11 ms·
I see this all around me. People are fixated on careers, hobbies (FOMO), spread thin by family obligations and errands. The truth is, happiness does not derive
by carabiner 6y ago
I see this all around me. People are fixated on careers, hobbies (FOMO), spread thin by family obligations and errands. The truth is, happiness does not derive from these things. This "busyness" is an invention. Life is simple, and happiness actually derives from having cats.
- catallergies 6y agoI'm allergic to cats. Pets also add complexity to life, e.g. when you want to go away for any length of time.
- onion2k 6y agoI'm also allergic to cats. I have two of them and live on antihistamines. It's worth it.
- earthboundkid 6y agoYou can leave cats alone for a weekend without an supervision, just a bowl of food and some water.
- williadc 6y agoYour cat isn't diabetic, I guess.
- cgriswald 6y agoMy friend did that. His cat ate all the food in a single sitting and was both fat and almost dead from not eating for two days.
- XorNot 6y agoIt doesn't work if you normally don't let your cat choose their meal times. But cats do develop food intelligence unlike dogs and will only eat what they need - the key is they have to have a reliable expectation that food is always available. An automatic feeder helps - since getting one there's always good in my cats bowl but she only eats a little at a time.
- jacobush 6y agoNot unlike dogs. Dogs are the same.
- hackerfromthefu 6y agoAhem, my dog will not eat and save his food for later when he's had too much food lately - I think that's what you're referring to as food intelligence. He often does this by burying the chicken drumstick under dirt and leaves, which I think is not uncommon for dogs.
- watwut 6y agoCat don't become fat from single large meal.
- rconti 6y agoWe do up to about 6 or 7 days. I often joke I'm not responsible enough to own a dog, and if I was going to get a dog, I might as well just have kids. The idea of having to find a way to take care of the dog when you want to go out of town is definitely a little anxiety-producing.
- chillwaves 6y agoHow do you deal with litter boxes?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoClean before the trip, clean after trip? It probably depends on the cat, but in case of ours, the litterbox can stay untouched for a week before it starts pooping outside of it. (However, we always arrange for someone to take an active care of the cat, including cleaning its litterbox, if we have to leave for more than 3 days.)
- rconti 6y agoso- we have a large "concrete mixing tub" we use as a litterbox for the 2 cats. it's roughly 36" x 24". It's in a 2-level wooden enclosure my father-in-law built just outside our house, with a cat door connecting it to the interior of our house. No reason it couldn't be used inside, of course, but it would eventually smell more inside, versus a smaller box you scoop more frequently. (of course, you can scoop a large box frequently too, it just takes longer). I tell myself I scoop it twice a week, but to be honest, it often ends up being more like "weekly", on garbage day. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Plasgad-Black-Large-Concrete-Mixing-Tub-887102C/205451585 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Plasgad-Black-Large-Concrete-Mix...
- chillwaves 6y agoOnce during college, I lived with roommates (and girlfriend) who loved cats. Think we had 3-4 indoor cats at one point and some other strays outside they liked to feed. We had 3 litter boxes and they had to be scooped daily or they quickly became disgusting. My point was that cats still need upkeep and it's really not fair to leave them living in filth for a week at a time just because someone can set up an auto-feeder. Any pet is going to be an inconvenience if properly cared for. Doesn't mean a person can't travel, but as mentioned they will likely need to ask or pay someone to come and check on the pets. Giant litter box is helpful but still needs to be regularly scooped. If someone can invent a feasible self cleaning litter box (or a good way to toilet train a cat) I would love to have a cat pet, but right now the idea of them using dirty litter boxes and walking on every surface in the house is just too unappealing.
- kyuudou 6y agoThey can even give you Toxoplasmosis! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoAnd there's a hypothesis that says toxoplasmosis can manipulate the behavior of their hosts to encourage risk-taking activities, including entrepreneurship, and cat owners are more likely to have an interest on startup companies [0][1]... Which brings us to Hacker News. Full Disclosure: I was a cat owner, but I'm on HN for its news and the forum, I'm not particularly interested in startup companies... [0] Toxoplasmosis has been linked to a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial behavior in people who get infected https://www.businessinsider.com/parasite-in-cat-poop-linked-to-entrepreneurial-behavior-2018-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/parasite-in-cat-poop-linked-... [1] There's a Really Weird Link Between Cats And Entrepreneurs https://www.sciencealert.com/toxoplasma-gondii-correlation-entrepreneurial-characteristics-global-economics https://www.sciencealert.com/toxoplasma-gondii-correlation-e...
- tareqak 6y agoThere is cat food that exists or is being developed that should help somewhat. [0] https://www.purinainstitute.com/science-of-nutrition/neutralizing-allergens/allergic-burden https://www.purinainstitute.com/science-of-nutrition/neutral... [1] https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(19)30349-5/fulltext https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(19)30349-5/ful...
- mStreamTeam 6y agoThis is funny because the most unhappy and anxious people I know are cat owners.
- Scoundreller 6y agoThink of how unhappy they'd be without cats!
- FpUser 6y agoI am a cat owner and happy like a clam ;)
- itisit 6y agoThis is what your cat wants you to think
- lacrimacida 6y agoNot true from my experience. All cat owners I know are relaxed go with the flow type of people. Few dog owners I know are as you describe but the rest don’t make the pattern significat to notice. Maybe the anxious people you know attempt to rid their anxiety by soothing themselves with cats and it is not working properly for them. I personally love cats and their presence gives me a relaxed attitude but would never have one in my apparent, the smell is too much to bear. And hair everywhere...
- nathanvanfleet 6y agoI remember talking to a coworker friend of mine who was a cat owner. She said that she didn't understand dogs. They just loved you unconditionally all the time no matter what. So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes. Kind of illustrated things to me.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoYou gotta earn it with a cat. Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love Cats are for people who have the kind of levels of self-confidence that makes the unconditional love of a dog both suffocatingly annoying and suspicious.
- lallysingh 6y agoMy cats are a pain the ass. They provide nothing for the effort and cost put into them.
- mrfox321 6y agoWhat effort and cost? They're so cheap and easy to take care of. Maybe I'm being too generous since I am using dogs as a reference point.
- adrianN 6y agoTravel becomes a lot harder if you have a cat.
- boraoztunc 6y agoTravel becomes almost impossible when you have a cat. Can't leave decent amount of time to anywhere, sometimes just possibilities of what may happen is enough.
- rimliu 6y agoGet a cat, save the planet!
- 4ggr0 6y agoSave the planet and simultaneously eradicate all the birds around you.
- romanoderoma 6y agoNot cheap nor easy They are incredibly annoying But are funny That's why people keep them (I got two) Edit: if they can roam freely they are also a threat to many other life forms and bio diversity
- seppin 6y ago> Edit: if they can roam freely they are also a threat to many other life forms and bio diversity They are the most prolific mass murderers of animals in the western world. My vegetarian (cat owning) friend got very upset when I pointed this out.
- m463 6y agoyou misspelled dogs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fogihujy 6y agoAnd chickens!
- gexla 6y agoHappiness has been debunked by the replication crisis.
- toper-centage 6y agoLife is simple* * YMMV. You might need to live in a developed world that assures you won't be left to die, that is not at war, that you can find a way to sustain yourself, and that you're not involved in any accidents that drastically change your otherwise simple life.
- pritovido 6y agoI have been in countries at war, like Congo, and life there was the simplest thing you could have. In fact, all the complexity appears when there is peace. People do not save or study or anything secondary when there is war. Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is? When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed? When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)? You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that. A kid without beard with an automatic gun does not like or respect you? You are dead. People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple. In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died. Nobody gave a dam. Cars were circulating as usual around the dead person. It was the most brutal thing I ever saw in my life, including Congo, in Congo people cared more about each other. It is the developed world that is complex and sophisticated. People work for abstract things like "career", "pensions", "tenure" or even paper money that are promises that don't really exist as real things but really are symbols of trust in the society. BTW you feel alive living at the moment and I personally miss some part of that, even when I was risking my life.
- superasn 6y agoYou know what drives me crazy? All these people talking about how great technology is and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time if nobody uses it? It just turns into more busy work, right? You never hear somebody say, "Well, with the time I’ve saved by using my Word Processor, I’m gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang out.” (Jesse)
- ksec 6y agoI am getting "smart" technology fatigue. I want old fashion technology, mechanical, analog. Whiteboard, Pen and Pencil, Dump TV.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYeah, "smart" is just a marketing buzzword. It's not an intrinsic property of technology, either. It's just businesses that want to take advantage of you in new and more abusive ways. Don't let them.
- WetMinister 6y agoAlso applies to the very tired ”work smarter, not harder” saying: it never means working less with the time you gain but actually means ”work smarter so you can work even more”
- xmprt 6y agoAt some point, you stop working though right? And all that smart work probably earned you enough money to retire early compared to someone working a dead end job.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThat depends on your career goals and your attitude towards the concept of "buffer time", though.
- collyw 6y agoThankfully the trend of boasting about "multitasking" has died. A decade or two back everyone seemed to think it was a good idea.
- growlist 6y ago> happiness actually derives from having cats Not if you're part of the massive destruction of wildlife wrought by these biodiversity annihilators masquerading as cute pets. 'As an invasive species[1] and superpredator,[2] they do considerable ecological damage.[2] In Australia, hunting by cats helped to drive at least 20 native mammals to extinction,[3] and continues to threaten at least 124 more.[3] Their introduction has caused the extinction of at least 33 endemic species on islands throughout the world.[2] Feral and domestic cats kill billions of birds in the United States every year, where songbird populations continue to decline.[4]' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife