypothesis in psychology, depressive realism, that says that depressed persons see reality more clearly but this better vision isn't an advantage, on the contrary it's useless.

huangc10 8y ago

> 12. Glorify or vilify the past. Do not do this. Do not live in the past. Do not think about what might, what could, what should have happened. Learn from it and move onwards. Nothing good comes from constantly dwelling on things that can't be changed.

bowmessage 8y ago
That's the whole point of the article... don't do any of these things!
mwaitjmp 8y ago
Nostalgia isn't all bad...in fact it's believed to improve your mood.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Yeah, for a short moment. Longer tern it likely leads to not appreciating the present.
  - ljm 8y ago
    Comparing your past self to your present self can be extremely destructive if you think you were in a better place then than you are now. Maybe sometimes it’s abjectly true - you became homeless and in the past you weren’t so it was better back then. In a lot of cases you’re probably looking back on a high moment while in the middle of a low moment. Either way, the comparison does far more harm than good and it might well hold you back.
scarejunba 8y ago
Haha, this has to be high satire. I am thrilled to read it.
lkrubner 8y ago
Goes to identity. Telling people not to do this is pointless unless you can suggest another way to construct identity. A person without a past is... an interesting thought experiment, but not something that exists in the real world. Identity builds up in layers -- what is your nation, your religion, your favorite team, your hometown, your college, your spouse, your child. If you give all of that up, then who are you? What are your goals? What do you believe in? What are you willing to fight for? What gives life meaning? A better bit of advice is "avoid ruminating" and this applies to every thought, not just the ones that involve the past. But even that is not easy, especially for those who create things, since to create something you have to ruminate on it heavily, for months or years -- this is probably why there is an overlap between depression and creativity.

maerF0x0 8y ago

>Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter. really roughly this is what stoics do, yet somehow they come to the conclusion "actually, what was i fearing? Proceed with adventure"...

konschubert 8y ago
I think people are just different. To some, thinking through the worst case scenario is a way to face and overcome their fears. To others, it's a way of instilling fears.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  I think the idea behind the exercise, from a Stoicism standpoint, is to mentally expose yourself to the fear of being homeless (or whatever about the exercise creates anxiety for you). Eventually you desensitize yourself to that feeling and begin to realize it wouldn't be as bad as you think. This is also an aspect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
  - selestify 8y ago
    Umm... seeing how the homeless live, it really would be as bad as I think. Probably even worse, since I don't see all of it.
    - Fricken 8y ago
      Most homeless people are suffering from a cocktail of problems with abuse, mental illness and drugs. If you woke one one morning to find yourself on the street with ragged clothes and empty pockets in a foreign city, but you still had your wits about you, you likely wouldn't be there for long.
      - vkou 8y ago

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s-shellfish 8y ago

More people in the field of mental health should have a sense of humor like this.

asdsa5325 8y ago

It seems like many people in this thread missed the sarcastic tone of the article...

mirimir 8y ago
Well, I just about stopped reading at > Let’s exclude some obvious ways, like doing drugs ... Not entirely, though. But I did get disgusted not long after, by the smug tone. Maybe it's all sarcastic ranting about self-help literature. But even if so, I didn't find it very funny.
- milankovic 8y ago
  What the hell did you expect from AlterNet?
- lopmotr 8y ago
  Yes, it seemed a bit random and confusing to me. I didn't think drugs or gambling obviously made people miserable - aren't they purpose made for pleasure? They don't really annoy other people either which turned out to be what the list was actually about - it should be called "Behaviors I don't like in other people because I don't know how to handle them".
  - zbentley 8y ago
    They are purpose made for pleasure, but not happiness. Put another way: those things are constructed to induce a point-in-time pleasurable state of mind; not create lasting happiness—in fact, they are often at odds with sustainable positivity due to their risk/feedback/reward cyclic nature.
    - bernardino 8y ago
      Maybe it’s just semantics but what is the distinction between doing something like drugs for pleasure versus doing something like drugs for escapism? Do they overlap? I’m now oddly reminded of Freud’s Civilisation and It’s Discontents, where he talks about the pleasure principle, etc — I should pick it up again but it felt tedious.

hypertexthero 8y ago

Reminds me of the end of John Cleese’s talk on creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

inoop 8y ago

Why do I get the feeling that whoever wrote this just came out of a bad relationship?

bcoates 8y ago
Yeah, I feel like every headline is missing a ", Sharon!" at the end.

star0zero 8y ago

15. Click on any of the links in the Trending Now section at the bottom of the article.

cjen 8y ago

CGP Grey made a great video [0] pretty similar to this, it has a bunch of points about physical things (changing sleep schedule, staying indoors) and keeps the same sarcastic tone. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

havemylife 8y ago

This is perspicaciously cynical. I love it.

mda 8y ago
I think tone of the article is disgusting.
- havemylife 8y ago
  What disgusts you about its tone? I found it informative and probably from honest experience. It's superficial chearful embrace towards problems people create for themselves is instructive towards correcting those habits.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Sarcasm is simply obnoxious.
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- guskel 8y ago
  Same. I find it making appeals to the just-world fallacy, not understanding that some people really do experience extended hardship without deserving it.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    I don't speak for anyone besides myself when it comes to mental illness, but I've come to a point in my life where I'm just like 'Jesus fucking Christ can this shit please be just over with - can I please just be happy with the life I have left and not live my entire life being miserable over what used to exist or what terrible things may happen?' Because when you dwell on suicide often enough, when you attempt suicide multiple times, when you get to that attempt where you are really sure, 'this is it - I actually have to say goodbye' eventually you realize 'I'm going to die one day. I'm convinced that day is today. Is this all the life I get? Was that it?' And hopefully for others who go through something similar, and luckily in my case, I didn't die. Because even if I'm stuck in my head and think 'it really would be better if I was just dead', I don't want my whole life to be a combination of empty and shallow happiness I only realize I had, once it's gone entirely. Hardship sucks for all of us. But the point is, don't focus on it when things are good. Life flies the fuck by otherwise, and what kind of an experience is that? Only happy when reminiscing, always sad when you actually have happiness, because you knew so well, that happiness is fleeting, and everything good in life must end eventually? Mental illness is no joke to overcome, life is full of turmoil, sadness, pain, misery. But I'm sure this will come across as callous and cruel to those still suffering with it, just as I felt when my family kept telling me to 'get over it' or how it's weakness or whatever the fuck people say to others to prove they are fed up with being miserable. It comes out fucked up, from anyone. People who go through it and come out the other side sound unsympathetic, but that's often because they are still suffering, but they want to feel like they have a choice. Not just a label they feel permanently stuck with until they die. What kind of a life is that to look forward to? Same patterns, same habits, same sickness. Same guilt and fear of proving the contrary - how will others take my triumph over misery? Will that make them feel defeated? People with enormous amounts of sadness often have enormous amounts of empathy, and letting go of their sadness can seem like letting go of their empathy. So they cling to it. But it's something everyone with that kind of heart, I suppose, can choose to go through, or not, I don't know. I know myself. I know I'm sick of being miserable. I know talking about every sad and miserable thing I've ever been through only makes me more miserable. I know it affects others around me. I know it's a cycle one can be afraid of - how do I affect others when I feel so much pain? How can I be allowed to have my own feelings and get through them, without watching them dissipate across everyone around me? I don't know if I'm better, I don't know if I'm worse. It's a curse, and a burden. But I know wholeheartedly, if I keep all of it in, it's going to kill me. And if I don't try to 'get over it' (again, the words can seem callous, but take this to mean whatever it should for the individual), in whatever way I can, it's going to hurt me and hurt everyone I try to connect with and love. So sometimes I have to fucking laugh at it. Because, isn't that so fucked up? That I get what it does, and I can't do shit about it? I'm sure that's how this author feels.

kristianc 8y ago

I’m no expert on abject misery but reading 12pt serif text with a ridiculous line length on an iPhone screen has got to come pretty close.

chapium 8y ago
If you use safari its a perfect setup for readability mode! Its a simple document and gets parsed perfectly.
zackangelo 8y ago
If you tap the icon with the horizontal lines on the left side of the address bar, it'll activate reader view.
solarkraft 8y ago
It's fine on my 4.6" phone.
- kristianc 8y ago
  15th miserable habit: Buy a phone that is too big for you.
phs318u 8y ago
Reader view works in this page and is perfectly readable.
ModernMech 8y ago
"14. Be critical. Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything."
- jamiegreen 8y ago
  Oh come on, we can recognise a joke here on HN. We don't have to be serious 100% of the time. It was funny!

bambax 8y ago

> Have an affair (...) Don't enjoy life's pleasures So... which is it? > Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Why is sex not listed in "life's pleasures"?

gowld 8y ago
"affair" in this context means "cheating on your partner". The list of life's pleasures is not exhaustive.
scarejunba 8y ago
Personally, I’m horrifically offended that skydiving and slacklining wasn’t listed there either.

himom 8y ago

This article alludes to the importance of ego death: the entire spectrum of positive to negative self-perceptions are entirely mutable. You might’ve thought you were an awkward dork at one point, so you fulfilled your own expectations with subtle self-sabotaging behaviors to reinforce this identity persona. More importantly, FIUYMI is a perfectly-viable strategy because it sells a persona to the practitioner’s self via repeated exposure. Another consideration is to do all that is possible, while impossible, to remove ego from thoughts and instead focus as a trained observer: perceiving and gathering data.

fwip 8y ago

Number 3, "Give yourself a negative identity," just sounds like "I don't like when people have mental health problems. Get over it already."

pagnol 8y ago
Are you practicing number 5? If so, great job!
- placebo 8y ago
  not necessarily - he could just be invoking the "do not attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity" rule It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    The counterpart to the rule is that stupidity is widespread and almost unfixable in general. Did I invoke one of the stupid rules from the article just right now? :)
  - eric-hu 8y ago
    > It's not always so easy to tell apart the things you have control over vs. the things you don't, but I think that all these rules can be summarized in one line, which is basically: If you're feeling sorry for yourself, you'd better find something more productive to do. I wholly agree with this. There's something deeply insightful, subtle and difficult about recognizing one's own control in a situation. I've thought about this a lot in the last year. The way I phrase it right now is: people don't have a choice until they realize they have one.
solarkraft 8y ago
Not fully. The point (I think) is not letting oneself be consumed by a problem & constantly identifying to be about it. There are way more things to define you.

Tade0 8y ago

> 5. Attribute bad intentions. Me and my SO have serendipitously discovered a great way to defuse arguments: it's the question "Are you accusing me of foulness?" (any sufficiently Victorian synonym works here) For some reason most people reflexively deny this in reply and realise that they've been attributing bad intentions groundlessly. Unfortunately this doesn't work on people who have a mindset which requires there to always be someone at fault.

asciimo 8y ago
Nice hack. Doing this with an upper class British accent could help defuse the situation further.
agumonkey 8y ago
important point, I very often get angry because I interpret some usual sign as the usual paranoid cause ..
tomnipotent 8y ago
Reminds me of the Principle of charity [1] that "requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation". I've found adopting this mindset to be one of the most important habits I've picked up, and eliminates so much drama. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
- dwcnnnghm 8y ago
  This is also the basis of the Steel Man Argument [0] [1], as opposed to Straw-manning. Instead of attacking (basically nitpicking) the easy missteps in your opponent's reasoning, find the best form of their argument, and then argue with this. It seems to me as the ideal way to both win over those on the other side and provide yourself with a solid ground. You present yourself as avoiding undermining their position (really listening and caring to understand where they are coming from) and present a better argument yourself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning [1] https://lifehacker.com/utilize-the-steel-man-tactic-to-argue-more-effectivel-1632402742 https://lifehacker.com/utilize-the-steel-man-tactic-to-argue...

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ppeetteerr 8y ago

Love the list, hate the attitude

Bakary 8y ago
The attitude is what makes the list useful to those who might benefit from it.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  You'll have to take my word that the list has the opposite effect of being helpful. It's rather off-putting to read despite being quite accurate.
  - bfhd 8y ago
    It's okay - you aren't one of the people who would be helped by this article. But some people would be.
RIMR 8y ago
A couple people I showed this to immediately got upset by #3. I get that it comes off as another "Just stop being depressed/anxious" argument, which is undoubtedly tone-deaf, but there's still a point to be made here. Depression and Anxiety are real issues, and you can't just "get over it". However, being in control of oneself and refusing to define yourself by things like depression and anxiety are important to besting things like depression and anxiety. Just because it is an affliction doesn't mean you should allow yourself to be defeated by it. It doesn't mean that you are doing any good using these problems as an excuse, because no matter how unfair it seems, depression and anxiety isn't an excuse for willful misery.
gowld 8y ago
Giving advice in a deeply sarcastic form just obscures the message. It's OK if it's for a silly lighthearted topic, but for anything serious it's just tacky.

bthrm 8y ago

This is super good, thank you very much for having shared it.

narag 8y ago

I used to know the person that probably served as a model for this article. Not only does this method work to make yourself miserable, but also all the people around you. If you detect this behaviour, run like hell.

seszett 8y ago
I did not think these things were so simple, but... yes, I used to know someone that could have served as a model for the article as well. Every single point seems to apply to this person. This list can hurt some feelings, but it sure could help some people if it was more widely known.
- narag 8y ago
  It seems to me that the people with hurt feelings are not exactly the same as the ones described by the article. 4, 5, 7, 9, 13 and 14 are definitely hostile behaviours. They're also self-damaging because, as I advised, people runs. But these behaviours are firstly and foremost against others. If someone gets hurt feelings about those, I'm fine with it.

foxhill 8y ago

having been, for want of a better term, ‘highly miserable’ in the past, the entirety of this article comes across as insidiously toxic and detrimental to the mental well-being of those who are suffering. there is a.. loosely similar CGP Grey video, which approaches the matter in a much more rational context [1] for anyone suffering, i emplore you to not read this and watch this instead; [1] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o https://youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

jsmo 8y ago
This was a wonderfully witty and almost equally sarcastic take on happiness. Good guffaws guaranteed.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Amen. I didn't watch your linked video, but I definitely agreed with your post. As someone who has also been highly miserable (aka clinically depressed) in the past, various sentiments along the line of "come on, life is great, why can't you appreciate it?" and "that's no so bad, suck it up" most definitely did NOT help me overcome my depression. Which makes me wonder: if the purpose of this post is to belittle "miserable" people, well I guess it succeeds, but then that seems a pretty miserable thing to do in the first place. If the purpose is to ironically remind folks that there are easy things you can do to not be miserable, I don't think it's doing it in a particularly effective way.
- creddit 8y ago
  Having been both clinically depressed and just generally negative and miserable, I think there's a large difference. This article addresses the latter of those two situations in a way that resonated pretty deeply with me. Clinical depression is drastically different and should be treated more as a disease than a state of mind. I don't believe this article comes across as suggesting its conclusions can treat clinical depression but rather are the symptoms of highly negative and miserable states of mind.
  - deleted 8y ago

Bakary 8y ago

I think the sarcastic tone of the article is extremely effective at getting its message across. It felt like been repeatedly slapped in the face but ending up grateful for the experience at the end.

the_arun 8y ago

Any of you seen this kind of miserable people? or this is stretching our imagination?

jamesissac 8y ago
I can identify with a couple of the points and I can be quite miserable at times. I'm working on addressing it.

zpallin 8y ago

This is the modern "Modest Proposal".

dsego 8y ago

All the borderlines in this thread getting triggered (you know it's true).

aidaman 8y ago

Can confirm.

davesque 8y ago

Clever article. Although it's a bit ironic that it appears on that site, which seems to be dedicated to anxiety-inducing political news.

jhsu 8y ago

reminds me of this by dandelion hands - how to never stop being sad: https://open.spotify.com/track/6ZLt6fyonW1xOGMBC9vJPJ?si=PGM3sZFZS_ujYGgB3xQnSg https://open.spotify.com/track/6ZLt6fyonW1xOGMBC9vJPJ?si=PGM...

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Give yourself a negative identity I was sexually abused as a child. I spent a total of about 3.5 years in therapy, a year in my teens and 2.5 years in my twenties. Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me miserable. So I spent the next few years focused on Getting A Life and practicing the art of Living Well Is The Best Revenge. And it's one of the wisest moves I ever made.

RIMR 8y ago
I know this is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I always felt that society's reaction to sexual assault give victims a reason to feel even worse about their situation. Not to say that it isn't a severely traumatic thing to experience - it absolutely is. But, we regularly treat virginity as some sort of virtuous status - and then speak of rape victims who lost their virginity to their attacker as if they were stripped of some sort of human value in the process. We speak of rape very matter-of-factly about how it ruins lives, ruins women for marriage, emasculates men, and follows you for life. For a victim, this almost feels like the world telling you how defeated you are supposed to feel. I feel like way too much of society's response is about pitying the victim, and not enough of the response is about moving forward and getting past the trauma and living a normal, happy life. I am also an American, and we tend to focus more on the negative. Many times, when I have expressed this opinion, people have been upset because my feelings don't put enough negativity on the actions of the attacker - but really, the attacker means nothing to me, only the recovery and wellbeing of the victim.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I agree with you. I have often gotten reactions of pity and the like for speaking openly of my experiences. I do my best to give polite push back against it. I was raised with the idea that the shame is on the rapist, not the victim. I was raised with the idea that people who treat the victim in a shaming way are part of the problem. Being open about this aspect of my life is probably the single most "political" thing I do. I strongly agree with the things I was taught on this subject. FWIW, I likely did not lose my virginity to rape insofar as the detail of my hymen being ruptured. That probably occurred many years earlier when I fell at age 4 while trying to use a chair as a ladder.

zerostar07 8y ago

Well great advice so i should follow it: If you are a stoic, positive person who doesn't negatively affect the life of others and your own, do not make the mistake to think you have it good. You re just a convenient person, transparent and invisible to everyone because people like drama, they don't like rocks.

SZJX 8y ago
Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Some people want drama and arguments which do them and others no good. You are staying out of it. You're achieving your aims, making contributions that you think matter, and living a fulfilling life even though some others might not be so close to you much. What's the big deal? Isn't that exactly the point of stoicism?

deviationblue 8y ago

This article exists with the value judgement that being not miserable is some kind of boon or "positive" or "good thing". Anything that starts with that kind of implied value judgement w/o anything substantive can be disregarded. Edit to add: Seriously though, a healthy amount of cynicism is required for critical thinking. If you try too hard to be something, whether that's happy or positive or whatever, you're depriving yourself from thinking of everything that might comprise a reality, and thus looking at just half of it. But yeah, too much of anything is bad. [Also, I get sarcasm, you should too, hopefully].

tlynchpin 8y ago
".. a healthy amount of skepticism is required .."

dragon96 8y ago

I feel like this article offers a lot of good points and factors to be aware of when sad, but it doesn't really point at ways to change. Anyone want to help compile a list of actionables or things to consider that you've personally found helpful? I'll start: > 2. Practice sustained boredom. I find that a pretty decent solution to being bored is to do something that I've been trying to avoid for a while, like running an errand or trying to learn something very technical. I find that feeling reluctant/frustrated often ends up being better than feeling like there's nothing to do, and usually doing this comes with a pretty handsome feel-good when you finally finish that errand or figure out what the darned textbook is trying to say.

agumonkey 8y ago

n+1) accuse every blog articles of plagiarism

elipsey 8y ago

PULIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: author trolls the mentally ill in standard way, says they're doing it for attention. If you have serious psych diagnosis like BP etc., please avoid this content; your loved ones know you're trying and only a handfull of contrarians strike this pose. Get some exercise and a good night's sleep, and stay on your meds. I'm rooting for you. P.S. This trash should not be on HN. It has nothing to do with tech and it could kill somebody.

s-shellfish 8y ago
I've known people who have been on upwards of 40 different medications throughout their life. It's a choice, not an obligation. If you have had to cycle through being on 5+ medications all to balance out effects of the others of which, might help, might not, not sure - for decades, and you wind up feeling like 'I don't even know who the fuck I am without all of this', then that's a place to be in life too that can be therapeutic and helpful. Not to mention the trends of psychiatric medication offering addictive substances and then basically, punishing you when you become addicted to them, backpedaling and then offering something no more effective than a placebo, then cycling you through groups and various other forms of 'healthcare' that is more comparable to being herded like cattle than it is therapeutic, while telling you 'now you're an addict' and basically laughing when you say 'but yes, because I took the drugs you gave me to get well, and then I got addicted, because they made me well, and I don't know the difference anymore between health and illness mentally'. The mental healthcare system in many areas of the world are fucked up. You can blame those things for some portion of your life and silently blame yourself for the rest of it. That's what I do anyway. Or be loud about it, on the internet. Life sucks, sometimes. I'm rooting for you too.
- elipsey 8y ago
  Yep, meds are terrible. My comment is for that small fraction of the population for whom "Just knock it off" is a dangerously wrong but appealing idea -- like curing cancer with coffee enemas. These folks have a high mortality rate. (If you're reading this you know who you are. Stay away from the article :)

abvdasker 8y ago

The reason this list is so relatable is because all of these behaviors are things normal, healthy people do. It's just a matter of degree, which is true of just about any behavior. If you take anything too far it will make you miserable. It's possible to reframe every single one of these behaviors in a positive light.

darkkindness 8y ago

> 3. Give yourself a negative identity. Allow a perceived emotional problem to absorb all other aspects of your self-identification. If you feel depressed, become a Depressed Person; if you suffer from social anxiety or a phobia, assume the identity of a Phobic Person or a Person with Anxiety Disorder. Make your condition the focus of your life. I think a couple of us in comments are rightly angry about this point, since it's easily read as a "hide and get over it" to those with real mental health conditions. But it isn't. It's saying to not wholly "identify as a Depressed person". It's making sure you know the difference between living like "It's harder for me to get out of bed" and "I can't get out of bed, I'm depressed." The first one is an attitude that makes recovery an option. The second lifestyle is the trap that highly miserable people find themselves in. I think this difference is really important. Kudos to the author for highlighting it.

overton 8y ago

Take from this what you will: If you don't have a serious mental illness, you can't even imagine the excruciating agony.

empressplay 8y ago

This is from 2013 (I checked because I thought I was having deja vu) https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/14-habits-highly-miserable-people https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/14-habits-highly-mi...

wb36 8y ago

"when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity." On the contrary, Tribe by sebastian junger has me fairly convinced me that the irony here is that people band together, find a sense of belonging and often psychological well being under strenuous circumstances more naturally than they do in peaceful, every man for himself and his or her own pursuit of happiness times.

flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
It's almost as if we were hardwired through millions of years of evolution to enjoy and thrive struggling through difficult conditions... Interesting!

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Karunamon 8y ago

The rest of the list notwithstanding, this one got me thinking: >Well-meaning friends and relatives will try to sabotage your efforts to be thankless. For example, while you’re in the middle of complaining about the project you procrastinated on at work to your spouse during an unhealthy dinner, he or she might try to remind you of how grateful you should be to have a job or food at all. Am I the only person who finds these sorts of pithy attempts to be colossally irritating? Feeling sad/depressed? Cheer up! Feeling overwhelmed? It's not so bad! Job annoying you? At least you have a job! Yes, thank you for the comment and completely shutting down my attempts at commiserating. Now am I not only still bothered by what I was originally bothered by, I'm annoyed at the interlocutor. Perhaps I'm only 1/14th miserable? :)

dsego 8y ago
> It’s inevitable that as you make yourself miserable, you’ll be making those around you miserable also, at least until they leave you—which will give you another reason to feel miserable.

texan 8y ago

Should be titled: How To Drive Yourself To Suicide

arcturus17 8y ago

It's ironic how the author comes across as utterly condescending and miserable herself. I don't see how this article may be helpful to anyone struggling with mental health issues, nor to their loved ones or therapists. Completely uninspired in its tone, exaggerated in its content, and unintelligible in its objectives.

jokoon 8y ago

I get that it's a satirical article, but I don't understand the point it's making. This is the result of people having the psycho rigidity to assume happiness is the golden standard of life, the moral standard of "things that are good, and things that are bad". "Things could be worse" is a good enough way to look at things, but ultimately, when people have bad feelings, remember it can stem from their biology, education or way of life. It's important to concede that certain things can be deterministic in life. What is worse is this obsession to always get better in every minute of your life. Cults have similar obsessions. Just let go a little.

dm319 8y ago

This article muddles association with causation. I think it's dangerous to assume that these traits cause unhappiness, even if that might be true for some people in particular cases. If you are less happy, you are probably less likely to take a risk with your job. If you are less happy, you a probably more likely to start a fight or fall out with your partner. If you are less happy you are likely to give yourself a negative identity. etc etc etc etc.. I don't get the feeling that this article is written by someone who has brought themselves on a journey out of unhappiness, but rather by someone who is irritated by someone else's unhappiness.

HeavyStorm 8y ago

Not sure why that article has made anywhere on HN. The writer shows a lot of contempt for "feeling miserable", and foster the illusion that people are actually in total control of their feeling and emotions.

ponderatul 8y ago

Please add lose yourself in your world of unrealistic fantasy. Watch porn, a lot of it. Allow yourself to get consumed by it. See people as objects. Then watch more porn. Start gambling, with your money first, then with other peoples' money. You are entitled to that money even though it's theirs. Society owes you a lot already. Even better, combine the two, do online strip poker. Do anything but face the often less colourful reality.

yousuretalkalot 8y ago

Gaahguhgh. (Yes that's a sound.) As I'm going down the list I'm just "haha right!... fools... wait... ...fuck." My feelz just got domerocked. A few of these (and by a few I mean at least half) I can easily say I've either done before - in one way or another - or I still engage in regularly. And obviously, I'm miserable! And good god. I have been really blind lately... The habit about therapy: "...and if there's still that one person who loves you so much that they're clinging to some hope of a counselor helping you..." ah jeeeez, Last night the love of my life and father of my child said I'm pushing him away, that I push everyone away; and last week while I was crying to my mother about how stressed I was over my finals, my mom mentioned finding a therapist for me to talk to. I felt immediately resistant, and it upset me and I was probably rude to her... as far as my dude, I asked him how I push people away, saying "I want to know what it is that I do so that I can stop doing it," and he says "well you freak out all the time," and WHAM! here comes the emotion. "What do you mean freak out? Because I have panic attacks? Because I don't know how to handle my emotions?! Well maybe if people loved me more I wouldn't feel so anxious!" - the worst part is I really believe myself sometimes. Holy fuck I don't want to be this person. I've been an active blogger before and written about my "depression," my "anxiety" - I've been going through these weird emotional spats since I was maybe 4 or 5, and I guess I just never got over them? (side note: this is where the maternal blame comes in) - and I would say a lot of the things that are sounding so ridiculous in this moment. "My mom wasn't good to her kids, my mom's mom wasn't good to hers - it's just in my blood. Therefore it's my mothers fault that I'm an alcoholic." WTF? Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with me? People have mentioned at various times throughout my life that I'm addicted to sadness. And I thought, yeah it's true, in an "I'm an artist living in Seattle, I play acoustic guitar, only wear black, and hate it when movies have happy endings" kinda way. I could identify with that hipster-like and almost-endearing cliche, if we're going that far... I digress.. The fucking point is that I have never genuinely realized that I am a shithead, living my life and trying to do something with it but "somehow everything seems to not work out," and "why does this keep happening to me?" Hooo. Lee. FUCK! I've been playing the victim, making unnecessary accusations, then causing a scene when the accused (understandably) wants to get the fuck away from me, and then falling into holes of rage sorrow self-hatred and whatever the fuck else that basically equals MISERY. And I've been telling myself, and anyone else who will listen to me, that I can't help it. And goddamnit I believed it when I said it. Fucking thank god I read this right now. I really need to turn some shit around. And I know I can. I'm a recovering alcoholic - I've been a shithead for as long as I can remember - so I've spent a lot of time, too much time, talking about self-improvement. And I've made progress before; I've been happy. But this regression I've slipped into has gotten way outta control, and I am actually grateful for the first time in a while that I randomly clicked on this thread. Alright I'm gonna stop now. I bookmarked the article and I'm making a commitment to myself right now to think about this when my emotions start to run wild. I'm changing my attitude right now, and I am gonna go kiss that wonderful man on the head... the one who I've been treating like shit and pushing away for months ...and start to act in love again. Maybe I'll report back later.

adultSwim 8y ago

Alternet <3

SZJX 8y ago

It's a really helpful list pointing out some of the cognitive traps people might not be aware of having/might not understand that somebody around them needs help on. One gripe I have with it is that some stoic traits seem to also have been thrown in here which is a bit off. Being stoic/always be prepared for bad possibilities while working towards the good ones doesn't mean being miserable, pessimistic or depressed. It's just a way to keep on sailing in your life no matter what the conditions are. Also I'm not so sure about "quit your job, clean out your savings account, and move to a state you know nothing about." I guess it's a matter of how this person is exactly treating it: Whether as a new chapter in one's adventure for a life-loving person or just a getaway from one's undesired and perennial boredom then.