5 ms·

Of course you choose whether to be happy. In fact, it is the ONLY thing you have control over. But it's the key to everything. It's the one choice you have to

by jd115 5y ago

Of course you choose whether to be happy. In fact, it is the ONLY thing you have control over. But it's the key to everything. It's the one choice you have to make in every living moment. Keep making this right choice, and life is a song. Choose to look the wrong way and life becomes hard work. There is nothing more to it. This is all anyone ever needs to know about life.

artemonster 5y ago
That is just a load of shit, I am so tired of this toxic positivity. Of course its a choice in the first place, but choice is not what brings you there. You need to choose right turn, yes, yes! But you have to walk the path towards the destination and that is a whole different story. If all you postulate that it is enough just to make the right turn, then… ah, whatever.
- jd115 5y ago
  There can be no such thing as toxic positivity. Your doubts are toxic, yes. But positivity can never be toxic. Life IS utterly binary and clear-cut in this respect, there are no grey areas, no nuances. There is an absolute good and it is joy. And it is 100% a personal choice, regardless of circumstances. Once again - it is the only ONE thing over which you have any control, at all times, no exceptions. You can always choose to be happy. AND that's enough!
  - rjh29 5y ago
    Incredibly insulting to people with depression.
    - jd115 5y ago
      Which is why they are depressed. They choose (over and over and over again, many times in each hour they make this CONSCIOUS CHOICE) to find this insulting, instead of empowering. I am leaving out no-one. Joy is absolutely accessible to every living being, at all times, under all conditions.
  - kranner 5y ago
    Leaving out people with e.g. clinical depression, this is still only true for some people. The rest don't believe that they can simply choose to be happy regardless of circumstances, and therefore they can't. I don't think we get a choice in the matter: either we're lucky to be in the first group who know it intuitively or figure it out or come across the idea somewhere, or we aren't so lucky.
- sethammons 5y ago
  I have met people who laugh and smile about hardships and I have met people who are sour about unequivocally positive situations. I don't think happiness is a destination, it is a path. The happy person is happy to have chosen to turn right and to have had the opportunity to so. The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. That is the decision
  - lexapro 5y ago
    >The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. >That is the decision What is the decision exactly? If unhappy people could just choose to be happy instead, they would.
    - sethammons 5y ago
      Let's make sure we are talking about the same thing. I don't mean the fleeting joy of a pop cycle on a hot summer day when you were twelve and the cutie you have a crush on smiled at you. I'm talking about a general disposition. A "happy person." It is the way one looks at and approaches the problems and/or situations. You can choose to change how you approach the problem and you can choose what you find rewarding in that problem and the approach. You can also choose to focus on what you've yet to attain. In our little parable here, the unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. We are getting terribly abstract now. But they could instead focus on what traction they have gained, they could "enjoy the art of the search," or whatever else they choose to put value on. But it comes down to what they value. Talks and whole books are written on this and I wont be able to do them justice. This mental outlook thing extends to depression. See CBT, Congnitive Behavioral Therapy, which reduces depression by changing how you think about things. One could choose to apply those techniques.
      - bradlys 5y ago
        A lot of this “choosing to be happy” as the way you describe it though is merely self-deception/lying-to-oneself. If I’m starving - I have every right to be upset. Yet in your mind - I should just learn to enjoy the search for food (even if it doesn’t exist) rather than being upset that I’m literally dying.
themacguffinman 5y ago
Sure, it's a choice in the same way that the outcome of an if-branch is a "choice". You have control over it in the same way a computer program has control over its own output. Which is to say: no actual control at all. Free will/choice isn't a coherent concept philosophically and I find it almost impossible to take anyone seriously when they propose "just change your mind" as a solution to anything. I am already struggling to resist the urge to leave this comment at "WOW THANKS, I'M CURED!". Twin studies show that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon where the genetic heritability of the stable component of happiness is estimated to be almost 80% [1]. If you're unhappy and reading this with a sense of disappointment, I'd just say "don't count yourself out yet". [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...
- sethammons 5y ago
  Not sure where you are going with the free will thing unless you are going for the genetics answer to happiness which I find lacking. Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics. Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality_Questionnaire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality... Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    There's a lot of fine literature out there that can properly explain better than I can why free will is an incoherent concept, I recommend googling it. Although the philosophy is fairly basic, it's hard to flesh out concisely in the format of social media comments. A one sentence summary might be: we are our physiology and thus bound by the laws of physics and chemistry, we cannot have more free will or more capacity to self-change than the physical particles that comprise us. Honestly I'm not interested in object-level rebuttals to this, the philosophy around this is fairly settled and feels like debating whether the earth is flat. The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions. No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6

by jd115 5y ago

artemonster 5y ago

That is just a load of shit, I am so tired of this toxic positivity. Of course its a choice in the first place, but choice is not what brings you there. You need to choose right turn, yes, yes! But you have to walk the path towards the destination and that is a whole different story. If all you postulate that it is enough just to make the right turn, then… ah, whatever.

jd115 5y ago
There can be no such thing as toxic positivity. Your doubts are toxic, yes. But positivity can never be toxic. Life IS utterly binary and clear-cut in this respect, there are no grey areas, no nuances. There is an absolute good and it is joy. And it is 100% a personal choice, regardless of circumstances. Once again - it is the only ONE thing over which you have any control, at all times, no exceptions. You can always choose to be happy. AND that's enough!
- rjh29 5y ago
  Incredibly insulting to people with depression.
  - jd115 5y ago
    Which is why they are depressed. They choose (over and over and over again, many times in each hour they make this CONSCIOUS CHOICE) to find this insulting, instead of empowering. I am leaving out no-one. Joy is absolutely accessible to every living being, at all times, under all conditions.
- kranner 5y ago
  Leaving out people with e.g. clinical depression, this is still only true for some people. The rest don't believe that they can simply choose to be happy regardless of circumstances, and therefore they can't. I don't think we get a choice in the matter: either we're lucky to be in the first group who know it intuitively or figure it out or come across the idea somewhere, or we aren't so lucky.
sethammons 5y ago
I have met people who laugh and smile about hardships and I have met people who are sour about unequivocally positive situations. I don't think happiness is a destination, it is a path. The happy person is happy to have chosen to turn right and to have had the opportunity to so. The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. That is the decision
- lexapro 5y ago
  >The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. >That is the decision What is the decision exactly? If unhappy people could just choose to be happy instead, they would.
  - sethammons 5y ago
    Let's make sure we are talking about the same thing. I don't mean the fleeting joy of a pop cycle on a hot summer day when you were twelve and the cutie you have a crush on smiled at you. I'm talking about a general disposition. A "happy person." It is the way one looks at and approaches the problems and/or situations. You can choose to change how you approach the problem and you can choose what you find rewarding in that problem and the approach. You can also choose to focus on what you've yet to attain. In our little parable here, the unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. We are getting terribly abstract now. But they could instead focus on what traction they have gained, they could "enjoy the art of the search," or whatever else they choose to put value on. But it comes down to what they value. Talks and whole books are written on this and I wont be able to do them justice. This mental outlook thing extends to depression. See CBT, Congnitive Behavioral Therapy, which reduces depression by changing how you think about things. One could choose to apply those techniques.
    - bradlys 5y ago
      A lot of this “choosing to be happy” as the way you describe it though is merely self-deception/lying-to-oneself. If I’m starving - I have every right to be upset. Yet in your mind - I should just learn to enjoy the search for food (even if it doesn’t exist) rather than being upset that I’m literally dying.

themacguffinman 5y ago

Sure, it's a choice in the same way that the outcome of an if-branch is a "choice". You have control over it in the same way a computer program has control over its own output. Which is to say: no actual control at all. Free will/choice isn't a coherent concept philosophically and I find it almost impossible to take anyone seriously when they propose "just change your mind" as a solution to anything. I am already struggling to resist the urge to leave this comment at "WOW THANKS, I'M CURED!". Twin studies show that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon where the genetic heritability of the stable component of happiness is estimated to be almost 80% [1]. If you're unhappy and reading this with a sense of disappointment, I'd just say "don't count yourself out yet". [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...

sethammons 5y ago
Not sure where you are going with the free will thing unless you are going for the genetics answer to happiness which I find lacking. Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics. Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality_Questionnaire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality... Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  There's a lot of fine literature out there that can properly explain better than I can why free will is an incoherent concept, I recommend googling it. Although the philosophy is fairly basic, it's hard to flesh out concisely in the format of social media comments. A one sentence summary might be: we are our physiology and thus bound by the laws of physics and chemistry, we cannot have more free will or more capacity to self-change than the physical particles that comprise us. Honestly I'm not interested in object-level rebuttals to this, the philosophy around this is fairly settled and feels like debating whether the earth is flat. The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions. No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6