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Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. US: I lost my job. I am so hap

Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. US: I lost my job. I am so happy. It was time for a change, and I know there are so many better opportunities out there. Russia: I was fired from my job. It sucks. How am I to find a new job in this economy? What am I to do? Followed by vodka with friends. (Stereotypes that may or may not be exaggerated) Managers reading this will demand happiness, so people must fake it even more. and they must fake it all day long at work. Work Survey: Are you HAPPY? Yes? (Manager wants it) No? (Won't get promoted, won't get anywhere) It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet. Drugs, floggings (must improve your happiness), bright colored cubicle, A new Ferrari every quarter. One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people. When it comes to soldiers WTF? Victim shaming? Soldiers are successful because they are happy? Thus if you are unhappy, depressed, PTSD, all that happened because you were not happy. (Stretching it a little for effect). This all reminds me of evangelical churches. (Who also forces people to be happy) > God Heals the sick. But God has not healed me, and I prayed, and people prayed with me. > That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed.

MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
I think Americans are more optimistic and thus are happier. Someone somewhere said it was America’s super power, that we believe things will always get better and it creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
- martneumann 5y ago
  I once heard that Americans motivate themselves positively: If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen! ... while Germans motivate themselves negatively: If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      Often, these thoughts are about worst cases, and imagined outcomes so much more than realistic ones. Germans do have a word for that: "Kopfkino" (literally translated to "cinema in the head"), a state of worrying about things that becomes more darkly fantastical with every second spent on it, playing through all the imaginable adverse outcomes.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      Not entirely true. Outside of government workers who are set for life, getting fired in Germany is definitely possible for various reasons, I know many cases. There are legal processes the employer must follow in order to fire employees but nearly all companies have lawyers that take care of that process to let employees go without getting sued. And you can fall on financial hardship if for example, you took massive loan for a house and you lost your job which happens to be in a low demand filed, making it hard to find another job quickly. You usually have your 1-3 months notice period as a buffer, but the unemployment you get after that might not cover your full expenses as that's usually around the 60% mark of your pay. Sure, like in most of Europe, it's more difficult to become poor and homeless than in the US, but Germany doesn't give you some magic immunity talisman to never loosing your job.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        Yes, you can loose your job in Germany. But definitely not as easy as for example in the US. Companies need valid reasons for letting people go. And then it doesn't work like: You are fired - this is your last paycheck (only in really, really extreme cases like you stealing from your employer or punching him in the face kind of reasons). Then there is the fact that for a time after being let go you receive a relevant share of your average salary for the last 12 months from the state while you keep looking for work. Does it suck to be let go? Sure. Is it the end of the world in Germany? In more cases than not - it isn't. I work in a company with even stronger employee protection as we have a so called works council. A body representing the workers towards upper management and standing in for their rights. Additionally there are strong unions in some industries in Germany that also help a lot. Ar there areas where companies sometimes already on the side of illegalities abuse the system and workers - for sure. Esp. in the low wage sector.
- paganel 5y ago
  Not sure about the happier part, I may be wrong as I've never been to the States but it looks like the meth/drugs epidemic is a major issue in much of the US. A happy populace wouldn't need to resort to drugs.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >A happy populace wouldn't need to resort to drugs How about instead of blaming the population, we pin the opioid addiction to big pharma and their illegal practices of lobbying and bribing their way into doctors prescribing opioids for toothaches and headaches. See Purdue. Also, Finland is constantly rated as the happiest country in the world yet suicide rates are relatively high and alcohol abuse is rampant, so maybe that's not how happiness works.
    - paganel 5y ago
      To be fair I also have my doubts about the Finnish statistics. I agree with your first point, much of the dire situation we have now was caused by big pharma companies.
Aeolun 5y ago
> That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed. This is just people projecting their own insecurities. Obviously they'd like to believe that if it was them that were sick they'd be healed. A bit like the wishful thinking around Corona.
loveJesus 5y ago
benreesman 5y ago
I’m surrounded by a certain type of Christian that I’ve taken to calling an “Ayn Rand Christian”. The MO is: “New Testament for me, Old Testament for thee”. IMHO when someone needs something concrete from you, and quotes one verse from the 33, but when you’re in trouble they’re happy to “pray for you” if you’re lucky, if not break out the weak faith routine you alluded to, what you’re really dealing with is the same people who give Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead place of privilege on their bookshelves. I’m not a person of particularly strong religion or even spirituality, but I’m on team: the 33, while flawed, are my preferred mode of interaction over the 66.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  There's a lot of cherry picking and hypocrisy in organized religion, even with Jesus himself making a tl;dr of the bible by going "love thy neighbour".
  - benreesman 5y ago
    Agreed.
- andrelaszlo 5y ago
  I'm curious about Christianity, what does 33/66 mean specifically?
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    I'm something of an otaku about religion, and I've never heard of it. I'd like to know what he means by it too.
    - benreesman 5y ago
      I replied to the sibling in some detail. It’s not my ambition to tell anyone what to believe about God: I’m quite unsure myself. But my little primer-as-Internet comment is based on not only reading but memorizing these documents at a young age, it’s likely a reasonable place to formulate some Google search terms.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
Happiness is only measurable in relation to sadness. If you were "happy" all the time you wouldn't feel like you were happy because that would be your default state - you would just feel normal. >One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people. That has been my goal, which has been more or less achieved. What more can you really ask for or expect out of life? Sometimes extraordinarily bad things are going to happen, and you are going to feel sad for a while. Likewise, sometimes extraordinarily good things happen, and you are going to feel happy for a while. But you can't (shouldn't) live your life with the ever-present anticipation (or dread) of these infrequent events. We're all on this planet for a very short time in the big scheme of things, and we'll all experience a variety of pleasant and unpleasant things. At the end of the day all you can do is navigate down the bumpy road as best you are able and not worry about things that are outside your control.
- theclansman 5y ago
  Yeah I agree, whatever they do at work to help you being happier is just gonna be your new normal. Obviously there should be some minimum standards, but saying that being happy makes you a better worker and therefore your employer should worry about you being happy is silly to me, because that comes from the inside. I'm not saying the environment doesn't affect you, but if you depend on external things to be happy you're always gonna come back to a default unhappy state, waiting for more new good things to happen to you. Being happy is a choice.
ajuc 5y ago
As a guy from Poland working for American and English companies for a while and playing a lot of D&D with Americans. The culture shock is real. Exhibit 1: (boss) great job team, could you maybe fix this one thing? (me) ok, if you say so, I thought we did pretty badly this sprint actually (my friend) he means that, it's just how British people say you're not doing great Exhibit 2: (my american Dungeon Master in the game we play) any feedback on the last session? I want to hear your thoughts. (me) it was great but I thought that X, Y and Z were kinda boring (other players) why are you so mean? Exhibit 3: (any American person) how are you? (me) actual response. (they) shocked. Exhibit 4: There was a poll in a huge american corpo I contract for recently, where teams from all over the world had to grade their experience with other teams. Mostly we don't interact with other teams so we don't have any experiences, the matrix is sparse, but we had to put a percentage in every cell anyway. Anglosaxons graded everybody 90%+. Eastern Europeans graded everybody but the few teams we actually interacted with - 50% :) There was a huge meeting for "solving the problems" and people couldn't believe it's normal here :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hooby 5y ago
You can't engineer happiness, but there are things that can be done to support and foster happiness. Some very important key factors to happiness that can be provided in a job environment are: .) self-determination \ .) a feeling of mastery/competency (or growth towards it) \ .) independence \ .) being treated fairly and equally Managers expecting their workers to be happy and show (fake) happiness, actually goes against several of those points. Older studies show, that small, mostly self-sufficient, self-organized teams with little managerial interference are both the happiest and most productive.
Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
When it comes to work, you obviously cannot engineer happiness, but there are a number of things you can look for in an employer. If you know where to look, there are absolutely companies out there that place an emphasis on employee empathy, flexibility, kindness, etc. I would know because I work at one such place. The thing that a lot of people are not willing to accept however is that you generally have to give up other things. I work at a nonprofit. We start at 17 days PTO and after year one you bump to 25 days. You are strongly encouraged to take it. We're given nearly $5k per year, essentially no strings attached, to be used as we see fit for continuing education efforts. Everyone is extremely kind, empathetic, and flexible. You are strongly discouraged from ever working more than 37.5 hours in a week. It's as close to heaven in an employer as I've ever found by a mile. Of course, because it's a nonprofit, I need to take a discount on pay, to the tune of somewhere around 20% below market in the region. Is it worth my happiness though? Completely. I have no regrets and continue to work here despite interest from places willing to pay me that extra 20% and more. I see a lot of devs getting hung up on getting "what they're worth," as if they're selling a hunk of meat to the highest bidder. If that's how you treat yourself, that's how you'll be treated in return. After about a decade of professional work, I prefer to see myself as being entered into a mutually beneficial relationship where salary is merely one piece of the picture. I've long since realized that my expenses rise/shrink to meet my salary, mostly without me noticing any actual change in quality of life, so just maximizing that number feels pointless. This is all not to say that I don't have ambition. My ambitions are just more multifaceted than "make XXXXXXXX/yr." Feeling fulfilled by the work -- that's an ambition. Having work that energizes me rather than drains me -- that's also an ambition. And I really do mean that, you have to strive for such things. They're not going to fall into your lap. It also requires you personally to understand what happiness means (contentment and inner peace rather than chemical euphoria) and pursue that instead of alternatives. Personally I really don't see the point in living a life of toiling away at shit work just to make an extra 20%. Oh, and by the way, we are no slouches. We create extremely high quality products at a fast tempo - because we all love what we're doing and are invested into the mission. We work for 7.5 hours and then we turn off and enjoy life, and come back rested and refreshed the next morning.
gashmol 5y ago
> Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. I think it's largely true. Interstingly enough there are parts of the world where faking unhappiness is the norm. > It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet. If happiness depends on externals than its indeed immpossible, since no one can control externals all of the time. Stoicism was such an attempt to bring about happiness. By instructing its followers to dismiss any will for externals and focus on internals instead, it aimed to make them happy. It may have been seen like a bulletproof plan. Unfortunately for stoics, though, you can't control internals either. Freewill is at best limited.

MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago

I think Americans are more optimistic and thus are happier. Someone somewhere said it was America’s super power, that we believe things will always get better and it creates a self fulfilling prophecy.

martneumann 5y ago
I once heard that Americans motivate themselves positively: If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen! ... while Germans motivate themselves negatively: If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Often, these thoughts are about worst cases, and imagined outcomes so much more than realistic ones. Germans do have a word for that: "Kopfkino" (literally translated to "cinema in the head"), a state of worrying about things that becomes more darkly fantastical with every second spent on it, playing through all the imaginable adverse outcomes.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Not entirely true. Outside of government workers who are set for life, getting fired in Germany is definitely possible for various reasons, I know many cases. There are legal processes the employer must follow in order to fire employees but nearly all companies have lawyers that take care of that process to let employees go without getting sued. And you can fall on financial hardship if for example, you took massive loan for a house and you lost your job which happens to be in a low demand filed, making it hard to find another job quickly. You usually have your 1-3 months notice period as a buffer, but the unemployment you get after that might not cover your full expenses as that's usually around the 60% mark of your pay. Sure, like in most of Europe, it's more difficult to become poor and homeless than in the US, but Germany doesn't give you some magic immunity talisman to never loosing your job.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      Yes, you can loose your job in Germany. But definitely not as easy as for example in the US. Companies need valid reasons for letting people go. And then it doesn't work like: You are fired - this is your last paycheck (only in really, really extreme cases like you stealing from your employer or punching him in the face kind of reasons). Then there is the fact that for a time after being let go you receive a relevant share of your average salary for the last 12 months from the state while you keep looking for work. Does it suck to be let go? Sure. Is it the end of the world in Germany? In more cases than not - it isn't. I work in a company with even stronger employee protection as we have a so called works council. A body representing the workers towards upper management and standing in for their rights. Additionally there are strong unions in some industries in Germany that also help a lot. Ar there areas where companies sometimes already on the side of illegalities abuse the system and workers - for sure. Esp. in the low wage sector.
paganel 5y ago
Not sure about the happier part, I may be wrong as I've never been to the States but it looks like the meth/drugs epidemic is a major issue in much of the US. A happy populace wouldn't need to resort to drugs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >A happy populace wouldn't need to resort to drugs How about instead of blaming the population, we pin the opioid addiction to big pharma and their illegal practices of lobbying and bribing their way into doctors prescribing opioids for toothaches and headaches. See Purdue. Also, Finland is constantly rated as the happiest country in the world yet suicide rates are relatively high and alcohol abuse is rampant, so maybe that's not how happiness works.
  - paganel 5y ago
    To be fair I also have my doubts about the Finnish statistics. I agree with your first point, much of the dire situation we have now was caused by big pharma companies.

Aeolun 5y ago

> That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed. This is just people projecting their own insecurities. Obviously they'd like to believe that if it was them that were sick they'd be healed. A bit like the wishful thinking around Corona.

loveJesus 5y ago

benreesman 5y ago

I’m surrounded by a certain type of Christian that I’ve taken to calling an “Ayn Rand Christian”. The MO is: “New Testament for me, Old Testament for thee”. IMHO when someone needs something concrete from you, and quotes one verse from the 33, but when you’re in trouble they’re happy to “pray for you” if you’re lucky, if not break out the weak faith routine you alluded to, what you’re really dealing with is the same people who give Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead place of privilege on their bookshelves. I’m not a person of particularly strong religion or even spirituality, but I’m on team: the 33, while flawed, are my preferred mode of interaction over the 66.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
There's a lot of cherry picking and hypocrisy in organized religion, even with Jesus himself making a tl;dr of the bible by going "love thy neighbour".
- benreesman 5y ago
  Agreed.
andrelaszlo 5y ago
I'm curious about Christianity, what does 33/66 mean specifically?
- JetAlone 5y ago
  I'm something of an otaku about religion, and I've never heard of it. I'd like to know what he means by it too.
  - benreesman 5y ago
    I replied to the sibling in some detail. It’s not my ambition to tell anyone what to believe about God: I’m quite unsure myself. But my little primer-as-Internet comment is based on not only reading but memorizing these documents at a young age, it’s likely a reasonable place to formulate some Google search terms.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

Happiness is only measurable in relation to sadness. If you were "happy" all the time you wouldn't feel like you were happy because that would be your default state - you would just feel normal. >One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people. That has been my goal, which has been more or less achieved. What more can you really ask for or expect out of life? Sometimes extraordinarily bad things are going to happen, and you are going to feel sad for a while. Likewise, sometimes extraordinarily good things happen, and you are going to feel happy for a while. But you can't (shouldn't) live your life with the ever-present anticipation (or dread) of these infrequent events. We're all on this planet for a very short time in the big scheme of things, and we'll all experience a variety of pleasant and unpleasant things. At the end of the day all you can do is navigate down the bumpy road as best you are able and not worry about things that are outside your control.

theclansman 5y ago
Yeah I agree, whatever they do at work to help you being happier is just gonna be your new normal. Obviously there should be some minimum standards, but saying that being happy makes you a better worker and therefore your employer should worry about you being happy is silly to me, because that comes from the inside. I'm not saying the environment doesn't affect you, but if you depend on external things to be happy you're always gonna come back to a default unhappy state, waiting for more new good things to happen to you. Being happy is a choice.

ajuc 5y ago

As a guy from Poland working for American and English companies for a while and playing a lot of D&D with Americans. The culture shock is real. Exhibit 1: (boss) great job team, could you maybe fix this one thing? (me) ok, if you say so, I thought we did pretty badly this sprint actually (my friend) he means that, it's just how British people say you're not doing great Exhibit 2: (my american Dungeon Master in the game we play) any feedback on the last session? I want to hear your thoughts. (me) it was great but I thought that X, Y and Z were kinda boring (other players) why are you so mean? Exhibit 3: (any American person) how are you? (me) actual response. (they) shocked. Exhibit 4: There was a poll in a huge american corpo I contract for recently, where teams from all over the world had to grade their experience with other teams. Mostly we don't interact with other teams so we don't have any experiences, the matrix is sparse, but we had to put a percentage in every cell anyway. Anglosaxons graded everybody 90%+. Eastern Europeans graded everybody but the few teams we actually interacted with - 50% :) There was a huge meeting for "solving the problems" and people couldn't believe it's normal here :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hooby 5y ago

You can't engineer happiness, but there are things that can be done to support and foster happiness. Some very important key factors to happiness that can be provided in a job environment are: .) self-determination \ .) a feeling of mastery/competency (or growth towards it) \ .) independence \ .) being treated fairly and equally Managers expecting their workers to be happy and show (fake) happiness, actually goes against several of those points. Older studies show, that small, mostly self-sufficient, self-organized teams with little managerial interference are both the happiest and most productive.

Gene_Parmesan 5y ago

When it comes to work, you obviously cannot engineer happiness, but there are a number of things you can look for in an employer. If you know where to look, there are absolutely companies out there that place an emphasis on employee empathy, flexibility, kindness, etc. I would know because I work at one such place. The thing that a lot of people are not willing to accept however is that you generally have to give up other things. I work at a nonprofit. We start at 17 days PTO and after year one you bump to 25 days. You are strongly encouraged to take it. We're given nearly $5k per year, essentially no strings attached, to be used as we see fit for continuing education efforts. Everyone is extremely kind, empathetic, and flexible. You are strongly discouraged from ever working more than 37.5 hours in a week. It's as close to heaven in an employer as I've ever found by a mile. Of course, because it's a nonprofit, I need to take a discount on pay, to the tune of somewhere around 20% below market in the region. Is it worth my happiness though? Completely. I have no regrets and continue to work here despite interest from places willing to pay me that extra 20% and more. I see a lot of devs getting hung up on getting "what they're worth," as if they're selling a hunk of meat to the highest bidder. If that's how you treat yourself, that's how you'll be treated in return. After about a decade of professional work, I prefer to see myself as being entered into a mutually beneficial relationship where salary is merely one piece of the picture. I've long since realized that my expenses rise/shrink to meet my salary, mostly without me noticing any actual change in quality of life, so just maximizing that number feels pointless. This is all not to say that I don't have ambition. My ambitions are just more multifaceted than "make XXXXXXXX/yr." Feeling fulfilled by the work -- that's an ambition. Having work that energizes me rather than drains me -- that's also an ambition. And I really do mean that, you have to strive for such things. They're not going to fall into your lap. It also requires you personally to understand what happiness means (contentment and inner peace rather than chemical euphoria) and pursue that instead of alternatives. Personally I really don't see the point in living a life of toiling away at shit work just to make an extra 20%. Oh, and by the way, we are no slouches. We create extremely high quality products at a fast tempo - because we all love what we're doing and are invested into the mission. We work for 7.5 hours and then we turn off and enjoy life, and come back rested and refreshed the next morning.

gashmol 5y ago

> Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. I think it's largely true. Interstingly enough there are parts of the world where faking unhappiness is the norm. > It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet. If happiness depends on externals than its indeed immpossible, since no one can control externals all of the time. Stoicism was such an attempt to bring about happiness. By instructing its followers to dismiss any will for externals and focus on internals instead, it aimed to make them happy. It may have been seen like a bulletproof plan. Unfortunately for stoics, though, you can't control internals either. Freewill is at best limited.