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Not everyone lives to seek happiness. There's no reason to view seeking "success" or any other mode of living as illness just because it's not going to achieve
by jameslk 6y ago
Not everyone lives to seek happiness. There's no reason to view seeking "success" or any other mode of living as illness just because it's not going to achieve happiness.
I don't think most want to be simply happy anyway. A lot of people want to have kids. Is this because they want to be happy? Is buying a house about seeking happiness? Is the author writing this article to be happy? Is reading Hacker News going to make you happy?
It's usually a mixture of motivations. There's far easier ways to be happy than most choose, but happiness is not the only reason to live.
- rewq4321 6y agoAgreed. Some people are motivated by wanting to have a significant positive impact on the world, and they're fine if that makes me a little less happy overall. I think that's great - especially when it's someone who has a lot of privilege/power. We should be encouraging that over pursuit of happiness/pleasure.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y agoYeah back in the day the pursuit of happiness used to be a vice, hedonism almost. Now it's seen as the ultimate life purpose, wtf.
- bladegash 6y agoBack in what day? Aristotle spent considerable time explaining how to achieve eudaimonia. In more recent history, humanist psychologists (e.g., Maslow, Rogers, etc.) have suggested people have an inbuilt tendency towards self actualization (which is roughly equivalent to happiness). I’m sure there are many more examples, but I find it unlikely that happiness has been seriously considered as a vice.
- n4r9 6y agoPleasure (i.e. self-reported, short-term happiness) and actualisation/flourishing seem to be very different things to me. Or at least that's one of the lessons I learned from the novel Brave New World.
- bladegash 6y agoI haven’t read the book you mentioned, but from my opinion derived after studying Maslow and Rogers, is that actualization refers to the result of factors leading to a fully functioning human, and by proxy, a happy/content/at peace one. If you ever get a chance, look into some of Maslow’s explanations on the characteristics of an individual who has self-actualizated. There are other interesting humanistic psychologists such as Dabrowski that are fascinating as well.
- n4r9 6y ago> happy/content/at peace Is that the same as immediate pleasure though?
- CM30 6y agoNot sure about that. Utilitarianism was around for a pretty long time, and I'm sure folks like Jeremy Bentham would probably disagree that the pursuit of happiness is/was a vice.
- sinsterizme 6y agoI disagree, I think every decision we make is ultimately pleasure seeking (or equivalently, suffering-minimizing). That doesn’t mean we are right about what actions we should perform to optimize our wellbeing, just that how we act necessarily reflects our beliefs in what will make us happy. Buying a house for example: We think it will provide us safety and comfort, a place to raise children, etc. Creating children is desired in itself through evolutionary impulses, and we see that manifested by desire, seeking purpose, leaving a legacy, etc.
- jameslk 6y agoHappiness, in its usage in the article and by me, is not pleasure. Your disagreement is not with my point
- sinsterizme 6y agoI am suggesting that happiness indeed boils down to pleasure