17 ms·

Steps Towards Happiness (2015)

230 points by wheresvic4 5y ago

HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
Step 10 seems to be about equanimity. If you find it hard to be equanimous, there is very old practice that will help you cultivate it. https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the_path_to_nibbana__d_johnson_f18.pdf https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the...
joshxyz 5y ago
Damn, rest in peace hintjens
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
The intentions there are good, but reads bit unrealistic in some places. Being a boomer, author doesn't realise how far financially he is then many people who are younger. > Stop wasting your time on commuting, boring jobs, meetings, TV. Do only things that you feel are worthwhile, with people you like. If this means a cut in income, so be it. TV - sure, commuting - thanks to COVID only, the rest - sorry, but I would like a house/pension/family.
- 59125throwaya 5y ago
  Worth taking a 5 second look into Peter's background. He was overall a pretty amazing dude.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > If this means a cut in income, so be it I mean, if I had the luxury of taking a cut in income without having to sell my house or whatever, I wouldn't mind. But as it stands, it's a luxury I and many others just can't afford. And I don't 'waste' my time on commutes either, WFH and all. My commute, once the office is open again, is actually the main exercise I get (20-30 minute bike ride)
- jackhiggs 5y ago
  I agree, but I'm going to go in harder. The author seems to think that people have infinite time. Many points require an allocation of time that most people - in particular those with families and caring responsibilities - do not have. Remove bad actors? What if the bad actor is the mother/father of your kids? What if they're a parent who requires care you/they can't afford so you have to do it yourself? It's all so simple isn't it. 10 steps to banality. It could be rewritten as "have enough money to do what you want without being overly concerned about the consequences, because you can make the consequences someone else's problem with your money"
  - bremac 5y ago
    For what it's worth, Peter wrote this a little more than a year before he died due to metastatic cancer. I suspect he understood quite well that time is finite.
  - fnord123 5y ago
    The author was from Belgium before he passed away five years ago from cancer. His perspective may be rooted in the Belgian experience where health care is affordable, there is a social safety net, and cheap access to mental health support. If you live in a place where you must care for your parent because professional care is not affordable then perhaps look into organizing or supporting political will to make it affordable (4. Be part of bigger things). And if you live in the US where this political will is destroyed before conception, then I guess find another blog post to help guide you to happiness.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    I think the author - who passed away unfortunately - has more than enough to say about dealing with bad actors. Read his book The Psychopath Code.
  - tavish1 5y ago
    just replying to the part about bad actors - he is talking specifically about narcissists and psychopaths. If you have to cut out your parent because of some inconvenience (and not because they are narcissists and severely affect your life), then that makes you not so empathetic, and that is absolutely not what he argues for in his book psychopath code.
- stinos 5y ago
  Just like in e.g. programming 'design principles' are called principles, not 'hard design rules all of which you must strive to follow to the letter' I'm pretty sure the author's intention is for these 10 things to be interpreted like the former, not the latter (also see sibling comments).
yesbut 5y ago
Anger and happiness are extremes. Shoot for contentment.
kubb 5y ago
In a world where you have to be worried about where you're going to live, none of this applies. Survival takes priority.
- amelius 5y ago
  Yes, perhaps this is a better framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    Maslow put sex in the wrong place and completely omitted wifi. A more serious challenge is that the relative importance of the different levels isn't fixed, but varies according to environmental circumstances, individual desires and social context / pressure.
virtualritz 5y ago
'Commute less' should be taken with a grain of salt unless one talks about cars. Any form of transport I take where I am not driving the vehicle myself gives me time to read, relax, think – even meditate (trains are great for this). I know for a fact that I read most books/month in my life in times I had a job that included at least 20 mins of commute (one way) on public transport.
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  For you, perhaps. Public transport for me involves having to fight for a space in an incredibly crowded environment, having to take multiple buses or a bus + tram, it's expensive, smelly and a vector for illnesses. I read a lot of books on my commute, but for me the cons outweigh the pros by quite a margin. No thanks!
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Hmm, in my time we’d have said something like that builds character.
    - laputan_machine 5y ago
      I commuted from the age of 11 until 21, when I had finally had enough of the BS to buy a bicycle and learn how to navigate the pot-hole-ridden roads of UK cities, figure out how to avoid getting killed by tired motorists and how to quickly fix a punctured tyre in -4c. Those things build character. Sitting in a bus just breeds resentment.
- enriquto 5y ago
  I'd say that even if you "drive" yourself, the commute can be a pleasurable experience, depending on the circumstances. I for one love my commute (which is a calm promenade in the woods on my bicycle). But this is very specific: even a much shorter commute but inside the city traffic and among cars and red lights would be a nightmare.
- michaelgrafl 5y ago
timdaub 5y ago
Hintjens is quoted too little these days considering how great many of his speeches and essays are. To me, he's the epistemic authority on developing software collaboratively and following his principles has aided my career. "Social Architecture" should be read by any aspiring open source developer.
drclau 5y ago
Every time I hear or read about happiness, I remember this quote from Thomas Metzinger. I hope you’ll find it useful, too: “Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.” — “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self“, Thomas Metzinger
- lukebuehler 5y ago
  Well, if you want a really reductionist view of happiness, which also happens to be largely true, you could say: have children.
  - j4hdufd8 5y ago
    What does that mean?
    - lukebuehler 5y ago
      The quote in the parent comment says that the whole hedonic machinery within us is a result of natural selection, of which conscious happiness is just a side effect. Then why not just go ahead and do what that machinery drives you do to: go and have offspring. Chances are that this is the nexus where most happiness can be found.
      - j4hdufd8 5y ago
        Wow, that... makes a lot of sense. It's one of those things I already knew intuitively but couldn't formalize why.
  - 5y ago
log101 5y ago
I don't know why but the first step--invest in your senses seemed to be most insightful one.
dukoid 5y ago
Re: "Finish your projects": Don't turn your hobby or side project into another "work": Keep projects small or modular.
have_faith 5y ago
11. Avoid treading a path of prescriptive platitudes. Yes I see the irony.
antihero 5y ago
11: Use HTTPS on your websites :)
- pietherr 5y ago
  The author died 5 years a ago, when https was not as common as it is now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens
  - antihero 5y ago
    Ah, shoot :( That's such a shame! (that they died, not that they didn't ever get to use HTTPS).
    - zoobab 5y ago
      At least there is no cert which expire. And no authority to obey. Pieter was my best friend, a great loss. But his writings are here to stay, i guess he started to write some books after 2009, when he got his first duct bill cancer.
      - rambambram 5y ago
        His book The Psychopath Code helped me tremendously. I remember also reading some other books from him. Good stuff, food for thought. A great loss indeed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
itistricky 5y ago
The link is weird. What is :99 at the end of it?
- alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
  It's part of the URL path. schema: http, domain: hintjens.com, url path: /blog:99 It looks a bit like a port number, but it's in the wrong place. For that you'd want http://hintjens.com:99/blog http://hintjens.com:99/blog
- speedgoose 5y ago
  Probably the identifier of the article. A long time ago, we used to use auto-incremented positive integers straight from the database instead of UUID or adjective-adjective-noun.
BasDirks 5y ago
I don't like his proposed end goal. His happiness sounds like a mere absense of pain, but other methods will get you there more reliably. I like the first items on his list: go into the world and mess around, but then he begins to prescribe mental cleanliness: finish your plate, associate only with good people, don't cling to material possessions. It's like he's picking arbitrary chapters from Hesse's Siddhartha. I feel in an uncanny valley of dogma.
- uneoneuno 5y ago
  So many of those themes are found outside the Gita, often they can be uncovered thru a good life. But the cohesion is missing - it does feel like the author cut out small bits of Dogma from many 'religions' as they were uncovered or found relevant, informed by their experience. The main point I find interesting is that each of us does this 'pick and choose'.
- gonehome 5y ago
  He was dying as he wrote this (Pieter Hintjens died from cancer in 2016). I’m happy to see his blog here again, but I suspect what he was going through at the time influenced his writing.
jll29 5y ago
There are some pieces of good advice in there, but it is ultimately a selfish list. "Mingle with others" because it makes _you_ happy implies _using_ other people; a better way is to _serve_ others ("Love thy neighbor like yourself"), which leads to a deeper happiness based on purpose.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  They do talk about being a part of a bigger thing — to me this implies serving a greater cause, serving others in need.
6ardamu 5y ago
There are several mentions that Peter died from metastatic cancer. This is not entirely accurate. He choose to leave this world using euthanasia as his last tweet shows[0]. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium. [0]: https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=20 https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=20
pdimitar 5y ago
I don't disagree with the article in principle, but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations. At 41 y/o I have arrived at most of the same wisdom but I can't see how and where can I implement it. As others commenters said, I wish I could take a pay cut and work on things I love more than my current job. I absolutely can't afford it; not because I can't take the income hit month by month -- I surely can, let's not forget us the programmers are rather privileged -- but I can't afford not saving, especially having in mind where does the world seem to go (potential economical crisis on the horizon). If I arrive at a point in my life where I can unquestionably abide by the philosophy described in the article, I might cry emotionally, while yelling of pain and happiness at the same time. For now though, it's still not happening. (And that's leaving aside the fact that I don't necessarily agree that material minimalism leads to happiness necessarily.)
- TimPC 5y ago
  Financially sure we face more pressure. But let’s be honest that modern society is practically a utopia compared to being drafted into WW2 and facing carnage and death.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    Cherry picking makes no argument any favours. :P I agree on WW2, sure, but after WW2? I've spoken with 30+ elders and they all unanimously agree that life in general was much, much better than today. Mostly in terms of upwards social mobility. An insane amount of very regular bank tellers could afford house, two apartments and 2-3 cars. And to put 3 kids in an university. Nowadays that's a very questionable endeavour.
    - groby_b 5y ago
      I'd strongly suggest looking for supporting data. If you talk to people, you will inevitably hear that "the good old times" were better than what we have. In the 1950s, the average house was still ~3 years of average income. Cars were about 9 months of income. So the "regular bank teller" with a house, 2 apartments, and 3 cars... there's something missing in the story. Let's not even get into the fact that life was significantly worse if you happened to be not white or male. Black people didn't have their voting rights significantly curtailed via Jim Crow laws. Married women didn't have the ability to have their own money. Beating your spouse was A-OK. Yes, social mobility was better (for white men). Universities were cheaper (a year of tuition was still ~1-2 months of income). Medical care was... not so good. Nutrition a non-existent concept. (And before we go to the "all natural food", quick reminder that the 1950s were the decade of TV dinners and truly atrocious recipes) The 50's certainly had less of the constant stream of demands that our current time has. It's not like it was purely worse, or the "golden age" image wouldn't hold. But as a net, across the population, we've seen improvement. We are backsliding the last ~20 years, absolutely. But we're still not in 1950.
refurb 5y ago
To me it’s all about expectations (realistic or not) and wether they are met. Expect to be poor and if you hit middle class you’ll be happy and grateful. Expect to be rich and the same outcome will produce depression. Not to sound like a stoicism fanatic, but that’s one aspect that helps. Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is. And yes, acknowledgement that humans evolved to never be satisfied with their current situation helps as well. Breaking free of “things need to get better” is great for mental health but means your also fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I agree with your comment a lot. Don't think of me as a nitpicker, I simply want to add a nuance to this statement: > Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is. I have observed many people having trouble with that and I agree with you that this is very much needed in our lives to give us some humility. That being said, to some people -- myself included -- this happened way too many times and they can't have appreciation through that vector anymore. My brain switched to "I am sick of hearing this! I will level up and won't have to think about never being threatened with living under a bridge ever again!". Of course, the hedonistic treadmill the article mentions is very much real -- we are never satisfied with what we have. However, it's very possible to arrive at the mindset where you are like "eh, I'd feel a bit better if I had a $500K in the bank and not only $200K" but objectively, when you've grown up and lived in a poor country for most of your life, I think it's easier to NOT get stressed about the statement in quotes. And I agree on the evolution part. I'd theorize this mindset of ours has evolved because we developed in a very harsh environment (ice age) and we wanted to optimize our lives for less work and more leisure. Ironically, nowadays humanity at large fails miserably at just that... but that's really a very different topic.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Interesting comment on appreciation. It’s not easy by any means and I’ve found myself fall into thought patterns where I start to feel like I’ve been cheated by life. But at least for me, a lot of it is driven by distraction. Work becomes overwhelming. Or family becomes too hard to juggle. So caught up in what’s in front of you that you lose the big picture. Where I’ve found clarity is in the “being present mindset”. Giving my son a bath and noticing just how much he changes everyday and what that experience must be like for him reminds me that time is fleeting. Often what we value most in the future are the experiences of the past. And taking the time to truly connect with my son will be one of those things I’ll look back on in 10 years and truly appreciate that I took that time. And don’t get me wrong. The hedonistic treadmill is the reason we went to the moon. Never being satisfied will drive humanity to do incredible things, but it will also drive people to depression. It’s neither good nor bad but just is. Acknowledging that and seeing it in yourself can help immensely.
farseer 5y ago
>>Above all, explore the world without desire or demand Go all Yoda eh?
SMAAART 5y ago
Forget being happy. Happiness is a high, therefore temporary. Seek satisfaction, satisfaction from a job well done after long hard hours of work. OP touches on this in: > 2. Do things you are bad at - Learning makes us feel alive. Challenge yourself, and keep proving you can learn. Learn to juggle, to hold your breath underwater for longer, to solve a Rubik's cube. Learn to play music and play for yourself. Learn to paint and draw.
circlefavshape 5y ago
> Want nothing, accept everything This can be a big obstacle to contentment for me and many people I know. It's just so easy to think "What do I want right now/in the future?" and then get down-in-the-dumps because reality doesn't correspond to this totally arbitrary thing you just imagined
zcw100 5y ago
Every time I read something like this I always think they have the causality backward which I think that anyone who has ever suffered from depression can attest to. The food doesn't make you happy, you're predisposed to finding happiness. You wouldn't say that bad food makes you unhappy would you? Disappointed maybe but under normal circumstances it wouldn't cause unhappiness. If you were depressed it might, and you would find it difficult to find happiness in even good food. Everyone has heard the story of the person who toils under great hardship and still manages to find joy in life. That's sort of the opposite of depression and it isn't necessarily good. People who are content to toil in hardship might find it difficult to motivate themselves to change their situation. It's a balance between the internal and external. Even the definition of what is good food is malleable. The chef or food critic might be repulsed by Taco Bell while someone else might enjoy every bite.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Perhaps it is in part the process of making your own food that is also therapeutic. I think we fill our days with positive and negative "karma" all the time and are unaware of it, losing clarity of even the bad karma as so much background noise. Perhaps it is only in times of crisis that we are specifically tuned to see the accumulative effect of the negative karma, can see it for what it is. I feel that way myself anyway — and then try to redouble my efforts going forward of pushing away those detrimental influences.
- Thursday24 5y ago
  Agree with this. The logic behind this is simple. The human being is part of the universe, hence subject to causation & perceived chance. The human being doesn't get to "choose" the architecture of the body at birth, no choice in breathing, the eyes are going to blink and so on. And the idea of "volition" goes out of the window the moment we ask a question such as: "where did this prior thought come from?" The universe is a massive machine and men and women are little machines operating in service to the larger whole. Pain, pleasure, happiness and depression are universal mechanisms which allow totality to function, but human beings in general tend to construct a personal narrative. Once one fully accepts causation, then the struggle goes away little by little, since the "personal story" dissipates, and only "universal law in motion" remains.
andygroundwater 5y ago
This advice is all well and good, but what happens to your state of internal bliss when one of you a-hole neighbors deliberately brings their dog to do its business on your front lawn. No amount to karmic happiness will stop you from wanting just retribution.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  Pieter was a friend of mine, and he certainly wasn’t conflict averse. If something bothered him, he would do something about it. He used to bring a Nerf gun to conferences just to shoot down people’s drones because he found them annoying.
tromp 5y ago
These two sentences jumped out to me: > Nothing makes us happier than other people. > Nothing can make us more miserable than other people.
lebuffon 5y ago
For happiness: "Do more, want less" Dali Lama
globular-toast 5y ago
I agree with all of the points, apart from one: > Do things you are bad at I would actually offer the opposite advice: do things you are good at. The world today is full of "anyone can do anything" and awards for participation etc. But nothing feels better than being good at what you do. I attribute a large amount of my happiness to doing a job that I'm actually good at. I'm better than 99% of people at doing what I do. I don't feel like I'm struggling. I don't feel like I'm inadequate. I feel like I'm useful. I feel appreciated and respected. I'm all for continual learning and pushing one's boundaries, but start by finding what you are good at. Otherwise you're forever going to feel mediocre and out of your depth.
- simonswords82 5y ago
  You should probably do a combination of things you are good and bad at.
vjust 5y ago
>10. Want nothing, accept everything "Accept everything" was a big one for me. It helped me deal with anxiety about future, amid uncertainty.
MauranKilom 5y ago
I personally subscribe to the advice given in The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck: You only get to choose your struggles in life. Happiness is the transient feeling in having dealt with a problem. You'll never run out of problems to deal with, therefore, the one thing to care about is what problems you end up engaging with (i.e. "give a f*ck about"). To that end, the ten items presented in the article are decent pointers towards "good" problems you might want to have (and which "bad" problems you'd want to avoid). It's part framing and part steering your life circumstances.
- Rendello 5y ago
  A family member visited recently and talked about family drama and how she doesn't want to be a part of it. I realized how I had went years without hearing anything about these parts of the family, and that I was being exposed to the drama by way of "I don't want to be involved with the drama". By engaging I was only stoking the drama further, despite the fact that I don't know these people and they don't know me. Relatedly, I really love this line from Meditations: A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"
- nicbou 5y ago
  This book would have made an excellent article. Nonetheless it has a great premise: you can apply the KonMari method to obligations and get rid of the ones that don't spark joy. Don't confuse it with the similarly titled book with Mark Manson, which reads as if Shia LaBeouf's motivational video was turned into a book.
- lgndisgnbdgg 5y ago
  I have a question. How did you make it through more than 5 pages of that book? It reads like an 8th grader that is trying his hardest to let you know he's cool and smart enlightened as fuck bro and has to curse every other line. I was cringing so hard in the first pages there is no way I could read it. It reads as a sort of pop culture, edgy (and trendy) mindfulness / Buddhism comboniation in a self help package. The slew of self help books with sht and fck in the titles after this books success is amusing though.
heywherelogingo 5y ago
One step toward happiness: dismiss these articles. My default browser page shows these endlessly - how to happy, how to worry less, how to live longer, how to get over this, how to embrace that, ... nine times out of ten highly uninformative, targeting every possible little concern or fear, an incessant bombardment of anxiety media. I immediately dismiss all anxiety media.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I should have thought these were anti-anxiety media but perhaps not for everyone. I enjoy these reminders about what is important in life and find I agree with their tenets (just unable to put them into practice to the degree I would like).
Communitivity 5y ago
The man is still a beacon, after dying in 2016, as an engineer and as a person. He wasn't perfect, but he is responsible for a number of things. He co-founded ZeroMQ, created AMQP, was CEO of Wikidot, helped create RestMS and wrote many insightful and illuminating articles, especially on living well and dying well. Every once in a while I find something he wrote that I haven't seen and save it. This is one of those.
jvanderbot 5y ago
for a solidly backed, thoroughly researched book on living fulfilling lives that is not Positive Psychology, read Happiness Hypothesis.
vgchh 5y ago
Few changes that have helped me greatly towards a happier life are: 1. Cutting out alcohol 2. 15 minute meditation before sleeping 3. Regular exercise - e.g from YouTube 4. Eating less…sort of intermittent fasting 5. Reminding myself to do actions/thoughts that my soul would approve of. Others can do what their soul approves of or not. This has been especially useful. For example I am no longer hurt if someone is being mean. Ultimately they have to be a witness to their soul and are probably just having a bad day. I can’t get inside them and fix it for them. Edit: These steps have essentially made me more alert - more capable if you will. I am able to deal better with good and bad.
- kcrx 5y ago
  I like this a lot. I’ve struggled with… let’s call it unhappiness a lot in my life. I spent years trying to work through deep emotional things intellectually, but the things that really got me on the right track were: 1. Sleeping 8 hours a day 2. Eating less processed foods & more fruits and vegetables 3. Walking Simple things, and they all took time to turn into habits, but better health/more energy eventually made everything else so much easier.
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    Maybe learning what kills happiness (reference to that post on how to kill pilots) leads to happiness?
    - kcrx 5y ago
      I’m going to borrow that way of thinking about it. Removing obstacles, letting go, etc.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        That's the way to go. Very often if we are asked "What do you want?" we can't give a good answer, whereas "What do you dislike / hate?" almost always gets an instant answer. In this regard I just succumbed to this brain quirk so I prefer to find 5 things this month that irk me and do my best to remove them from my life, as opposed to meditating hours every day trying to find those 3-4 ultimate things that will instantly make me happy. Better chase the mouse in your feet than to try and find the elephant beyond the horizon.
kovek 5y ago
Tape your mouth shut when sleeping. Search google/youtube “Mouth taping for sleep”
biophysboy 5y ago
Another thing I think that is worth remembering for nerdy, passionate, and driven people is that sometimes the sacrifice you are ostensibly making for your future happiness is worthless or may even backfire. For the longest time, I felt that persevering past my exhaustion point was virtuous and would pay dividends in the long run. And there were cases where this was true (e.g. meeting a deadline), but otherwise it was just false. Not only was my short-term happiness harmed, but it wasn't even worthwhile. I was working slower and remembering less.
- go_elmo 5y ago
  In the end no one profits from this. Companies profit more from fit employees instead of overstressed ones.
- nostromo95 5y ago
  Montaigne often talks about this, but something that's true about virtue is that you can't disconnect the action from the motivation. Often what on the surface appears like virtuous fortitude is actually obstinacy and lack of self-awareness / imagination!
zephyr9 5y ago
> To be happy you must deal with negative emotions. Learn to recognize these in yourself, and deal with them. Anger, self-pity, jealousy, fear, hate, loneliness… set them aside, and let happiness take their place. And here I was just not setting aside my negative emotions like a sucker.
- runeg 5y ago
  More emphasis on the dealing with the emotions, and setting them aside is a later byproduct of doing the work.
mitchbob 5y ago
(2015)
cblconfederate 5y ago
We need a neuroscientific definition of happiness before embarking in dubious exercises
areichert 5y ago
A few years ago, I was dealing with some issues around anxiety, so I made a little app for myself to track my daily activities against my mental health (in the form of 3 assessments [0] measuring depression, anxiety, and well-being) I spent about 9 months logging, and found these to be the top 5 activities that improved my overall happiness: - 1. Strenuous exercise (e.g. going hard at the gym, playing a sport, taking a dance class, etc.) was a clear winner. (Going for a walk or doing light bodyweight exercises at home helped a bit, but not nearly as much.) - 2. Creative activities (e.g. writing, playing music, programming), particularly when I could get into a "flow" state. - 3. Reading long-form content (for at least 20 mins). - 4. Meditating (for at least 5 mins). - 5. Spending time with close friends (as opposed to e.g. going to parties with acquaintances). A lot of these things are fairly obvious (and may also vary a bit by personality type) but being able to see concrete, quantifiable results made it much easier to adopt habits that made me happier in the long run! [0] https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/migrations/20180531105505_assessments.js#L14-L91 https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/...
begueradj 5y ago
finally some genuine found the manual of happiness.

230 points by wheresvic4 5y ago

Step 10 seems to be about equanimity. If you find it hard to be equanimous, there is very old practice that will help you cultivate it. https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the_path_to_nibbana__d_johnson_f18.pdf https://library.dhammasukha.org/uploads/1/2/8/6/12865490/the...

joshxyz 5y ago

Damn, rest in peace hintjens

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

The intentions there are good, but reads bit unrealistic in some places. Being a boomer, author doesn't realise how far financially he is then many people who are younger. > Stop wasting your time on commuting, boring jobs, meetings, TV. Do only things that you feel are worthwhile, with people you like. If this means a cut in income, so be it. TV - sure, commuting - thanks to COVID only, the rest - sorry, but I would like a house/pension/family.

59125throwaya 5y ago
Worth taking a 5 second look into Peter's background. He was overall a pretty amazing dude.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> If this means a cut in income, so be it I mean, if I had the luxury of taking a cut in income without having to sell my house or whatever, I wouldn't mind. But as it stands, it's a luxury I and many others just can't afford. And I don't 'waste' my time on commutes either, WFH and all. My commute, once the office is open again, is actually the main exercise I get (20-30 minute bike ride)
jackhiggs 5y ago
I agree, but I'm going to go in harder. The author seems to think that people have infinite time. Many points require an allocation of time that most people - in particular those with families and caring responsibilities - do not have. Remove bad actors? What if the bad actor is the mother/father of your kids? What if they're a parent who requires care you/they can't afford so you have to do it yourself? It's all so simple isn't it. 10 steps to banality. It could be rewritten as "have enough money to do what you want without being overly concerned about the consequences, because you can make the consequences someone else's problem with your money"
- bremac 5y ago
  For what it's worth, Peter wrote this a little more than a year before he died due to metastatic cancer. I suspect he understood quite well that time is finite.
- fnord123 5y ago
  The author was from Belgium before he passed away five years ago from cancer. His perspective may be rooted in the Belgian experience where health care is affordable, there is a social safety net, and cheap access to mental health support. If you live in a place where you must care for your parent because professional care is not affordable then perhaps look into organizing or supporting political will to make it affordable (4. Be part of bigger things). And if you live in the US where this political will is destroyed before conception, then I guess find another blog post to help guide you to happiness.
- rambambram 5y ago
  I think the author - who passed away unfortunately - has more than enough to say about dealing with bad actors. Read his book The Psychopath Code.
- tavish1 5y ago
  just replying to the part about bad actors - he is talking specifically about narcissists and psychopaths. If you have to cut out your parent because of some inconvenience (and not because they are narcissists and severely affect your life), then that makes you not so empathetic, and that is absolutely not what he argues for in his book psychopath code.
stinos 5y ago
Just like in e.g. programming 'design principles' are called principles, not 'hard design rules all of which you must strive to follow to the letter' I'm pretty sure the author's intention is for these 10 things to be interpreted like the former, not the latter (also see sibling comments).

yesbut 5y ago

Anger and happiness are extremes. Shoot for contentment.

kubb 5y ago

In a world where you have to be worried about where you're going to live, none of this applies. Survival takes priority.

amelius 5y ago
Yes, perhaps this is a better framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  Maslow put sex in the wrong place and completely omitted wifi. A more serious challenge is that the relative importance of the different levels isn't fixed, but varies according to environmental circumstances, individual desires and social context / pressure.

virtualritz 5y ago

'Commute less' should be taken with a grain of salt unless one talks about cars. Any form of transport I take where I am not driving the vehicle myself gives me time to read, relax, think – even meditate (trains are great for this). I know for a fact that I read most books/month in my life in times I had a job that included at least 20 mins of commute (one way) on public transport.

laputan_machine 5y ago
For you, perhaps. Public transport for me involves having to fight for a space in an incredibly crowded environment, having to take multiple buses or a bus + tram, it's expensive, smelly and a vector for illnesses. I read a lot of books on my commute, but for me the cons outweigh the pros by quite a margin. No thanks!
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Hmm, in my time we’d have said something like that builds character.
  - laputan_machine 5y ago
    I commuted from the age of 11 until 21, when I had finally had enough of the BS to buy a bicycle and learn how to navigate the pot-hole-ridden roads of UK cities, figure out how to avoid getting killed by tired motorists and how to quickly fix a punctured tyre in -4c. Those things build character. Sitting in a bus just breeds resentment.
enriquto 5y ago
I'd say that even if you "drive" yourself, the commute can be a pleasurable experience, depending on the circumstances. I for one love my commute (which is a calm promenade in the woods on my bicycle). But this is very specific: even a much shorter commute but inside the city traffic and among cars and red lights would be a nightmare.
michaelgrafl 5y ago

timdaub 5y ago

Hintjens is quoted too little these days considering how great many of his speeches and essays are. To me, he's the epistemic authority on developing software collaboratively and following his principles has aided my career. "Social Architecture" should be read by any aspiring open source developer.

drclau 5y ago

Every time I hear or read about happiness, I remember this quote from Thomas Metzinger. I hope you’ll find it useful, too: “Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.” — “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self“, Thomas Metzinger

lukebuehler 5y ago
Well, if you want a really reductionist view of happiness, which also happens to be largely true, you could say: have children.
- j4hdufd8 5y ago
  What does that mean?
  - lukebuehler 5y ago
    The quote in the parent comment says that the whole hedonic machinery within us is a result of natural selection, of which conscious happiness is just a side effect. Then why not just go ahead and do what that machinery drives you do to: go and have offspring. Chances are that this is the nexus where most happiness can be found.
    - j4hdufd8 5y ago
      Wow, that... makes a lot of sense. It's one of those things I already knew intuitively but couldn't formalize why.
- 5y ago

log101 5y ago

I don't know why but the first step--invest in your senses seemed to be most insightful one.

dukoid 5y ago

Re: "Finish your projects": Don't turn your hobby or side project into another "work": Keep projects small or modular.

have_faith 5y ago

11. Avoid treading a path of prescriptive platitudes. Yes I see the irony.

antihero 5y ago

11: Use HTTPS on your websites :)

pietherr 5y ago
The author died 5 years a ago, when https was not as common as it is now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens
- antihero 5y ago
  Ah, shoot :( That's such a shame! (that they died, not that they didn't ever get to use HTTPS).
  - zoobab 5y ago
    At least there is no cert which expire. And no authority to obey. Pieter was my best friend, a great loss. But his writings are here to stay, i guess he started to write some books after 2009, when he got his first duct bill cancer.
    - rambambram 5y ago
      His book The Psychopath Code helped me tremendously. I remember also reading some other books from him. Good stuff, food for thought. A great loss indeed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

itistricky 5y ago

The link is weird. What is :99 at the end of it?

alexjurkiewicz 5y ago
It's part of the URL path. schema: http, domain: hintjens.com, url path: /blog:99 It looks a bit like a port number, but it's in the wrong place. For that you'd want http://hintjens.com:99/blog http://hintjens.com:99/blog
speedgoose 5y ago
Probably the identifier of the article. A long time ago, we used to use auto-incremented positive integers straight from the database instead of UUID or adjective-adjective-noun.

BasDirks 5y ago

I don't like his proposed end goal. His happiness sounds like a mere absense of pain, but other methods will get you there more reliably. I like the first items on his list: go into the world and mess around, but then he begins to prescribe mental cleanliness: finish your plate, associate only with good people, don't cling to material possessions. It's like he's picking arbitrary chapters from Hesse's Siddhartha. I feel in an uncanny valley of dogma.

uneoneuno 5y ago
So many of those themes are found outside the Gita, often they can be uncovered thru a good life. But the cohesion is missing - it does feel like the author cut out small bits of Dogma from many 'religions' as they were uncovered or found relevant, informed by their experience. The main point I find interesting is that each of us does this 'pick and choose'.
gonehome 5y ago
He was dying as he wrote this (Pieter Hintjens died from cancer in 2016). I’m happy to see his blog here again, but I suspect what he was going through at the time influenced his writing.

jll29 5y ago

There are some pieces of good advice in there, but it is ultimately a selfish list. "Mingle with others" because it makes _you_ happy implies _using_ other people; a better way is to _serve_ others ("Love thy neighbor like yourself"), which leads to a deeper happiness based on purpose.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
They do talk about being a part of a bigger thing — to me this implies serving a greater cause, serving others in need.

6ardamu 5y ago

There are several mentions that Peter died from metastatic cancer. This is not entirely accurate. He choose to leave this world using euthanasia as his last tweet shows[0]. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium. [0]: https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=20 https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=20

pdimitar 5y ago

I don't disagree with the article in principle, but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations. At 41 y/o I have arrived at most of the same wisdom but I can't see how and where can I implement it. As others commenters said, I wish I could take a pay cut and work on things I love more than my current job. I absolutely can't afford it; not because I can't take the income hit month by month -- I surely can, let's not forget us the programmers are rather privileged -- but I can't afford not saving, especially having in mind where does the world seem to go (potential economical crisis on the horizon). If I arrive at a point in my life where I can unquestionably abide by the philosophy described in the article, I might cry emotionally, while yelling of pain and happiness at the same time. For now though, it's still not happening. (And that's leaving aside the fact that I don't necessarily agree that material minimalism leads to happiness necessarily.)

TimPC 5y ago
Financially sure we face more pressure. But let’s be honest that modern society is practically a utopia compared to being drafted into WW2 and facing carnage and death.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Cherry picking makes no argument any favours. :P I agree on WW2, sure, but after WW2? I've spoken with 30+ elders and they all unanimously agree that life in general was much, much better than today. Mostly in terms of upwards social mobility. An insane amount of very regular bank tellers could afford house, two apartments and 2-3 cars. And to put 3 kids in an university. Nowadays that's a very questionable endeavour.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    I'd strongly suggest looking for supporting data. If you talk to people, you will inevitably hear that "the good old times" were better than what we have. In the 1950s, the average house was still ~3 years of average income. Cars were about 9 months of income. So the "regular bank teller" with a house, 2 apartments, and 3 cars... there's something missing in the story. Let's not even get into the fact that life was significantly worse if you happened to be not white or male. Black people didn't have their voting rights significantly curtailed via Jim Crow laws. Married women didn't have the ability to have their own money. Beating your spouse was A-OK. Yes, social mobility was better (for white men). Universities were cheaper (a year of tuition was still ~1-2 months of income). Medical care was... not so good. Nutrition a non-existent concept. (And before we go to the "all natural food", quick reminder that the 1950s were the decade of TV dinners and truly atrocious recipes) The 50's certainly had less of the constant stream of demands that our current time has. It's not like it was purely worse, or the "golden age" image wouldn't hold. But as a net, across the population, we've seen improvement. We are backsliding the last ~20 years, absolutely. But we're still not in 1950.

refurb 5y ago

To me it’s all about expectations (realistic or not) and wether they are met. Expect to be poor and if you hit middle class you’ll be happy and grateful. Expect to be rich and the same outcome will produce depression. Not to sound like a stoicism fanatic, but that’s one aspect that helps. Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is. And yes, acknowledgement that humans evolved to never be satisfied with their current situation helps as well. Breaking free of “things need to get better” is great for mental health but means your also fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

pdimitar 5y ago
I agree with your comment a lot. Don't think of me as a nitpicker, I simply want to add a nuance to this statement: > Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is. I have observed many people having trouble with that and I agree with you that this is very much needed in our lives to give us some humility. That being said, to some people -- myself included -- this happened way too many times and they can't have appreciation through that vector anymore. My brain switched to "I am sick of hearing this! I will level up and won't have to think about never being threatened with living under a bridge ever again!". Of course, the hedonistic treadmill the article mentions is very much real -- we are never satisfied with what we have. However, it's very possible to arrive at the mindset where you are like "eh, I'd feel a bit better if I had a $500K in the bank and not only $200K" but objectively, when you've grown up and lived in a poor country for most of your life, I think it's easier to NOT get stressed about the statement in quotes. And I agree on the evolution part. I'd theorize this mindset of ours has evolved because we developed in a very harsh environment (ice age) and we wanted to optimize our lives for less work and more leisure. Ironically, nowadays humanity at large fails miserably at just that... but that's really a very different topic.
- refurb 5y ago
  Interesting comment on appreciation. It’s not easy by any means and I’ve found myself fall into thought patterns where I start to feel like I’ve been cheated by life. But at least for me, a lot of it is driven by distraction. Work becomes overwhelming. Or family becomes too hard to juggle. So caught up in what’s in front of you that you lose the big picture. Where I’ve found clarity is in the “being present mindset”. Giving my son a bath and noticing just how much he changes everyday and what that experience must be like for him reminds me that time is fleeting. Often what we value most in the future are the experiences of the past. And taking the time to truly connect with my son will be one of those things I’ll look back on in 10 years and truly appreciate that I took that time. And don’t get me wrong. The hedonistic treadmill is the reason we went to the moon. Never being satisfied will drive humanity to do incredible things, but it will also drive people to depression. It’s neither good nor bad but just is. Acknowledging that and seeing it in yourself can help immensely.

farseer 5y ago

>>Above all, explore the world without desire or demand Go all Yoda eh?

SMAAART 5y ago

Forget being happy. Happiness is a high, therefore temporary. Seek satisfaction, satisfaction from a job well done after long hard hours of work. OP touches on this in: > 2. Do things you are bad at - Learning makes us feel alive. Challenge yourself, and keep proving you can learn. Learn to juggle, to hold your breath underwater for longer, to solve a Rubik's cube. Learn to play music and play for yourself. Learn to paint and draw.

circlefavshape 5y ago

> Want nothing, accept everything This can be a big obstacle to contentment for me and many people I know. It's just so easy to think "What do I want right now/in the future?" and then get down-in-the-dumps because reality doesn't correspond to this totally arbitrary thing you just imagined

zcw100 5y ago

Every time I read something like this I always think they have the causality backward which I think that anyone who has ever suffered from depression can attest to. The food doesn't make you happy, you're predisposed to finding happiness. You wouldn't say that bad food makes you unhappy would you? Disappointed maybe but under normal circumstances it wouldn't cause unhappiness. If you were depressed it might, and you would find it difficult to find happiness in even good food. Everyone has heard the story of the person who toils under great hardship and still manages to find joy in life. That's sort of the opposite of depression and it isn't necessarily good. People who are content to toil in hardship might find it difficult to motivate themselves to change their situation. It's a balance between the internal and external. Even the definition of what is good food is malleable. The chef or food critic might be repulsed by Taco Bell while someone else might enjoy every bite.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Perhaps it is in part the process of making your own food that is also therapeutic. I think we fill our days with positive and negative "karma" all the time and are unaware of it, losing clarity of even the bad karma as so much background noise. Perhaps it is only in times of crisis that we are specifically tuned to see the accumulative effect of the negative karma, can see it for what it is. I feel that way myself anyway — and then try to redouble my efforts going forward of pushing away those detrimental influences.
Thursday24 5y ago
Agree with this. The logic behind this is simple. The human being is part of the universe, hence subject to causation & perceived chance. The human being doesn't get to "choose" the architecture of the body at birth, no choice in breathing, the eyes are going to blink and so on. And the idea of "volition" goes out of the window the moment we ask a question such as: "where did this prior thought come from?" The universe is a massive machine and men and women are little machines operating in service to the larger whole. Pain, pleasure, happiness and depression are universal mechanisms which allow totality to function, but human beings in general tend to construct a personal narrative. Once one fully accepts causation, then the struggle goes away little by little, since the "personal story" dissipates, and only "universal law in motion" remains.

andygroundwater 5y ago

This advice is all well and good, but what happens to your state of internal bliss when one of you a-hole neighbors deliberately brings their dog to do its business on your front lawn. No amount to karmic happiness will stop you from wanting just retribution.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
Pieter was a friend of mine, and he certainly wasn’t conflict averse. If something bothered him, he would do something about it. He used to bring a Nerf gun to conferences just to shoot down people’s drones because he found them annoying.

tromp 5y ago

These two sentences jumped out to me: > Nothing makes us happier than other people. > Nothing can make us more miserable than other people.

lebuffon 5y ago

For happiness: "Do more, want less" Dali Lama

globular-toast 5y ago

I agree with all of the points, apart from one: > Do things you are bad at I would actually offer the opposite advice: do things you are good at. The world today is full of "anyone can do anything" and awards for participation etc. But nothing feels better than being good at what you do. I attribute a large amount of my happiness to doing a job that I'm actually good at. I'm better than 99% of people at doing what I do. I don't feel like I'm struggling. I don't feel like I'm inadequate. I feel like I'm useful. I feel appreciated and respected. I'm all for continual learning and pushing one's boundaries, but start by finding what you are good at. Otherwise you're forever going to feel mediocre and out of your depth.

simonswords82 5y ago
You should probably do a combination of things you are good and bad at.

vjust 5y ago

>10. Want nothing, accept everything "Accept everything" was a big one for me. It helped me deal with anxiety about future, amid uncertainty.

MauranKilom 5y ago

I personally subscribe to the advice given in The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck: You only get to choose your struggles in life. Happiness is the transient feeling in having dealt with a problem. You'll never run out of problems to deal with, therefore, the one thing to care about is what problems you end up engaging with (i.e. "give a f*ck about"). To that end, the ten items presented in the article are decent pointers towards "good" problems you might want to have (and which "bad" problems you'd want to avoid). It's part framing and part steering your life circumstances.

Rendello 5y ago
A family member visited recently and talked about family drama and how she doesn't want to be a part of it. I realized how I had went years without hearing anything about these parts of the family, and that I was being exposed to the drama by way of "I don't want to be involved with the drama". By engaging I was only stoking the drama further, despite the fact that I don't know these people and they don't know me. Relatedly, I really love this line from Meditations: A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"
nicbou 5y ago
This book would have made an excellent article. Nonetheless it has a great premise: you can apply the KonMari method to obligations and get rid of the ones that don't spark joy. Don't confuse it with the similarly titled book with Mark Manson, which reads as if Shia LaBeouf's motivational video was turned into a book.
lgndisgnbdgg 5y ago
I have a question. How did you make it through more than 5 pages of that book? It reads like an 8th grader that is trying his hardest to let you know he's cool and smart enlightened as fuck bro and has to curse every other line. I was cringing so hard in the first pages there is no way I could read it. It reads as a sort of pop culture, edgy (and trendy) mindfulness / Buddhism comboniation in a self help package. The slew of self help books with sht and fck in the titles after this books success is amusing though.

heywherelogingo 5y ago

One step toward happiness: dismiss these articles. My default browser page shows these endlessly - how to happy, how to worry less, how to live longer, how to get over this, how to embrace that, ... nine times out of ten highly uninformative, targeting every possible little concern or fear, an incessant bombardment of anxiety media. I immediately dismiss all anxiety media.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
I should have thought these were anti-anxiety media but perhaps not for everyone. I enjoy these reminders about what is important in life and find I agree with their tenets (just unable to put them into practice to the degree I would like).

Communitivity 5y ago

The man is still a beacon, after dying in 2016, as an engineer and as a person. He wasn't perfect, but he is responsible for a number of things. He co-founded ZeroMQ, created AMQP, was CEO of Wikidot, helped create RestMS and wrote many insightful and illuminating articles, especially on living well and dying well. Every once in a while I find something he wrote that I haven't seen and save it. This is one of those.

jvanderbot 5y ago

for a solidly backed, thoroughly researched book on living fulfilling lives that is not Positive Psychology, read Happiness Hypothesis.

vgchh 5y ago

Few changes that have helped me greatly towards a happier life are: 1. Cutting out alcohol 2. 15 minute meditation before sleeping 3. Regular exercise - e.g from YouTube 4. Eating less…sort of intermittent fasting 5. Reminding myself to do actions/thoughts that my soul would approve of. Others can do what their soul approves of or not. This has been especially useful. For example I am no longer hurt if someone is being mean. Ultimately they have to be a witness to their soul and are probably just having a bad day. I can’t get inside them and fix it for them. Edit: These steps have essentially made me more alert - more capable if you will. I am able to deal better with good and bad.

kcrx 5y ago
I like this a lot. I’ve struggled with… let’s call it unhappiness a lot in my life. I spent years trying to work through deep emotional things intellectually, but the things that really got me on the right track were: 1. Sleeping 8 hours a day 2. Eating less processed foods & more fruits and vegetables 3. Walking Simple things, and they all took time to turn into habits, but better health/more energy eventually made everything else so much easier.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Maybe learning what kills happiness (reference to that post on how to kill pilots) leads to happiness?
  - kcrx 5y ago
    I’m going to borrow that way of thinking about it. Removing obstacles, letting go, etc.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      That's the way to go. Very often if we are asked "What do you want?" we can't give a good answer, whereas "What do you dislike / hate?" almost always gets an instant answer. In this regard I just succumbed to this brain quirk so I prefer to find 5 things this month that irk me and do my best to remove them from my life, as opposed to meditating hours every day trying to find those 3-4 ultimate things that will instantly make me happy. Better chase the mouse in your feet than to try and find the elephant beyond the horizon.

kovek 5y ago

Tape your mouth shut when sleeping. Search google/youtube “Mouth taping for sleep”

biophysboy 5y ago

Another thing I think that is worth remembering for nerdy, passionate, and driven people is that sometimes the sacrifice you are ostensibly making for your future happiness is worthless or may even backfire. For the longest time, I felt that persevering past my exhaustion point was virtuous and would pay dividends in the long run. And there were cases where this was true (e.g. meeting a deadline), but otherwise it was just false. Not only was my short-term happiness harmed, but it wasn't even worthwhile. I was working slower and remembering less.

go_elmo 5y ago
In the end no one profits from this. Companies profit more from fit employees instead of overstressed ones.
nostromo95 5y ago
Montaigne often talks about this, but something that's true about virtue is that you can't disconnect the action from the motivation. Often what on the surface appears like virtuous fortitude is actually obstinacy and lack of self-awareness / imagination!

zephyr9 5y ago

> To be happy you must deal with negative emotions. Learn to recognize these in yourself, and deal with them. Anger, self-pity, jealousy, fear, hate, loneliness… set them aside, and let happiness take their place. And here I was just not setting aside my negative emotions like a sucker.

runeg 5y ago
More emphasis on the dealing with the emotions, and setting them aside is a later byproduct of doing the work.

mitchbob 5y ago

(2015)

cblconfederate 5y ago

We need a neuroscientific definition of happiness before embarking in dubious exercises

areichert 5y ago

A few years ago, I was dealing with some issues around anxiety, so I made a little app for myself to track my daily activities against my mental health (in the form of 3 assessments [0] measuring depression, anxiety, and well-being) I spent about 9 months logging, and found these to be the top 5 activities that improved my overall happiness: - 1. Strenuous exercise (e.g. going hard at the gym, playing a sport, taking a dance class, etc.) was a clear winner. (Going for a walk or doing light bodyweight exercises at home helped a bit, but not nearly as much.) - 2. Creative activities (e.g. writing, playing music, programming), particularly when I could get into a "flow" state. - 3. Reading long-form content (for at least 20 mins). - 4. Meditating (for at least 5 mins). - 5. Spending time with close friends (as opposed to e.g. going to parties with acquaintances). A lot of these things are fairly obvious (and may also vary a bit by personality type) but being able to see concrete, quantifiable results made it much easier to adopt habits that made me happier in the long run! [0] https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/migrations/20180531105505_assessments.js#L14-L91 https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/...

begueradj 5y ago

finally some genuine found the manual of happiness.