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A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life
- bitfhacker 7y agoIt's similar to the half glass of water... Do you see the glass half full or half empty?
- noonespecial 7y agoWait. You got a glass? Lucky.
- peristeronic 7y agoHouse? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
- m0xte 7y agoI see it is missing wine
- bitfhacker 7y agoThat's another way to see it... I get it: water gives you rust.
- ericajohnson 7y agoDr. Bik Kwoon Tye could be a poster child for Dr. Seligman's work in the field of positive psychology! This story reminds me so much of a book I just finished reading: The Happiness Advantage. "Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around."
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoGod I tortured myself growing up thinking that once I achieved the next big goal I would “be happy”. I don’t know why it took me 30+ years to realize that state was never achieved, I just have to be happy now without waiting for it to happen to me.
- rwnspace 7y agoI wonder if it took 30+ years because your young adult brain was geared toward perceiving 'carrots and sticks'.
- bleepcord 7y agoHow would a young adult go about breaking this perception?
- rwnspace 7y agoI don't know, and I'm not sure it's a good idea. I think it's a feature, not a bug, though it has very clear downsides, which you can take steps to ameliorate. Talking of steps: Walking and talking are pretty ancient ways of taking stock and finding new perspectives. Talk to people outside your usual age range and social class. Get out into nature. These things usually help in ways I can't explain very well, but I find them vital to sustainably integrating who I am in here with where I am in the world. In my experience, major health crises of the mental kind tend to be down to this.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoDoes it? A lot of the people I know who've accomplished significant things did so not because they were happy, but because they tried harder than anyone else. They were not satisfied with the way things were and put a lot of effort into changing them. I myself didn't lose half my bodyweight because I was happy, quite the contrary, I hated --and still hate-- my body. That kind of motivation is incredibly helpful for overcoming the suffering required to accomplish big things. Success will not make you happy, this my experience agrees with, but I'm equally sure that happiness will not make one successful.
- spark28 7y agoWow, I went to Cornell and actually remember a professor Tye! It's something we all need to be reminded of — happiness isn't the destination, but rather our mind-frame along the way. It's easy to get trapped in the mundane, daily grind if we forget to keep prioritizing (and re-evaluating) our happiness, especially when it sometimes flies in the face of what's "societally important".
- GoodJokes 7y agoCool way to use your mom to advertise for your company.
- starpilot 7y agoWhy was this flagged? This is exactly what it is.
- callesgg 7y agoThe secret is lie about how happy your life is. To others to yourself. To everyone.
- colecut 7y agoFunny how true this is really. Can't intentionally smiling release the same chemicals in your brain that are released when you are happy about something in a sort of backwards effect?
- callesgg 7y agoYes, causality as it is often talked about is a lie or more accurately a deception of the mind a cognitive bias.
- abhinuvpitale 7y agoFake it till you make it? I definitely think this helps in case of happiness, since a 'deliberate' smile makes folks around you friendlier and happier. That, in turn, enforces the same emotion on to you!
- seppin 7y agoIt's more a case of doing something everyday, eventually you become that thing. It's just a matter of time and consistency. Faking happy could very well be one of those things.
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoOr perhaps the true lie is the one evolution has programmed into us, to believe that things "should" be better.
- d1zzy 7y agoThere is a lot of truth to "ignorance is bliss", a healthy dose of ignorance is often times necessary. What do you really gain by being all knowledgeable (and miserable)? Life is not a videogame that you win at the end by learning more than other people, instead it's a game that we all LOSE when we die, so to my eyes the only thing we should optimize for is to be happy while we live. If knowing more things make you happy, go for it but keep an eye on the potential negative effects on one's mood/happiness that I find inherent in knowledge.
- Cougher 7y agoThis reminds me of the Monty Python skit, "How To Do It". To rid the world of all known diseases, "become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical world really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be diseases any more." The secret to a happy life is to be happy now instead of waiting for stuff!
- ronilan 7y agoHere is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ryjjeNc5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ryjjeNc5k
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paulz_ 7y agoThe author also did an episode of Indie Hackers [0] which is in my opinion the best episode of that podcast. I wish her and Courtland would do a regular podcast together. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-values https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...
- lynnetye 7y agoAw shucks, thanks for saying so! :) And if by regular you mean once a year, your wish may very well come true...
- rnernento 7y agoOk Boomer.
- Pistos2 7y agoHere's something I sometimes tell people: Contentment comes when "the way you want it" and "the way it is" overlap enough -- but sometimes in life, you can really only change one of those.
- jodrellblank 7y ago"So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they're already met?" - Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, 1992 - https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/02/11 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/02/11
- yters 7y agoWhen I step back and look at my life, I have to say it is pretty good. I get agitated when I lose perspective and magnify some particular bad thing. Also, as a Christian, this gives me the ultimate relief, because I can step back and say whatever unimaginably horrible thing is happening God is ultimately in control orchestrating things for maximal good, of which maximal good is also at some fundamental level in line with my intuition of maximal good, so I'll be satisfied in the end of it all. And if God doesn't exist, then nothing matters anyways, so why worry? Either way, no reason to worry in any ultimate sense. Sort of like the opposite of Pascal's wager. Worry has no rational basis regardless of one's worldview.
- anon9001 7y agoThat's funny, because as an atheist, I can step back and say that for whatever unimaginably horrible thing that's happening, it's all just a random walk. So I find satisfaction in that nothing matters anyways, and the best we can do is try to live a good life while we're here, and not take any of it too seriously. Because it's all random and largely out of my control, there's no rational basis for worry. It's nice to see a Christian that reached the same conclusion with a totally different process :)
- david-gpu 7y ago> I can step back and say that for whatever unimaginably horrible thing that's happening, it's all just a random walk Can you, really? Say your kid disappeared a week ago after soccer practice, and the police has no leads about their whereabouts. Could you really distance yourself and "not worry because everything is just a random walk"? Or would you spend all night restless, like a normal human being?
- yters 7y agoYes, that is the flaw in my reasoning. If someone used my reasoning to just check out and not be concerned about their children being abducted, then we'd rightly believe there is something wrong with that person. And if the parent became manic and left no stone unturned in their search for their child, like Taken, we'd be understanding. Yet, our world is not the world of Taken, and we are not ex-CIA agents capable of destroying anyone in our path. There are truly evil people in this world capable of harming us, whom we have no power to thwart. Think of people living in the land of a drug lord, who can swoop in and take their children if he feels like it. Or the Uighurs and Falun Gong of China, who are regularly captured and organ harvested, and there's nothing they can do about it. There is great evil in our world, and little we can do about it but do our best to fight it and never give up, and even then there is no hope of truly eradicating evil from our world. What is the appropriate response?
- Diederich 7y agoI was raised by my grandparents. They were born in the 1910s, and grew up in the midwest during the dust bowl and great depression. My grandfather lost most of his buddies in Guadalcanal and Burma during World War II, and, in his own words, fully expected to become worm food himself. He said little, but one phrase he did repeat more than any other was simple: "Any day you're breathing is a good day." To him, every day, every year, every one of the six decades past 1944 was a cherry on top gift. Growing up in the 1970s in the United States, conducting nuclear attack drills with regularity, many of us felt that it was fairly likely that we would be incinerated before our 21st birthdays. "Every day you're breathing is a good day." There are certainly limits to these 8 simple words, but radical gratitude is at their core. It's quite likely that everybody reading this post is having a FAR better life than 99.9% of every other human being who exists and has ever existed. I'm a generally happy person because, from a young age, I have chosen to focus on that simple truth. This perspective need not lead to complacence. Those who know me will say that I've always been a driven person, personally and professionally. Every day you're breathing is a good day. Thanks, grandpa, for the wise words. He would have celebrated his 100th birthday last month.
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- retube 7y agoIndeed. To select one data point: had you been born in Russia in 1923 you had only a 32% chance of making it to 1946. infant mortality, famine and then WW2 meant that 68% of the 1923 cohort died before they were 23.
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- Diederich 7y agoYup, it's good to point that sort of thing out. Most of the history that (I suspect) most of the readers of HN are exposed to will be quite western focused, and yes, a lot of things were fairly bad in the first half of the 20th century in the United States. But damn...things were fucking terrible in a lot of other parts of the world during that time. And more importantly, such terrible times existed, all over the world, going back forever.
- devmunchies 7y agoHayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) said (at around 70 as well), "The notion that one's goal in life is to be happy, that your own happiness is the goal... I just don't buy it" I think as we focus on mastery or craftsmanship, happiness finds us. Not everyone, but I'd say modern society is hedonistic—we seek happiness instead of achievement and get neither.
- Infinitesimus 7y ago> Not everyone, but I'd say modern society is hedonistic—we seek happiness instead of achievement and get neither. I agree on the hedonism but I'm not sure the happiness-achievement struggle is as simple. There are plenty of people who have achieved stuff my some metric (fame, wealth, etc.) and are still deeply unhappy
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago>we seek happiness instead of achievement and get neither. Probably because we've been conditioned (through billions of dollars, spent yearly, on marketing) to believe that happiness comes with the acquisition of certain items, status or experiences. We've conflated happiness with dopamine rushes and short-lived pleasure, and believe the feeling can be elongated by merely emulating the actions which either provided both or could provide more of both. Many of us have also altered our lives to support the above mentality - living in densely packed cities with air and sound pollution, or poor commutes, working around the clock, or in chaotic and stressful companies, doing ultimately purposeless or even outright destructive work, with the hopes of gaining more money or more status to fund the above, etc. Coupled with the increasing social isolation and division, the never-ending outrage we're told to feel over today's new issue, which we as a civilization are going through, it's not hard to see why people are finding it hard to say they're happy.
- sabas123 7y agoBut fuck this world if mastering your craft turns out to be just as stressful and painful as seeking happiness from material wealth.
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- Scapeghost 7y agoThe secret to a happy life is ignorance. As in not caring about stuff. There's too much depressing shit in the world, too many injustices happening to other people and lifeforms, to truly be happy with that knowledge even if your own life is perfect.
- theli0nheart 7y agoWell, there are some things you really ought to care about (health, friendships, etc.), otherwise you won’t have much of a reason to live.
- Scapeghost 7y agoYeah, make that not caring about bad stuff then :)
- r00fus 7y agoI would say it's more about sifting out the wheat from the chaff. Sturgeon's Law [1] is very applicable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- keyle 7y agoYou might find that stoicism is the better approach rather that pure ignorance. Living in ignorance and seeking to learn nothing is just fueling the dystopian world we're walking into. The most content people in the world are people who know everything there is to know about physics, philosophy, chemistry etc. That deep knowledge opens their eyes to the big picture. Ignore the news, but learn everything there is to know about humanity.
- aurbano 7y agoYou've managed to put my feelings in words really accurately. I don't know if this is the best way to be, but it works remarkably well!
- topmonk 7y agoI think human emotional state is nature's tool to get us to procreate and improve the chances of our offspring to survive. If at anytime we become truly happy this hurts these goals. For example, if an old man could be building a wall or an arsenal of bows an arrows, or inventing a better way to go fishing, his tribe would be more likely to survive. But if he just sat there, content to being alive, this is bad for his offsprings' future. You could say, well why can't he do these things and be happy at the same time? I can't really explain why not being happy leads to a better outcome for the safety and procreation of society in general, but I would assume that it must serve some purpose in that goal, or the whole concept of it would have been removed by evolution long ago. So, I think it's better just to resign yourself to the fact, barring using mind altering drugs, that you'll never be much happier than you were on average before, or much sadder, either. And as far as this 70 yo lady is concerned, I'd bet when this was written she was simply riding the high of accomplishing something, and probably soon crashed back down below her baseline, only to recover back to it sometime later.
- WalterBright 7y agoI'm basically a happy person. But that doesn't mean I'm content to sit on the beach. I can't stand that. I need to be doing something useful.
- topmonk 7y agoYes, but not everyone is like that. Just as some people are taller, smarter, more artistic, etc. some people have a baseline happiness that is higher than others. Consider yourself lucky.
- WalterBright 7y ago> Consider yourself lucky. I do. I also feel lucky in that while my eyesight and coordination are poor, my interests lie elsewhere so that doesn't impair me.
- Doingmything123 7y agoWhat if the human emotional state is a byproduct of human consciousness. In that way, it isn't something that can just be chopped off as unnecessary. Not to say that it doesn't help with procreation but I think your view point is a little too cynical. What does this suggest about people that don't have kids?
- toephu2 7y agoHaven't seen anyone talk about it but I believe happiness is partly hereditary. It's genetic (not totally, but it must play a big part, since depression is heredity[1]). Just think about yourself and your own natural happiness level. For my siblings and I, it seems very similar to our parents. Of course not everyone is this way but I definitely believe some people are born a lot happier than others. [1]actually the jury is still out on that one
- Doingmything123 7y agoIsn't this the nature vs nurture debate? It seems like this could just as easily be attributed to growing up in a good/happy family. Not to say that genes have no effect, I just think the environment you are raised in has a more significant effect.
- sabas123 7y agoIf bad genes are sufficient to make you depressed, then that doesn't imply they are also sufficient for making you any more happy in any point in time.
- UnpossibleJim 7y agoWeirdly enough, I was having a chat with my mom about this sort of thing last night (she's 69, not 70, so I'm not sure she's old enough for her opinion to count, yet). Both of us were chatting about our tendency to be solitary and only see family and a couple of core friends. Past that, we'll hide away in books and study for days and not notice, perfectly happy but when we have to come out of our houses we are out of sorts with the world and it scares us a little that we are so very happy in this hermit way. We have to force ourselves to be social, which is supposed to be the key to long life and happiness - and we try, but it comes so foreign to some. I have to wonder if these 'keys to happiness' are as universal as advertised. And for the record - we both are social, but it isn't our natural state =)
- lynnetye 7y agoIf socializing feels uncomfortable at first, but rewarding after, then it sounds like it's a good thing to "force" yourself to do. But if you're doing it just because you think you're supposed to and it actually isn't enjoyable, then maybe you can rethink what "being social" means. Or rather, rethink how you practice it. You don't have to leave your house in order to make friends, build relationships, or feel connected to other people! Invite people over. Or if you prefer 1-on-1 interactions, just invite one person over at a time. My husband is super introverted and will always choose being alone over being in a big group of people. I'm the complete opposite. But we're both still social animals. We both get energized by camaraderie, interesting discussions/debates, and human connection – we just have different preferences for how we engage w/ and achieve those things.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agowhich is supposed to be the key to long life and happiness I often wonder about that. I'm sure if someone is gregarious and outgoing then they would suffer if they were deprived of social contact. Is this the same for introverts? I wonder if any of the studies on this control for introversion/extroversion.
- doodlewind 7y agoMy grandpa is an agriculture scientist. He graduated from university before the Culture Revolution disaster, and still served the country selflessly. In the 1980s he won Chinese national science first prize. He raised me up and I am proud of him. All the difficulties and chaos that happened in this country doesn't affect his perseverance doing researches and making my family better off. He is still optimistic and healthy today. With your stories, I found that as human being, we are really seeking for and sharing similar happiness, which can go beyond ideology. Thanks for all your sharing again.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y agoFTA: "Making "have fun" the goal is the key that unlocks everything" This is enticing blanket statement. However, there are many things you'll need to do that will not or should not be fun. And if you fully believe this sentiment, during those times you are not having fun, you may feel like you're "doing it wrong" when this is just how it is and that's ok. Happiness is more related to contentment than fun.
- starpilot 7y agoThis is just an ad for a job board, "Key Values"
- starpilot 7y agoThis is why people make fun of HN. How to be a billionaire: Work hard! How to start a business: Start working, believe in yourself! Now that I've read OP article, I realize what I've been doing wrong all my life. I had disabled my "fun" switch. Glad someone finally pointed it out. Everything is so much better now, wow! Thank you!
- chillwaves 7y agoI value this comment. I find the original article akin to associating a good "soul" or a condemned "soul". It is hand waving simplicity against the complex reality of biological limitations. Some people simply have more endurance for the suffering of life, better motivation or better opportunity and environment. I want everyone to live to seek their potential, but there is no answer to finding peace (or happiness) in life. At least not an answer that can be communicated through words.
- sabas123 7y ago> It is hand waving simplicity against the complex reality of biological limitations. Some people simply have more endurance for the suffering of life, better motivation or better opportunity and environment. I expected the general population of HN to be well trained enough to instantly realize this. I guess it was my fault for tricking myself in believing I could find such a place.
- Tempest1981 7y agoAlthough the discussion here is pretty high quality.
- alexanderscott 7y agoclick bait for author’s software
- ken 7y agoEven as homogeneous as the set of HN readers tends to be, we can't agree on anything. The idea that there is a singular "key that unlocks everything" in life is downright bizarre. You probably wouldn't copy her diet or sleep schedule or religion or footwear or anything else. Why would anyone look to adopt her life philosophy? Monty Python and Douglas Adams mocked this very idea. The author has her MBTI on her profile, and it's nearly the opposite of mine. That suggests to me that her preferences are likely quite different from mine.
- hindsightRegret 7y agoIs this an article or a commercial? Psych, it's both!
- pi-squared 7y agoTLDR: Have fun. Otherwise: ad/clickbait for author's startup.
- gfs78 7y agoHappiness is not about achieving your goals or having a stress free life or anything related to wealth. Happiness is about being able to live in the present moment and share your life with the people that you love. Of course a minimum of wealth, health, etc. is needed and that minimum could be quite an effort to reach depending on where you start with. I´ve never met a happy unloved person no matter how rich or powerful.