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The problem I'm having, dear reader, is that I don't understand why I seem to be the only happy person on the Internet. My twitter feed collectively has depres

The problem I'm having, dear reader, is that I don't understand why I seem to be the only happy person on the Internet. My twitter feed collectively has depression. Hacker News is a crowd that seems to feel okay on the best of days, when it doesn't realize it has burnout. I feel a little better than neutral when I'm at baseline. On most days, I don't need a reason to smile. I just like to smile because things are good. I didn't sprinkle this post with happy smileys to illustrate my point (for your sake!) but I would have if I were writing to myself. I wish I could help other people. The point of this is not "look at me my life is great". I just don't know what to do.

Sebb767 5y ago
I'm mostly happy, so that's two of us :) In general, being happy is probably not something you talk about too much - it's the "normal" state of being and talking too much about it makes you look like you're either bragging or trying to sell your two week seminar. In that regard, it's a bit like money - if you have enough, you don't talk about it much unless you get really lucky (sell company, win lottery etc), but if you're lacking it, it's on your mind all the time.
- loves_mangoes 5y ago
  Glad to hear it :) I think you're right in general that there's usually no point acknowledging good things, there's no lesson to learn or corrective action to take from things being good — that's just the expected state. What bothers me is I see people constantly talk about happiness like something you chase all your life, some unattainable goal that only an old sage that spent decades meditating would know anything about. Like it's a mythical thing, not the 'normal state of being', as you said. I'd really like to understand what went wrong that so many people aren't feeling the way you and me would say is normal/neutral. I've started learning psychology just to understand better, but I don't know that there's anything concrete I can do to help anyone. That sort of sucks.
  - WJW 5y ago
    I'll join in, so that we can be a crowd of three! :) Definitely agree that it is not really on my mind all the time though. It is like money or oxygen that way, you only really notice when you don't have it. That might explain why we only hear about unhappy people online; the happy people simply don't post about it as much. I'll also add the insight from Epicurus that many people are confused about what brings about happiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    The idea of baseline happiness makes sense to me. I generally live at a 7-8 out of 10 and always bounce back to that level no matter what happens. Many of my friends are around that tier. My wife is 7-6. She sometimes seems incredulous about my good mood. I can't really help it.
  - polishdude20 5y ago
    I think it's because we've gotten so used to seeing the riches and happiness of other people on social media and we see our merely neutral happiness as something to strive away from.
  - throwaway6532 5y ago
    >that's just the expected state. It's funny that that's the expected state, because if you compute through various permutations of different geographical locations, and points in history, levels of socio-economic status etc you get a very different answer as to what the expected state is. You also realize it can change on a dime. And if you look around, it looks like it's starting to do just that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bitcuration 5y ago
  Why you have to be happy? lol. In fact, the normal life state for the best of survival would be far from being happy. Whenever we prefer something, think Darwin and think if it makes biological sense.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well if we want to talk about it in those terms, the “hedonic treadmill” suggests that if things haven’t just gotten much better or worse our levels of happiness should be pretty stable. If you were a hunter-gatherer or primitive farmer you wouldn’t have been thinking about how much better an American suburb thousands of years in the future would be than eating sandy bread.
gbuk2013 5y ago
You’re not the only one. :) For me it took some conscious effort but it was yoga that finally pushed me over the edge. Now it’s mostly just happy even if the circumstances don’t call for it. Like someone said in one of the other comments: happiness is a choice. It is also orthogonal to the intellect. It’s just that people tend to turn their intellect against themselves and so a sharper intellect makes for more damage.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  > Like someone said in one of the other comments: happiness is a choice. That's exactly what Naval (writer of the link in this post) preaches about happiness, if you listen to pretty much any podcast appearance of his he emphasizes how much being happy is a choice. It's funny, a lot of the stories in this thread (career-driven, not happy, achieve financial freedom, now what?) mirror very closely to his life and his path to happiness.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    I mean - happiness is a state of mind when you’re in plenty. If you don’t have plenty or are lacking basic necessities - it’s kinda hard to argue being happy in that state is genuine.
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      What does genuine happiness mean? There are plenty of poor, happy people on this world. Once you can afford food and shelter everything else is kind of just a mindset if you don't mind being something of a social weirdo.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Yoga does it for me also, blissfulness and happiness, as well as having good health. When I don't do yoga it fades away after awhile. I'm going back to it soon.
jmcgough 5y ago
I find that people who spend the most time on the internet are the least happy. The people making 20 updates a day on social media are way more likely to be severely depressed, because they aren't spending time with friends, working on hobbies or focused on a good career. So a lot of the social media content I see is from pretty unhappy people.
mianos 5y ago
There are three of us, maybe? Just not to make this a useless thread, if I find I am not as happy I just get on my bicycle and go for a quick ride. Often to just pick up milk or bread, otherwise just to nowhere. I am locked down this week with covid so I am not allowed to ride out so I am only medium happy, that is not happy enough to annoy my wife. :)
themacguffinman 5y ago
I doubt you can help other people very much. Research suggests that happiness is largely a stochastic phenomenon [1] where common-sense factors like socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, and religious commitment all show little impact on variation in happiness. The genetic heritability of the stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%. This largely matches my own anecdotal observations. I'm capable of experiencing happiness like everyone else but it's largely situational and unstable and tends to be hedonic. Some other people meanwhile are unflappably happy. Happiness is probably a matter of perspective, and I think it's just really, really difficult to truly and durably change your perspective. It's like asking an atheist to believe in a god or vice versa. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb... Also a metastudy: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
throwawaymsft 5y ago
It’s gotta be the mangoes! Unfortunately the internet has a large selection bias. Anger, outrage, etc. are more viral than quiet contentment. Misery loves company and all that. It’s hard to change opinions online (especially when people go online to vent or already in a bad mood), but I’m sure you’re inspiring those with your real life interactions. Keep on keeping on.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  I have heard that mangos reduce depression. Might be correlation to the warm climates they grow in ;)
m_fayer 5y ago
Perhaps people on the internet are happier than they seem. Because they are grousing and complaining. Which are great guilty pleasures which until recently there was little room to indulge in day to day life. Until we invented something to let us indulge to our hearts content: the internet.
- cryptolake 5y ago
  I this basically sums it up, most posts you see are not written literally.
ianai 5y ago
Happiness writes less.
mbrodersen 5y ago
You most definitely aren’t :) I am happy most of the times but that is boring and nothing to talk about. People love to talk misery and drama. Apparently some people would rather live with a partner who is unpredictable, and even perhaps a bit dangerous, because of the drama. It’s like living in your own reality show.
YaBomm 5y ago
wutbrodo 5y ago
I've found it critical to remember this truism when trying to extrapolate from internet posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_int https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most... This rings true anecdotally too. I was a participant on the very same forum and received an admonishment from another commenter about my posting style, which made me realize that my health-problem-induced approach to commenting on the forum was laced with subtle ad hominem barbs and other unproductive habits. Being called out helped me realize how unproductive my engagement was. I suspect that this dynamic is in play for a lot of fora with less healthy discussion norms than r/ssc (which has to be 99.9% percentile for quality of discussion). Mentally ill people have more time and inclination to spend time arguing with strangers online. Deducing too much from these interactions I'd simply sampling "what do insane people think about X", which is of limited usefulness.
fzzzy 5y ago
Were you bullied as a child? Did you have enough to eat every day as a child? Were your parents screaming at each other every day when you were a child? Did they beat you or abuse you emotionally? Did you have two parents? Did your siblings make you miserable every day, or were you an only child and constantly lonely? Did your teachers attempt to dominate you and crush your spirit? Do you recall suffering any traumas at all during childhood? Have you had good mental health as long as you can remember?
- loves_mangoes 5y ago
  I'm very late (I don't check my alt account too often), but I figure I'll reply anyways. Even if just for myself. The truth is I was not a popular kid. I had food, but I've fainted once from hunger (my fault). My parent fought for a while, the screaming was not very nice to be in the middle of. Then they divorced. So I lived with one and visited the other on the weekends. One of my siblings went to live with the other parent, so I didn't really get to grow up with them. I didn't see them much until much later as a result. I did not like school very much, though I'm sure the teachers weren't trying to crush my spirits. They were average people doing an average job. It only crushed me inside because it's not the right environment for me. Everyone else must have been fine. I feel like I've been lucky, though. Mental health is not a concept I've had growing up, but I've somehow eventually managed to escape. I'm in a good environment, now. I work doing something I like, for a company that has a net positive contribution to the world. It's a small weight off my shoulders that I didn't end up working for a Palantir or a Facebook, and rationalizing to myself why that's actually okay. That would have caused some serious dissonance. I don't know if I have trauma. I feel like if you have to ask "who doesn't?", you maybe, probably do? But I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past. It's not that I'm trying to avoid it, everything has just changed so much that it doesn't continually affect me anymore. I suspect the conclusion is not as obvious as it might appear. On the one hand, having had a poor childhood or a very good childhood just sets your expectations for what happiness is as an adult. An adult used to opulence will think nothing is remarkable, or particularly good, while someone who has never taken it for granted will feel comparatively better, knowing that the baseline for normal used to be worse. And, on the other hand, trauma.
- marviio 5y ago
briancl 5y ago
I feel the same. My theory is that I’ve learned from my past mistakes of being a shut-in due to social anxiety, which led me to spiral downward when things inevitably went wrong in life. I decided to do something about that: face my anxiety head on. Now I have a thriving network of close friends, colleagues, mentors, and family. Things will go wrong, but I have a support stem. I will be okay. Being okay is rad. One of the most surprising parts of this transformation is when people reach out to me after something has gone wrong in their life. I used to freeze in those moments. Unsure how to act or what to say. Now I feel honored to be there for a friend, and it’s rewarding in ways I never thought possible.
- Kirth 5y ago
  Over what timespan did you do this, and do you have any tips for others who should be doing the same thing?
  - briancl 5y ago
    Exposure therapy over years. I don’t think I’m done, so I’d say I’m still at it. But not how you think. I was fortunate to have a major career change thrust upon me.. it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I took it. It required me to go from a passive customer-facing role to an active customer-facing role. It was difficult, and I struggled early on, but I feel like I’m the type of person who can rise to a challenge. Usually that’s a technical challenge or something less personal, but I just kept tell myself that I was the type of person who can rise to any challenge and kept going. When this career change presented itself, I had just had my first child, and I wanted to be better for him. I wanted to be a good role model.
kafkaesque 5y ago
This state of mind is called "ignorance is bliss." There's nothing wrong with it. Despite people thinking "happy" people have never had any hardship in life, it really just describes not wanting to explore what has caused them any trauma, thus, not letting those things affect them (in a negative way or positive way). I've noticed this kind of person is usually the most uninteresting to talk to, though. But not everyone has to be interesting. In my experience, aside from their work, they seem to have surface-level conversations and interests and live a much simpler life. It's like an extreme form of pragmatism. Also, to paraphrase Borges, happiness is its own justification.[1] In other words, it either needs no justification or, at the most, only a surface-level justification. [1] "He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola."
- ayeli 5y ago
  You're making a huge assumption here: that all happy people are ignorant to their hardships. That is empathetically false. Personally, the more I've explore the depths of my past, accepting the things that make me who I am: the traumas, the privileges, etc. The more happier I become.

Sebb767 5y ago

I'm mostly happy, so that's two of us :) In general, being happy is probably not something you talk about too much - it's the "normal" state of being and talking too much about it makes you look like you're either bragging or trying to sell your two week seminar. In that regard, it's a bit like money - if you have enough, you don't talk about it much unless you get really lucky (sell company, win lottery etc), but if you're lacking it, it's on your mind all the time.

loves_mangoes 5y ago
Glad to hear it :) I think you're right in general that there's usually no point acknowledging good things, there's no lesson to learn or corrective action to take from things being good — that's just the expected state. What bothers me is I see people constantly talk about happiness like something you chase all your life, some unattainable goal that only an old sage that spent decades meditating would know anything about. Like it's a mythical thing, not the 'normal state of being', as you said. I'd really like to understand what went wrong that so many people aren't feeling the way you and me would say is normal/neutral. I've started learning psychology just to understand better, but I don't know that there's anything concrete I can do to help anyone. That sort of sucks.
- WJW 5y ago
  I'll join in, so that we can be a crowd of three! :) Definitely agree that it is not really on my mind all the time though. It is like money or oxygen that way, you only really notice when you don't have it. That might explain why we only hear about unhappy people online; the happy people simply don't post about it as much. I'll also add the insight from Epicurus that many people are confused about what brings about happiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A.
- nefitty 5y ago
  The idea of baseline happiness makes sense to me. I generally live at a 7-8 out of 10 and always bounce back to that level no matter what happens. Many of my friends are around that tier. My wife is 7-6. She sometimes seems incredulous about my good mood. I can't really help it.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  I think it's because we've gotten so used to seeing the riches and happiness of other people on social media and we see our merely neutral happiness as something to strive away from.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  >that's just the expected state. It's funny that that's the expected state, because if you compute through various permutations of different geographical locations, and points in history, levels of socio-economic status etc you get a very different answer as to what the expected state is. You also realize it can change on a dime. And if you look around, it looks like it's starting to do just that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bitcuration 5y ago
Why you have to be happy? lol. In fact, the normal life state for the best of survival would be far from being happy. Whenever we prefer something, think Darwin and think if it makes biological sense.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well if we want to talk about it in those terms, the “hedonic treadmill” suggests that if things haven’t just gotten much better or worse our levels of happiness should be pretty stable. If you were a hunter-gatherer or primitive farmer you wouldn’t have been thinking about how much better an American suburb thousands of years in the future would be than eating sandy bread.

gbuk2013 5y ago

You’re not the only one. :) For me it took some conscious effort but it was yoga that finally pushed me over the edge. Now it’s mostly just happy even if the circumstances don’t call for it. Like someone said in one of the other comments: happiness is a choice. It is also orthogonal to the intellect. It’s just that people tend to turn their intellect against themselves and so a sharper intellect makes for more damage.

dntrkv 5y ago
> Like someone said in one of the other comments: happiness is a choice. That's exactly what Naval (writer of the link in this post) preaches about happiness, if you listen to pretty much any podcast appearance of his he emphasizes how much being happy is a choice. It's funny, a lot of the stories in this thread (career-driven, not happy, achieve financial freedom, now what?) mirror very closely to his life and his path to happiness.
- bradlys 5y ago
  I mean - happiness is a state of mind when you’re in plenty. If you don’t have plenty or are lacking basic necessities - it’s kinda hard to argue being happy in that state is genuine.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    What does genuine happiness mean? There are plenty of poor, happy people on this world. Once you can afford food and shelter everything else is kind of just a mindset if you don't mind being something of a social weirdo.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Yoga does it for me also, blissfulness and happiness, as well as having good health. When I don't do yoga it fades away after awhile. I'm going back to it soon.

jmcgough 5y ago

I find that people who spend the most time on the internet are the least happy. The people making 20 updates a day on social media are way more likely to be severely depressed, because they aren't spending time with friends, working on hobbies or focused on a good career. So a lot of the social media content I see is from pretty unhappy people.

mianos 5y ago

There are three of us, maybe? Just not to make this a useless thread, if I find I am not as happy I just get on my bicycle and go for a quick ride. Often to just pick up milk or bread, otherwise just to nowhere. I am locked down this week with covid so I am not allowed to ride out so I am only medium happy, that is not happy enough to annoy my wife. :)

themacguffinman 5y ago

I doubt you can help other people very much. Research suggests that happiness is largely a stochastic phenomenon [1] where common-sense factors like socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, and religious commitment all show little impact on variation in happiness. The genetic heritability of the stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%. This largely matches my own anecdotal observations. I'm capable of experiencing happiness like everyone else but it's largely situational and unstable and tends to be hedonic. Some other people meanwhile are unflappably happy. Happiness is probably a matter of perspective, and I think it's just really, really difficult to truly and durably change your perspective. It's like asking an atheist to believe in a god or vice versa. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb... Also a metastudy: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6

throwawaymsft 5y ago

It’s gotta be the mangoes! Unfortunately the internet has a large selection bias. Anger, outrage, etc. are more viral than quiet contentment. Misery loves company and all that. It’s hard to change opinions online (especially when people go online to vent or already in a bad mood), but I’m sure you’re inspiring those with your real life interactions. Keep on keeping on.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
I have heard that mangos reduce depression. Might be correlation to the warm climates they grow in ;)

m_fayer 5y ago

Perhaps people on the internet are happier than they seem. Because they are grousing and complaining. Which are great guilty pleasures which until recently there was little room to indulge in day to day life. Until we invented something to let us indulge to our hearts content: the internet.

cryptolake 5y ago
I this basically sums it up, most posts you see are not written literally.

ianai 5y ago

Happiness writes less.

mbrodersen 5y ago

You most definitely aren’t :) I am happy most of the times but that is boring and nothing to talk about. People love to talk misery and drama. Apparently some people would rather live with a partner who is unpredictable, and even perhaps a bit dangerous, because of the drama. It’s like living in your own reality show.

YaBomm 5y ago

wutbrodo 5y ago

I've found it critical to remember this truism when trying to extrapolate from internet posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_int https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most... This rings true anecdotally too. I was a participant on the very same forum and received an admonishment from another commenter about my posting style, which made me realize that my health-problem-induced approach to commenting on the forum was laced with subtle ad hominem barbs and other unproductive habits. Being called out helped me realize how unproductive my engagement was. I suspect that this dynamic is in play for a lot of fora with less healthy discussion norms than r/ssc (which has to be 99.9% percentile for quality of discussion). Mentally ill people have more time and inclination to spend time arguing with strangers online. Deducing too much from these interactions I'd simply sampling "what do insane people think about X", which is of limited usefulness.

fzzzy 5y ago

Were you bullied as a child? Did you have enough to eat every day as a child? Were your parents screaming at each other every day when you were a child? Did they beat you or abuse you emotionally? Did you have two parents? Did your siblings make you miserable every day, or were you an only child and constantly lonely? Did your teachers attempt to dominate you and crush your spirit? Do you recall suffering any traumas at all during childhood? Have you had good mental health as long as you can remember?

loves_mangoes 5y ago
I'm very late (I don't check my alt account too often), but I figure I'll reply anyways. Even if just for myself. The truth is I was not a popular kid. I had food, but I've fainted once from hunger (my fault). My parent fought for a while, the screaming was not very nice to be in the middle of. Then they divorced. So I lived with one and visited the other on the weekends. One of my siblings went to live with the other parent, so I didn't really get to grow up with them. I didn't see them much until much later as a result. I did not like school very much, though I'm sure the teachers weren't trying to crush my spirits. They were average people doing an average job. It only crushed me inside because it's not the right environment for me. Everyone else must have been fine. I feel like I've been lucky, though. Mental health is not a concept I've had growing up, but I've somehow eventually managed to escape. I'm in a good environment, now. I work doing something I like, for a company that has a net positive contribution to the world. It's a small weight off my shoulders that I didn't end up working for a Palantir or a Facebook, and rationalizing to myself why that's actually okay. That would have caused some serious dissonance. I don't know if I have trauma. I feel like if you have to ask "who doesn't?", you maybe, probably do? But I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past. It's not that I'm trying to avoid it, everything has just changed so much that it doesn't continually affect me anymore. I suspect the conclusion is not as obvious as it might appear. On the one hand, having had a poor childhood or a very good childhood just sets your expectations for what happiness is as an adult. An adult used to opulence will think nothing is remarkable, or particularly good, while someone who has never taken it for granted will feel comparatively better, knowing that the baseline for normal used to be worse. And, on the other hand, trauma.
marviio 5y ago

briancl 5y ago

I feel the same. My theory is that I’ve learned from my past mistakes of being a shut-in due to social anxiety, which led me to spiral downward when things inevitably went wrong in life. I decided to do something about that: face my anxiety head on. Now I have a thriving network of close friends, colleagues, mentors, and family. Things will go wrong, but I have a support stem. I will be okay. Being okay is rad. One of the most surprising parts of this transformation is when people reach out to me after something has gone wrong in their life. I used to freeze in those moments. Unsure how to act or what to say. Now I feel honored to be there for a friend, and it’s rewarding in ways I never thought possible.

Kirth 5y ago
Over what timespan did you do this, and do you have any tips for others who should be doing the same thing?
- briancl 5y ago
  Exposure therapy over years. I don’t think I’m done, so I’d say I’m still at it. But not how you think. I was fortunate to have a major career change thrust upon me.. it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I took it. It required me to go from a passive customer-facing role to an active customer-facing role. It was difficult, and I struggled early on, but I feel like I’m the type of person who can rise to a challenge. Usually that’s a technical challenge or something less personal, but I just kept tell myself that I was the type of person who can rise to any challenge and kept going. When this career change presented itself, I had just had my first child, and I wanted to be better for him. I wanted to be a good role model.

kafkaesque 5y ago

This state of mind is called "ignorance is bliss." There's nothing wrong with it. Despite people thinking "happy" people have never had any hardship in life, it really just describes not wanting to explore what has caused them any trauma, thus, not letting those things affect them (in a negative way or positive way). I've noticed this kind of person is usually the most uninteresting to talk to, though. But not everyone has to be interesting. In my experience, aside from their work, they seem to have surface-level conversations and interests and live a much simpler life. It's like an extreme form of pragmatism. Also, to paraphrase Borges, happiness is its own justification.[1] In other words, it either needs no justification or, at the most, only a surface-level justification. [1] "He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola."

ayeli 5y ago
You're making a huge assumption here: that all happy people are ignorant to their hardships. That is empathetically false. Personally, the more I've explore the depths of my past, accepting the things that make me who I am: the traumas, the privileges, etc. The more happier I become.