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Nobody optimizes happiness

243 points by arunbahl 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alexfromapex 4y ago
I’ve heard a talk before about how using it as a performance indicator works wonders. Countries need to shift from monetary goals like GDP to GHP.
- blocked_again 4y ago
  Is this sarcasm?
  - jerojero 4y ago
    Not sure but GDP really is not an end-all be-all indicator that we should be using. I think Piketty makes a good argument against GDP if you're keen on learning more about the topic.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    Bhutan famously uses "Gross National Happiness" instead of GDP as a success metric.
    - blocked_again 4y ago
      I guess that explains why people are moving from all over the world to Bhutan.
      - plutonorm 4y ago
        Is this sarcasm?
  - alexfromapex 4y ago
    No it’s totally serious, this has been a huge research topic: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/insights-from-the-first-global-survey-of-balance-and-harmony/ https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/insights-from-the-firs...
mlyle 4y ago
I think this piece overstates things. Retirement is a big life transition. Big transitions suck, even if they end up pointing in the direction you'd like. I optimized for early financial independence. I did lucrative things and made money (with skills I enjoyed using). Then I used the opportunity to do less lucrative, even more interesting/enjoyable things. I'm a schoolteacher at the moment. Who knows what I'll do next!
- aboodman 4y ago
  Yes I have known many people who have made this transition, and I myself did ~5 years ago. It takes most people about a year to figure themselves out.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  When did you retire? What exactly is a lucrative thing that generated said wealth? Always interested in hearing stories!
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Founded a venture-backed startup at 19; sold it. Could have retired at 23. Kept accidentally falling into interesting work every couple of years; doing it for awhile, and retiring again. Some of it lucrative, some of it not. Accidentally started coaching school robotics teams at 38. They did well; role grew in scope. Now I am 43; teaching HS economics, MS robotics/engineering, and a few other random things full time.
    - apalmer 4y ago
      But you are not actually retired. Seems more in line with what the article is saying.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        It's all semantic-- the income I derive from work is irrelevant to my quality of life, and I work completely by choice.
fein 4y ago
The definition of happiness is subjective of course, but I think a better "synonym" here would be the word prosperity. People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness. It's well correlated up to a certain level of wealth / income, and then only very loosely correlated.
  - fein 4y ago
    I would chalk that up to a mental illness at that point.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean-- pursuing income past the point of clear correlation? The leveling out is around $75k of annual income. Most of us here have optimized income beyond that point.
      - elteto 4y ago
        Not saying that the overall idea is wrong but that figure is way too low currently for most large metro areas in the US. And below poverty level in others. With $75k and a family of two kids you are not going to be saving much for retirement, if anything. Medical bills can completely bankrupt you in an instant. You can’t just pick any restaurant you want without doing some research on price first. You can’t afford much of a vacation anywhere either, except perhaps taking the kids to Disneyland once a year.
        HeyImAlex 4y ago
        That study was published in 2010, so adjusted for inflation it’s more like 100k.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Nobody optimizes for happiness but they do optimize for "cheerfulness". > The goal of life is cheerfulness (euthymia), which is not the same as pleasure . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion > “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/democritus/ https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/democritus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tranquillitate_Animi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tranquillitate_Animi
- biggerChris 4y ago
  True happiness is being a child till ones dying moment on earth.
  - smeej 4y ago
    Oh wow. That's actually how I imagine hell, being stuck in my childhood. I forget other people had healthy families until I read something like this!
    - o_____________o 4y ago
      GP probably meant childlike – open heart, a state of wonder, curiosity and play. Healthy people seem to have this quality bookended on each side of their life.
      - O__________O 4y ago
        Most babies are unhappy the second they are born. Being both happy and unhappy is natural.
      - granshaw 4y ago
        Yes. Plus having someone Cook for and clean after me. Oh and maybe pay the bills too Being completely serious ( I think)
wccrawford 4y ago
I think the opposite. Everyone thinks they're optimizing for happiness. It's nearly impossible to target because there are far, far too many unknowns. But nobody just aims to have a ton of money for no reason. They do it because they want money. Why? They think they'll be happier when they have it. Some have a whole-life plan, and some are just living day-to-day, but everyone trying to earn "more money" is aiming to be happier. There are some who aim for happiness only in the short term, too. People call them lazy, or good-for-nothing a lot of the time. They're not trying to make others happy, just themselves. And so far as they can tell, it's working because if they knuckled down and worked hard, they could earn more money... But they'd definitely be less happy in the short term. There are even some who optimize for other people's happiness. It brings them happiness, too, of course, but probably not as much as it brings others. That's called charity, selflessness, or altruism. But everyone optimizes for happiness. They just don't always get it.
- voidhorse 4y ago
  The problem is that the equation “money == happiness” lacks a proof.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    At best the two are correlated up to a fairly low income level. After that there’s virtually no correlation at all.
    - pizzathyme 4y ago
      I used to think this until I made a career change that moved me from the top 10% earners to the top 1%. I am much, much happier, on a daily and multi year basis. Less stress, less worry, more optimistic.
      - bandyaboot 4y ago
        n=1. The science has been done on this and as far as I know, the results have been pretty consistent and have held up so far.(edit: turns out that's incorrect--there have been contradictory results released in the last couple years) My household is in higher single digit top percentage range and I'm not even sure whether or not I think moving to the top percent would make me happier. In the name of science I will be talking with my boss on Monday.
MikeCapone 4y ago
The book 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Dan Gilbert is great on this topic. People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Seems like the only happy people are retired or wealthy people to me...
- truncate 4y ago
  Adding to that, I'm reading Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. One of the points that I really related to was that more you think about happiness, more likely you will find yourself unhappy. Essentially the pursuit/expectation of happiness paradoxically will make your brain think of all the things wrong in your life. I don't know how it started, I think that's been true for me. I never thought about happiness when I was young. There were things that were not perfect -- not enough money, no girlfriend, not having clarity on what to do next, failures, envy in general -- but I was still much happier relatively and I was by no means thinking about happiness back then. Just accepted it is what it is, and kept going on with life.
voidhorse 4y ago
I think it’s even a bit simpler than that. The, admittedly reductive, viewpoint I take: people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed because they’ve earned a freedom that others told them they wanted. Many of us are “pipelined”. The course of our lives is not determined by some conscious self-realization, but rather follows a prescribed track. I think (at least American) schooling is largely a failure because it does not teach self reflection. We fail students by failing to even introduce most of them to philosophical thinking. Instead, our schools are focused on teaching the skills required to produce laborers that will ultimately buoy up the economic system. But the reality is, most people don’t want to be laborers, so when everything is framed like this we equate freedom with freedom from labor. But that isn’t the form of freedom most people really want. People want a more radical freedom grounded in self-fulfillment. All the FIRE folks chase freedom from labor but never spend any time doing philosophical reflection, thus they never realize how they actually want to self-define and shape their lives, thus they face ennui and depression once their grand battle for freedom from labor ends. In other words, Sartre and De Beauvoir had much to teach us.
- dakull 4y ago
  Living in bad faith. But is not just them, the whole corpus of philosophy should be studied.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > we equate freedom with freedom from labor. Negative freedoms are half a deal. All the old philosophers have a lot to teach us. We just don't have time to pay attention to them now. Maybe Nietzsche said it well: "Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that" What did he mean? > So if we aren't optimizing happiness, why not? Because "happiness" isn't a thing. It's an idea we have about a thing that most of us are not courageous enough to name, let alone take for ourselves.
  - scsilver 4y ago
    Its hard to enlighten your way into happiness when you have an infection. I think alot of “happiness” is based in health, physical, emotional, and the health of those you interact with. Atleast those are somewhat quantifiable ways to avoid needless suffering.
hirundo 4y ago
We are biological devices whose purpose in life is to replicate, as driven by our selfish genes. Happiness is just one metaphenomena that evolution opportunistically takes advantage of in order to achieve this purpose. It is a "purpose" in the narrow sense that algorithms that do not achieve it are removed from the population. Over the course of a life, human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator, genetically and memetically. We are sculpted in detail by being descended from billions of generations of successful replicators. There is much temporary, but little long term happiness in ignoring those forces. Having a family, writing a book, creating a piece of art, or a functional invention, or a community. These are means of replication, to be optimized if you wish to increase happiness as a side effect.
- smeej 4y ago
  What is the purpose of the system of replicators? Does it have one? Is it an end in its own right? In my experience, people who see themselves as part of the pursuit of the purpose of the system are also able to find happiness even if they do not personally replicate in some obvious biological or memetic way.
- grog454 4y ago
  > human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator With a species as complex as humans it becomes much less clear what being an effective replicator entails. Someone like Alexander Fleming (inventor of penecilin) has probably done more to augment human replication than a million typical humans. And of course this effect isn't limited to medical specialists. A more salient example would be any of the creators of or contributors to dating apps.
hu3 4y ago
Considering I fired a problematic but very profitable client last month, yes I do optmize for happiness. Altough less than I should.
deepzn 4y ago
In the past, I've found Bezos regret minimization framework to be a great way to figure out if you are making the right decision leading to happiness. Although, there might be a line of divergence for some things between regret minimization, and happiness maximization (e.g. short term pleasures for long-term long lasting gains).
eevilspock 4y ago
Possibility: We need meaning more than happiness. For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty. ~ from Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033 Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. ~ Viktor Frankl
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Frankl's status as a Holocaust survivor affords him a special perspective that few get, or would want to. On the other side of PTSD, for a lucky few, is "post traumatic growth". I won't claim it's a super-power but it gives a perspective in which many "meaningless" things melt away and one sees the world vividly. IIRC (it's a while since I read Frankl) logotherapy starts from a point of utter meaninglessness, in the camps or on the battlefield where people die for no reason. With all the "meaning" stripped away one is free to build ones own. Frankl gave an enormous gift with that book and his work in clinical practice, up there with Donald Winnicott. Sadly very little makes it into ordinary life, perhaps because the subject matter is too challenging.
Archelaos 4y ago
> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals [...] people don’t seem to think too much about the specifics of what would happen after their goal is achieved. Most people I know seem to have so many goals and projects that there is no danger of them running out of things to achieve.
hprotagonist 4y ago
Possibility: increasing happiness is not accomplished by being centered on one’s self.
chrismartin 4y ago
"Happiness" feels under-specified here. I think it's more like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0]. Which actions, both in the moment and in the long-term, (1) shore up the base of your pyramid and (2) carry you further up it? People seem to think a lot about the lower layers, e.g.: - I am hungry, what will I eat? - How are the people that I love doing? But people seem to spend relatively little effort reasoning about the top. Self-actualization looks different for everyone, and for a particular person it tends to evolve. What would make today a great day for you? What would make the next year great? How do you get there? Relatively few people seem to reach a durable state of "I am so happy that I desire only to maintain my current happy situation". Perhaps a big component of happiness is the state of working toward (or at least anticipation of reaching) continuously evolving goals. Or, maybe I have strong "type A" bias and have something to learn from people who do much less. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
h2odragon 4y ago
People who optimize for happiness aren't bragging about having done so, usually. Its hard to do so without coming across as smug and holier than thou, "I have achieved nirvana and you haven't, striving peasant." Many disregarded, lower income, "lower class" people have as much ability as people paid many times the income, but they have chosen to balance their life differently, often for greater happiness for themselves or others. Those people who have too many dogs, for example.
- elefantastisch 4y ago
  Indeed. I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/) We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them. There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.
syrusakbary 4y ago
About a year ago I wrote an article about a similar topic. It’s so easy to fall into the goals trap, where external goals dictate our happiness. It’s addictive, specially if you achieve them. It might seem contradictory but achieving external goals usually drifts us away from happiness. Here’s the article if anyone is interested on reading further! https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2f82663bda https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Imagine where you would like to end and draw a mental map of which personality traits or skills you need in order to get there Interesting adaptive system take. Adapt the model/ego ideal. Random theory as to why people don't do that... if you think the goal is necessary to get the ideal, then changing yourself might make you not want the goal any more. Given the superpower to simply decide to be happy, but risk becoming Diogenes instead of Alexander the Great, who would take it? You'd have to be a-priori happy with missing out on all you presently hold dear [1]. [1] Read "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips for a deep and disturbing account of how powerful that can be,
dukeofdoom 4y ago
can recommend a kayak to improve your current state of happiness if you don't already own one. it's like an adventure vehicle, exercise machine, nature and relaxation transportation thing.. Even if you are poor and short on money, a kayak can even help you eat better if you start fishing from it.
kelseyfrog 4y ago
Optimizing for happiness is a hopeless endeavor stymied by the hedonic treadmill. Instead it's far more productive to observe the emotional need for happiness at a distance, like a tide that rolls in and out. Like all emotions, the only thing we control is how we respond to them. Becoming too attached, even to happiness is a fool's errand.
Melatonic 4y ago
Didn't they measure the brain waves of some specific bud hist monks in a very high altitude area and determine that they were the "happiest" (or maybe "content" is the better word) people in terms of what we can scientifically measure?
llbeansandrice 4y ago
Those folks from the FIRE communities are forgetting the most important part of it. “Build the life you want, then save for it”. They started saving, and then pulled the trigger to retire to…nothing. I still think FIRE is the best path to happiness. Not having financial pressures gives so much freedom Ime. That doesn’t mean people don’t mess it up though.
- mlyle 4y ago
  I think -- even accounting for it all... Struggling productively has its own value. If you "win" and stop, you can easily be inadvertently giving up something important to you. I keep making my way back to work.
bandyaboot 4y ago
I think one of the better strategies for optimizing happiness is to try to surround yourself with as many happy people as possible and make that sphere as broad as possible. I tend to be on the liberal side politically, and honestly, that’s what it’s mostly about. It’s selfishness masquerading as compassasion.
dgreensp 4y ago
> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals and get up every day and work like mad to try to achieve them. > Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch? First of all, the everybody/nobody in this article is scoped to the author's circle/bubble. IME, a lot of founder types are pretty happy just working and not doing much else. After their company IPOs, they will probably just start another company. They aren't necessarily working to retire. Having enough money that you don't have to work is never a bad thing, IMO. I have a chunk of money right now from selling some stock, not enough to retire (with my lifestyle), but enough for now. Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money. (I have kids, and lots of code I want to write; I'll always be busy, and if I'm bored it's because the things I'm busy doing are boring.) I'm sure it's fair to say that retiring takes some adjustment. You can take some time to get in touch with yourself. You can work if you want. You have a lot more options. The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to. I was brought up to go to school every day, do my homework, and achieve. Not to prioritize myself and building a fun, joyful, fulfilling life for myself. It's a matter of culture. And there are also stages of life where it makes sense to focus on one's career.
- Swizec 4y ago
  Yeah some of us enjoy work. People pay me to do what I started doing for fun at 9 years old? Hells yeah! More!! If I win the lottery tomorrow (IPO or otherwise), I’d probably continue to have a job of some sort. Maybe I would prioritize a different reward than cashflow, but my day to day wouldn’t change much.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    A good model for this (don’t laugh) is Downton Abbey. Some characters are fine just chilling, some want to do a “job” like working at a hospital. But none of them have anything near the level of problems of their staff, who need their job to live.
    - slickdork 4y ago
mrsmee89 4y ago
I think this is incredibly self evident but I’ll say it anyway, becoming well acquainted with the fact that you’re gonna die is the best way to gain clarity on what’s important. It’s the backdrop to everything else. It’s still shocking to me that people don’t understand how important this is to living a life that YOU want.
dasil003 4y ago
Statistical studies of happiness are interesting, but I feel they are borderline useless for practical application. There's just too much subjectivity lost in the quantification of happiness. Individuals are not populations. On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy. Trying to design a goals or future state in pursuit of happiness feels like setting myself up for disappointment. All else being equal, having money is better than not having it, being engaged in some mentally challenging "work" is better than being bored, having good family and friend relationships is better than being isolated, but trying to optimize these things with some kind of master plan feels like it induces FOMO and general anxiety about the finite possibilities for one life. I prefer to go with the flow, stay engaged in whatever I'm doing, and keep my eyes open for opportunities. I'm not sure if this makes me "happy", but I'm sure more content when I'm operating then when I try too hard to size up the big picture.
- krisrm 4y ago
  > On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy These are wise words that I needed to hear after a hard day and feeling like I've always been getting the short end of the stick lately. Thank you for writing them.
- christophilus 4y ago
  I think you’re right about the way to be unhappy. You might even generalize it to be: too much self preoccupation. The most miserable people I know are self absorbed. The happiest ones are always focused on something other than themselves. I’ve found this same pattern plays out in my own life.
plutonorm 4y ago
Most of the time people are talking about a kind of 'cognitive' happiness. Which is essentially divorced from the experience of positive valence emotions on a day to day basis. If you ask prisoners if they are happy, they will say no because it would be weird for them to say yes, wouldn't it? it would break our expectations and their own. It would break the model we all have of how we are supposed to feel about this or that. I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.
jvanderbot 4y ago
"Happiness is love. Full stop." George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Longitudinal studies on happiness and fulfillment exist, and show that satisfying relationships dominate other factors. I'll so glad I adopted this mindset before it was too late.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Drug overdoses are real. Optimization in the abstract is meaningless.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
strken 4y ago
> Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch? I'd buy and eat roughly what I do now, in roughly the same area, but I'd own a small house or townhouse near the park with a nice garden and no mortgage. > When you wake up, what will your bedroom look like? Who (if anyone) will be in it with you? What clothes will you put on? What will you eat for breakfast? What will the breakfast room look like? What will you do all day? Who will you spend time with? What will you talk about? My bedroom will look basically the same, but I'll be allowed to fix all the peeling paint and weird broken plaster because I won't be renting. I'll put on clothes that are identical to my current clothes, walk down to the cafe for a coffee and take it into the park, and jump on a zoom/slack call with a friend around 10 or 11am to talk about our project. I know this is what will happen because I work a normal job four days a week and the fifth day already looks like this. Reading this, I don't understand what the author's talking about. My life's fine, I just want to own a home and work a bit less. Most of the people I know are like this. The grand plans are "get married," "get enough money to support my parents in their retirement," "get enough for a house deposit," or "bring my family over from the old country." Is this a Bay Area rationalist thing where everyone the author knows is trying to cure cancer/study X-risks/align skynet/defeat malaria?
- granshaw 4y ago
  Yeah I’d say once someone’s into their first or second job, maybe late twenties, those grandiose dreams are left behind
roenxi 4y ago
There is a slightly different frame on "Increasing happiness is impossible" that the article misses (despite being quite thorough). Optimising for happiness is a terrible goal. Particularly for people of a strong materialist bent, because the obvious answer is drugs, but even spiritually it is quite clear that personal happiness isn't something valuable. Major religions tend to optimise for community. The two I know well - Christianity favours forgiveness and a relation between sinner and God, Buddhism optimises for reducing suffering but in the context of a communal setting. From the extreme materialist position note that happiness has no evolutionary advantages. Power and wealth do, being gregarious does, having lots of partners does. So humans are not going to optimise for happiness. Those that do get bred out of the gene pool. So in practice happiness is only a signpost pointing towards more pressing goals.
eric4smith 4y ago
Continuous happiness is impossible, since happiness comes from accomplishing things. So the only way to optimize for it is to plan to accomplish the things one likes to do. Our society is too fixated on being happy. Which is why for example the divorce rate is so high. Sure there is a baseline of “contentment” when huh become rich. But if one has money in the bank and nothing to accomplish you’re left with the same unhappiness and lack of purpose - just in a different way.
- rufius 4y ago
  Honestly, I think you were on to something re: contentment. I’ve never really optimized for happiness. I tend to frame it all in terms of being content. I think that is more sustainable - or at least it is for me. I don’t have any fancy studies to back this up - just my own life experience.
bobthechef 4y ago
mikpanko 4y ago
Is optimizing for happiness a worthy goal? Another approach is optimizing for having meaning in life. As humans we can’t escape some suffering in our lives, but doing it for something we consider meaningful makes the suffering more bearable. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a classic book on the topic.
- moviewise 4y ago
  Why not both? We can optimize for happiness and meaning: "First, let’s disentangle the difference between feeling sad, empty, and dissatisfied with life, versus wondering that the purpose of life is all about. They are somewhat related in that people who are content with life and the opportunities it offers don’t generally feel bad when thinking about philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life?" From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? Some Advice On Happiness From A Few Good Movies https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existential-crisis https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Yeah, I was going to respond with a missing possibility: maybe happiness is not the point of life. Personally, I feel like happiness is a PART of a fulfilling life, but not the whole of it. I know in my life, I was likely ‘happier’ when I didn’t have kids… I spent more hours of the day doing things that I wanted to do, and those things made me happy in the moment. Now, with two young kids, I am spending less time doing the things I would choose to spend my time on, and I have fewer moments where I am in the flow and maximally happy. However, I feel WAY more satisfied with my life now, and feel much more compete and with a clear purpose in my life. There is a reason why hedonism is often looked down on; if your only motivation is your own happiness, your life will end up lacking.
  - mherdeg 4y ago
    The Bluey episode "Fruit Bat" touches on this -- when you decide to have kids you're choosing to forego a lot of fun, in Bandit's case pickup football matches with adult friends. It's a conscious choice and the tradeoff is a very different life focus. I don't think one or the other purpose is inherently better, just different. Having two young kids at home for the past two years with full-time jobs and minimal childcare has really stretched things further than I would have expected. Watching how much the older kid loves going to the library, check out a stack of books, take them to the playground and read them while his sister plays -- while they both exude sheer joy -- has been unforgettably good. It's not all happy times; the kids need a lot of help and they aren't always cooperative. But it's the job I signed up for and it has a uniquely valuable comp structure.
paulpauper 4y ago
Happiness is getting the promotion, things going your way, your article on front page of hacker news, making money, etc...quantifiable , rare accomplishments that are valued in the yes of others and confer status. I don't know why people have to act like happiness is complicated. I think the depressing reality is most people are not that good at anything, thus cannot feel the satisfaction that comes from achievement.
ezrast 4y ago
> If it’s possible to cause unhappiness, surely it’s possible to cause happiness, too? This isn't a reasonable conclusion. It's easy to make someone unhappy by denying them basic human needs: food, comfort, entertainment, security, community. Once those needs are met, it's much less obvious how to get to the next tier. It's mostly well-accepted that money is correlated with happiness for people in poverty, but the relationship quickly flattens out for folks who are comfortably middle-class. People instinctively know how to get to a certain baseline, once they have the resources to do so. Moving past that is a separate question entirely.
pedalpete 4y ago
It seems to me the author is looking at happiness as it's a destination you arrive to and then just live there. Perhaps we should look at our emotions and mental states as food. I remember a GF in high school telling me I shouldn't be happy all the time. That I was missing out on the broader scope of emotions because I was always "happy". I think that is probably an outward appearance rather than reality. I'm not always happy, and I don't think I'm at my best when I've achieved happiness. If everyone was always happy, is that the world we want to live in? I'm not suggesting that some people should be happy while others live in sorrow, but there is a reason all of these things exist. I find meditating on being grateful can often bring great sorrow, which is can be cathartic. It's not happiness, so should I be trying to remove that feeling and replace it with happiness? Everything in moderation, I suppose that applies to emotions as well.
tehsauce 4y ago
Successful people probably are most happy when they are chasing after ambitious goals. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
mherdeg 4y ago
The news coverage made it sound like in the last few years, Tony Hsieh was surrounding himself with people whose full time job was to make him happy. If that's accurate I wonder whether it worked?
randallsquared 4y ago
Because optimizing happiness (at best) leads to pointless bliss, a la Goodhart's Law. Happiness is the coarse measure of your brain/subconscious/whatever estimate of how you're doing at life: are you effectively working at achieving your goals? This is why people reporting being happy when they are focused on doing what they really want to do, and lack of happiness is just a sign that, at some deep level, you do not believe you are trending toward success at your goals. You might need to fix your goals. You might need to fix your trend. But happiness is more likely to come as a side effect of doing the right thing (in your own estimation!) than as a direct effect of trying to be happy.
kingkawn 4y ago
I do
danrl 4y ago
FWIW: I find that a well-sized challenge and some minor suffering in overcoming it provides me with meaning, resulting in happiness. All other happiness I experience can be traced back to spending time with friends, spending time in nature, eating and moving in a healthy way. YMMV
chmod775 4y ago
Optimizing for happiness is how humans work at their core. We just easily get stuck in local maxima. Everybody optimizes happiness, most of us poorly.
deleted 4y ago
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braindead_in 4y ago
There are certain spiritual traditions where the goal is to achieve a permanent of bliss: samadhi/Nirvana/enlightenment etc. Some of these schools of thought go back 5000+ years and the philosophy and science of happiness has been worked out in great details. I'm a recent convert to Nondualism and right now all I want to do is to meditate. Sometimes it's so peaceful and blissful that everything else pales in comparison.
- 6510 4y ago
  You can do many things but if the source is external or material it can vanish at any time.
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    Everything can vanish at any time. Even "internal" sources are not forever nor are they independent of external factors.
alecfreudenberg 4y ago
I don't know much about Maslow but I tend to resonate with the archetype of that hierarchy. I think people climb the pyramid and eventually find a state of seeking increasingly profound self realizations. They then optimize for things like fulfillment and a well protected lower pyramid. Happiness is an emotion, and not one that seems viable to try and maximize for continuously. There are other emotions that are not compatible with happiness, and they are neccesary to achieve a sense of self actualization.
inglor_cz 4y ago
"Maybe it’s not the achieving stuff that makes us happy, but rather the act of chasing after achievements." I think he is up to something here. Some people enjoy (real world) hunts enormously; I don't, being squeamish about blood and death, but an abstract hunt feels captivating to me. That said, the piece is written in a deliberately black-and-white way. There is a lot to happiness. For example, I don't have anywhere enough money to retire, but I have enough not to be forced to bow down to any single boss or customer; they know it and treat me respectfully.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Sold company, moved into a smaller flat, moved to the sea, work much less, got dog, gave away most things, increased happyness. Should have done this ten years ago.
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
There's a quote from John Bogle's book Enough, something to the extent of he wanted to leave for his kids "enough money that they could do anything, but not enough money that they could do nothing."
Aeolun 4y ago
Because nobody can measure happiness, nobody optimizes for it. When you do anything you don’t know if the thing is going to make you happier or not (and if so how long it will last). Anyhow, I’m fairly certain if whole communities of people FIRE’d together, they’d be much happier than doing it by themselves. The big issue is the social isolation it brings.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
Happiness is too fleeting to be the goal. It depends on such small things it can change hour by hour and it's entirely based by my perception. I can't plan if I'll be sick or if my partner will dump me or anything else that may upset me. Happiness shouldn't be the goal, it should be something we strive for, despite of the negative in our life. I can try to achieve some form of success (professional, monetary, social) and that will increase the chance that my life won't fall apart. From experience that's not enough to be happy all the time. I felt the most miserable right after achieving great results and relaxing. Keeping myself busy (with work or family) is what makes it easier to be happy. I don't think the alternative should be an hedonistic plan on how to be happy (eg. schedule a meditation session everyday or pamper yourself, eat your favourite food, get in bed with tons of people); still aim at greatness, live your life like you wanted it to read it if it was a book - and try to see good in everything to be happen in fortune and misfortune.
Hadriel 4y ago
Uhm, that's exactly what Tony Hsieh did.
closedloop129 4y ago
>Maybe it’s not the achieving stuff that makes us happy, but rather the act of chasing after achievements. It's called happiness, like happening. If nothing happens or can happen, how can people be happy? People do optimize happiness by making money, because then, anything can happen. The problem is that they buy products, where things are already done, instead of buying the tools to get it done by themselves, or better, get it done with their friends.
collimator 4y ago
Then, become nobody
mathgladiator 4y ago
It took me a long time to figure what makes me happy, and it took six ketamine trips to figure this out. It's important to detach from the outcome and just embrace the day. Stop thinking about long term plans and goals, and just wake up and make. Wake and make. This works for me because at my core, I'm a artistic coder. I love to code for the sake of coding. I find these machines beautiful works of arts, and the way of code speaks to me. So, what am I doing about it? I'm building a cathedral. I'm taking all experience, all my wisdom, decades of side projects, and I'm building a new platform. The ultimate platform. A glorious platform that I named after a goat which I named after a character from battlestar galatica. I wrote a bit about this here: https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-monastic-code-machine.html https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo... Optimizing for happiness requires discovering a repeatable behavior that sparks joy. For whatever reason, working on a programming language to drive a new type of platform sparks joy. Sometime, I'll make a game with my platform, but I'm not anxious of even worried. I just show up and polish things here and there. Just today, I spent a few hours ensuring that document events, message handlers, constructor all have access to @context variable. I'm working on this right now, running my test suites with ridiculous code coverage (99%) over thousands of tests. It's great. I have no expectation of financial return, and I'm grateful to be retired. I sucked shit through a straw in big tech, and it was worth it to get to this point. Now, I can commune with the machine, and work on my physical health.
- psyc 4y ago
  I’m not sure who asked you to ghostwrite my autobiography, but thanks. Saves me the trouble. Minor correction though: my cathedral is my dream game, or more accurately whatever my dream game is in the present.
- scotty79 4y ago
  > Optimizing for happiness requires discovering a repeatable behavior that sparks joy. Oh, well. For me that's gaming. And to some degree helping others. I also like solving some problems but it's hard to turn it into repeatable behavior that reliably sparks joy.
collimator 4y ago
Therefore become nobody.
MauranKilom 4y ago
Quoting (abridged, of course) from The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck on this topic: > There is a premise [...] that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were getting accepted to law school [...]. If I achieve X, then I can be happy. > This premise though, is the problem. Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature, and, as we'll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness. > We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no - our own pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution, they're a feature. > There's no such thing as a life without problems. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. And maybe the central tenet of the book: > Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is "solving". If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. > To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you. It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house. You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job - or even a book, for that matter. Much of the rest of the book goes into depth about choosing what problems you want to have - because you will have problems no matter what, but it's up to you what those are. Both on a factual level ("you won't get a great physique if 'wake up early to go to the gym' is a problem you don't want to have") and on a mindset level ("Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is unhappy about his success because earlier he was kicked out of Metallica, who are now more successful"). In other words, what to "give a fuck" about - and what not to give a fuck about. Would recommend!
- Expez 4y ago
  In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dives a bit deeper into what sort of "problems" we should choose for yourself if we want a happy life. The gist of it is that we should pick activities that we can loose ourselves in. Everyone's experienced this, where they work on something, look at the watch, and a surprising amount of time has passed. A few examples of good "problems": learning an instrument, coding something or learning a sport. I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.
mullikine 4y ago
https://mullikine.github.io/posts/the-most-surreal-day/ https://mullikine.github.io/posts/the-most-surreal-day/ The meaning of life. This type of happiness can't be bought with money. You have to give away money actually to find happiness.
a_c 4y ago
Just get rich first. If you are an asshole, you get to be an asshole. If you want to spend time with family, you get to spend time with family. If you want to build some useful product, do music, paint, drink tea, you get to do all that.
danielunited 4y ago
Happiness is overrated. I don’t live to be happy. I live to make an impact.
- Ataraxy 4y ago
  Yeah but that's what would make you happy...
endymi0n 4y ago
„Dr. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, believes there are five factors that contribute to our happiness: positive emotion and pleasure, achievement, relationships, engagement, and meaning. Of these, he believes engagement and meaning are the most important. Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way to finding lasting happiness. When our daily actions fulfill a bigger purpose, the most powerful and enduring happiness can happen.“ — The One Thing After studying the science of happiness for quite a while, this paragraph resonated a lot with me, summing it all up pretty nicely. Can recommend the whole book!
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  This kinda flies in the face people who don’t try to find deep meaning in their everyday life, accept it as it is and enjoy the best they can. This strategy usually comes with not getting too engaged and not getting hang up on small annoyances. TBF the article is also looking at people chasing after a dream, so people living average and happy lives might not fit either.
smartbit 4y ago
To me this article seems written from the perspective of United States. Eg. Social Engagement as a mean of personal happiness imho is not part of the core US values as (earning) money is so prevalent that all other happiness values are nothing more than checkboxes on a bucket list. Please let me know what you think. If you don’t agree please explain what I misunderstood.
pdimitar 4y ago
I am not sure what is this article trying to prove exactly. As a start, it conflates "nobody is thinking about what happens after they achieve their goal(s)" with "nobody is thinking / optimizing for happiness". Needless to say both are VERY different things. Cherry-picking a few people who can never be at peace and using that to peddle the message of "you don't ACTUALLY want to stop working" seems weird as hell. If I can retire tomorrow -- I am 42 -- my remaining years on this Earth will still not be enough to do all the hobbies and non-work related goals that I have. Even if I live to 85. And I know others like myself as well. So I don't know, strange article. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd call it a propaganda in the direction of "keep working, don't think about anything else". I am willing to accept that was not the author's goal but it does come across this way. There are several nice tidbits though.
metacritic12 4y ago
There's a catch 22 in optimizing happiness. The people who are most effortfully, consciously aiming towards happiness never seem in the happiest 10% of people. The happiest 10% of people are appreciating nature, or spiritual and trying to glorify God, or on a mission to save the world. It's like trying really really hard to fall asleep. The act of conscious aiming makes you sad every time things are less than optimal. Happiness itself is also a raw goal: you could be really happy hooked up to heroine, aiming for that gets you to a place that is ironically very depressing.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  The way I see it, happiness is a derivative, meaning you can't directly influence your happiness, you can only do things that might influence it. The struggle is optimizing that activity to deliver happiness in the best way. Your example about heroin is a really good one, because while it's one of the most direct ways to happiness, it does it in the worst way imaginable. But I don't think it's a catch-22 because people achieve it in vastly different ways. My buddy likes going clubbing on the weekends, it brings him loads of happiness, I personally would not be happy spending time that way. Likewise I love going outdoors and hiking, and I'm pretty sure he would be miserable in my form of "happiness".
langsoul-com 4y ago
You can play the then what game. Keep asking then what. You have enough money to retire, then what? You go travelling all around the world, then what? So and so forth until reaching a conclusion on how you consciously decide to live your life.
deleted 4y ago
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carapace 4y ago
Everyone optimizes happiness all the time, they are also Yak-shaving, and that's why we can't have nice things. Item: you are an evolved system. Ergo, "happiness" is a non-specific proxy for your unconscious estimate of the degree of present and future ease and success at living and reproducing. You are always optimizing for "happiness" by definition, four and a half billion years of evolution has seen to that. You are the direct descendant of untold millions of successful reproducers. (As an aside, for FIRE folks who find themselves bored or unsatisfied, the blindingly obvious answer is that your unconscious estimate takes into account the conditions of other people around you. Just because things are good for you doesn't mean you're done. "No man is an island." and all that, eh? The solution is equally obvious: help other people, make the world a better place.) Item: your brain is easily programmed. Due to the ad hoc nature of our upbringings we acquire models of the world that are wildly inconsistent (above the level of basic physical phenomenon.) We are following quasi-random programs. That's the reason why we work so hard and get such poor results: we are using lousy programs. Fortunately, it's easy to re-program your brain. In fact there are specific algorithms and techniques. I'd like to call attention to the "Core Transformation" technique particularly. ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/ I have no affiliation with them BTW) It's an algorithm for "popping the why stack" (cf. "Five Whys" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys ) Without going into a long spiel about it, the basic idea is that behaviors are motivated by a chain of intentions, a series of indirections. Behavior -> A -> B -> C -> Happiness You do FOO to get A which achieves B which in turn does C which engenders Happiness. (There can be more or fewer steps in between.) What these folks found is that all behaviors eventually wind up at one of five "core states": Beingness, Oneness, Bliss, Okayness, Happiness (I think I remembered them correctly, but maybe not, check the website.) The fascinating thing about these "core states" is that they are not dependent on anything else. (The idea that they are is part of the "lousy programming".) They are not contingent. You can access them at any time, in any location or condition. As you can imagine, going directly for the "core states" rather than through a chain of indirection brings a lot of simplicity and grace to life. Everything else comes together effortlessly, fulfilling the evolutionary mandate of happiness: present and future ease and success at living.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I don’t really try to optimize for happiness. I like a feeling of contentment. If I can walk into my living room, sit quietly doing nothing, and feel contented with who I am, my life, etc. then that is enough for me. I don’t always chase after “fun.”
Borrible 4y ago
Happyness is boring.

243 points by arunbahl 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I’ve heard a talk before about how using it as a performance indicator works wonders. Countries need to shift from monetary goals like GDP to GHP.

blocked_again 4y ago
Is this sarcasm?
- jerojero 4y ago
  Not sure but GDP really is not an end-all be-all indicator that we should be using. I think Piketty makes a good argument against GDP if you're keen on learning more about the topic.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Bhutan famously uses "Gross National Happiness" instead of GDP as a success metric.
  - blocked_again 4y ago
    I guess that explains why people are moving from all over the world to Bhutan.
    - plutonorm 4y ago
      Is this sarcasm?
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  No it’s totally serious, this has been a huge research topic: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/insights-from-the-first-global-survey-of-balance-and-harmony/ https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/insights-from-the-firs...

mlyle 4y ago

I think this piece overstates things. Retirement is a big life transition. Big transitions suck, even if they end up pointing in the direction you'd like. I optimized for early financial independence. I did lucrative things and made money (with skills I enjoyed using). Then I used the opportunity to do less lucrative, even more interesting/enjoyable things. I'm a schoolteacher at the moment. Who knows what I'll do next!

aboodman 4y ago
Yes I have known many people who have made this transition, and I myself did ~5 years ago. It takes most people about a year to figure themselves out.
thenerdhead 4y ago
When did you retire? What exactly is a lucrative thing that generated said wealth? Always interested in hearing stories!
- mlyle 4y ago
  Founded a venture-backed startup at 19; sold it. Could have retired at 23. Kept accidentally falling into interesting work every couple of years; doing it for awhile, and retiring again. Some of it lucrative, some of it not. Accidentally started coaching school robotics teams at 38. They did well; role grew in scope. Now I am 43; teaching HS economics, MS robotics/engineering, and a few other random things full time.
  - apalmer 4y ago
    But you are not actually retired. Seems more in line with what the article is saying.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      It's all semantic-- the income I derive from work is irrelevant to my quality of life, and I work completely by choice.

fein 4y ago

The definition of happiness is subjective of course, but I think a better "synonym" here would be the word prosperity. People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness.

mlyle 4y ago
> People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness. It's well correlated up to a certain level of wealth / income, and then only very loosely correlated.
- fein 4y ago
  I would chalk that up to a mental illness at that point.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean-- pursuing income past the point of clear correlation? The leveling out is around $75k of annual income. Most of us here have optimized income beyond that point.
    - elteto 4y ago
      Not saying that the overall idea is wrong but that figure is way too low currently for most large metro areas in the US. And below poverty level in others. With $75k and a family of two kids you are not going to be saving much for retirement, if anything. Medical bills can completely bankrupt you in an instant. You can’t just pick any restaurant you want without doing some research on price first. You can’t afford much of a vacation anywhere either, except perhaps taking the kids to Disneyland once a year.
      - HeyImAlex 4y ago
        That study was published in 2010, so adjusted for inflation it’s more like 100k.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Nobody optimizes for happiness but they do optimize for "cheerfulness". > The goal of life is cheerfulness (euthymia), which is not the same as pleasure . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion > “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/democritus/ https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/democritus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tranquillitate_Animi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Tranquillitate_Animi

biggerChris 4y ago
True happiness is being a child till ones dying moment on earth.
- smeej 4y ago
  Oh wow. That's actually how I imagine hell, being stuck in my childhood. I forget other people had healthy families until I read something like this!
  - o_____________o 4y ago
    GP probably meant childlike – open heart, a state of wonder, curiosity and play. Healthy people seem to have this quality bookended on each side of their life.
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Most babies are unhappy the second they are born. Being both happy and unhappy is natural.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      Yes. Plus having someone Cook for and clean after me. Oh and maybe pay the bills too Being completely serious ( I think)

wccrawford 4y ago

I think the opposite. Everyone thinks they're optimizing for happiness. It's nearly impossible to target because there are far, far too many unknowns. But nobody just aims to have a ton of money for no reason. They do it because they want money. Why? They think they'll be happier when they have it. Some have a whole-life plan, and some are just living day-to-day, but everyone trying to earn "more money" is aiming to be happier. There are some who aim for happiness only in the short term, too. People call them lazy, or good-for-nothing a lot of the time. They're not trying to make others happy, just themselves. And so far as they can tell, it's working because if they knuckled down and worked hard, they could earn more money... But they'd definitely be less happy in the short term. There are even some who optimize for other people's happiness. It brings them happiness, too, of course, but probably not as much as it brings others. That's called charity, selflessness, or altruism. But everyone optimizes for happiness. They just don't always get it.

voidhorse 4y ago
The problem is that the equation “money == happiness” lacks a proof.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  At best the two are correlated up to a fairly low income level. After that there’s virtually no correlation at all.
  - pizzathyme 4y ago
    I used to think this until I made a career change that moved me from the top 10% earners to the top 1%. I am much, much happier, on a daily and multi year basis. Less stress, less worry, more optimistic.
    - bandyaboot 4y ago
      n=1. The science has been done on this and as far as I know, the results have been pretty consistent and have held up so far.(edit: turns out that's incorrect--there have been contradictory results released in the last couple years) My household is in higher single digit top percentage range and I'm not even sure whether or not I think moving to the top percent would make me happier. In the name of science I will be talking with my boss on Monday.

MikeCapone 4y ago

The book 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Dan Gilbert is great on this topic. People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.

fullshark 4y ago
Seems like the only happy people are retired or wealthy people to me...
truncate 4y ago
Adding to that, I'm reading Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. One of the points that I really related to was that more you think about happiness, more likely you will find yourself unhappy. Essentially the pursuit/expectation of happiness paradoxically will make your brain think of all the things wrong in your life. I don't know how it started, I think that's been true for me. I never thought about happiness when I was young. There were things that were not perfect -- not enough money, no girlfriend, not having clarity on what to do next, failures, envy in general -- but I was still much happier relatively and I was by no means thinking about happiness back then. Just accepted it is what it is, and kept going on with life.

voidhorse 4y ago

I think it’s even a bit simpler than that. The, admittedly reductive, viewpoint I take: people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed because they’ve earned a freedom that others told them they wanted. Many of us are “pipelined”. The course of our lives is not determined by some conscious self-realization, but rather follows a prescribed track. I think (at least American) schooling is largely a failure because it does not teach self reflection. We fail students by failing to even introduce most of them to philosophical thinking. Instead, our schools are focused on teaching the skills required to produce laborers that will ultimately buoy up the economic system. But the reality is, most people don’t want to be laborers, so when everything is framed like this we equate freedom with freedom from labor. But that isn’t the form of freedom most people really want. People want a more radical freedom grounded in self-fulfillment. All the FIRE folks chase freedom from labor but never spend any time doing philosophical reflection, thus they never realize how they actually want to self-define and shape their lives, thus they face ennui and depression once their grand battle for freedom from labor ends. In other words, Sartre and De Beauvoir had much to teach us.

dakull 4y ago
Living in bad faith. But is not just them, the whole corpus of philosophy should be studied.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> we equate freedom with freedom from labor. Negative freedoms are half a deal. All the old philosophers have a lot to teach us. We just don't have time to pay attention to them now. Maybe Nietzsche said it well: "Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that" What did he mean? > So if we aren't optimizing happiness, why not? Because "happiness" isn't a thing. It's an idea we have about a thing that most of us are not courageous enough to name, let alone take for ourselves.
- scsilver 4y ago
  Its hard to enlighten your way into happiness when you have an infection. I think alot of “happiness” is based in health, physical, emotional, and the health of those you interact with. Atleast those are somewhat quantifiable ways to avoid needless suffering.

hirundo 4y ago

We are biological devices whose purpose in life is to replicate, as driven by our selfish genes. Happiness is just one metaphenomena that evolution opportunistically takes advantage of in order to achieve this purpose. It is a "purpose" in the narrow sense that algorithms that do not achieve it are removed from the population. Over the course of a life, human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator, genetically and memetically. We are sculpted in detail by being descended from billions of generations of successful replicators. There is much temporary, but little long term happiness in ignoring those forces. Having a family, writing a book, creating a piece of art, or a functional invention, or a community. These are means of replication, to be optimized if you wish to increase happiness as a side effect.

smeej 4y ago
What is the purpose of the system of replicators? Does it have one? Is it an end in its own right? In my experience, people who see themselves as part of the pursuit of the purpose of the system are also able to find happiness even if they do not personally replicate in some obvious biological or memetic way.
grog454 4y ago
> human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator With a species as complex as humans it becomes much less clear what being an effective replicator entails. Someone like Alexander Fleming (inventor of penecilin) has probably done more to augment human replication than a million typical humans. And of course this effect isn't limited to medical specialists. A more salient example would be any of the creators of or contributors to dating apps.

hu3 4y ago

Considering I fired a problematic but very profitable client last month, yes I do optmize for happiness. Altough less than I should.

deepzn 4y ago

In the past, I've found Bezos regret minimization framework to be a great way to figure out if you are making the right decision leading to happiness. Although, there might be a line of divergence for some things between regret minimization, and happiness maximization (e.g. short term pleasures for long-term long lasting gains).

eevilspock 4y ago

Possibility: We need meaning more than happiness. For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty. ~ from Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033 Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. ~ Viktor Frankl

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Frankl's status as a Holocaust survivor affords him a special perspective that few get, or would want to. On the other side of PTSD, for a lucky few, is "post traumatic growth". I won't claim it's a super-power but it gives a perspective in which many "meaningless" things melt away and one sees the world vividly. IIRC (it's a while since I read Frankl) logotherapy starts from a point of utter meaninglessness, in the camps or on the battlefield where people die for no reason. With all the "meaning" stripped away one is free to build ones own. Frankl gave an enormous gift with that book and his work in clinical practice, up there with Donald Winnicott. Sadly very little makes it into ordinary life, perhaps because the subject matter is too challenging.

Archelaos 4y ago

> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals [...] people don’t seem to think too much about the specifics of what would happen after their goal is achieved. Most people I know seem to have so many goals and projects that there is no danger of them running out of things to achieve.

hprotagonist 4y ago

Possibility: increasing happiness is not accomplished by being centered on one’s self.

chrismartin 4y ago

"Happiness" feels under-specified here. I think it's more like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0]. Which actions, both in the moment and in the long-term, (1) shore up the base of your pyramid and (2) carry you further up it? People seem to think a lot about the lower layers, e.g.: - I am hungry, what will I eat? - How are the people that I love doing? But people seem to spend relatively little effort reasoning about the top. Self-actualization looks different for everyone, and for a particular person it tends to evolve. What would make today a great day for you? What would make the next year great? How do you get there? Relatively few people seem to reach a durable state of "I am so happy that I desire only to maintain my current happy situation". Perhaps a big component of happiness is the state of working toward (or at least anticipation of reaching) continuously evolving goals. Or, maybe I have strong "type A" bias and have something to learn from people who do much less. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

h2odragon 4y ago

People who optimize for happiness aren't bragging about having done so, usually. Its hard to do so without coming across as smug and holier than thou, "I have achieved nirvana and you haven't, striving peasant." Many disregarded, lower income, "lower class" people have as much ability as people paid many times the income, but they have chosen to balance their life differently, often for greater happiness for themselves or others. Those people who have too many dogs, for example.

elefantastisch 4y ago
Indeed. I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/) We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them. There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.

syrusakbary 4y ago

About a year ago I wrote an article about a similar topic. It’s so easy to fall into the goals trap, where external goals dictate our happiness. It’s addictive, specially if you achieve them. It might seem contradictory but achieving external goals usually drifts us away from happiness. Here’s the article if anyone is interested on reading further! https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2f82663bda https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2...

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Imagine where you would like to end and draw a mental map of which personality traits or skills you need in order to get there Interesting adaptive system take. Adapt the model/ego ideal. Random theory as to why people don't do that... if you think the goal is necessary to get the ideal, then changing yourself might make you not want the goal any more. Given the superpower to simply decide to be happy, but risk becoming Diogenes instead of Alexander the Great, who would take it? You'd have to be a-priori happy with missing out on all you presently hold dear [1]. [1] Read "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips for a deep and disturbing account of how powerful that can be,

dukeofdoom 4y ago

can recommend a kayak to improve your current state of happiness if you don't already own one. it's like an adventure vehicle, exercise machine, nature and relaxation transportation thing.. Even if you are poor and short on money, a kayak can even help you eat better if you start fishing from it.

kelseyfrog 4y ago

Optimizing for happiness is a hopeless endeavor stymied by the hedonic treadmill. Instead it's far more productive to observe the emotional need for happiness at a distance, like a tide that rolls in and out. Like all emotions, the only thing we control is how we respond to them. Becoming too attached, even to happiness is a fool's errand.

Melatonic 4y ago

Didn't they measure the brain waves of some specific bud hist monks in a very high altitude area and determine that they were the "happiest" (or maybe "content" is the better word) people in terms of what we can scientifically measure?

llbeansandrice 4y ago

Those folks from the FIRE communities are forgetting the most important part of it. “Build the life you want, then save for it”. They started saving, and then pulled the trigger to retire to…nothing. I still think FIRE is the best path to happiness. Not having financial pressures gives so much freedom Ime. That doesn’t mean people don’t mess it up though.

mlyle 4y ago
I think -- even accounting for it all... Struggling productively has its own value. If you "win" and stop, you can easily be inadvertently giving up something important to you. I keep making my way back to work.

bandyaboot 4y ago

I think one of the better strategies for optimizing happiness is to try to surround yourself with as many happy people as possible and make that sphere as broad as possible. I tend to be on the liberal side politically, and honestly, that’s what it’s mostly about. It’s selfishness masquerading as compassasion.

dgreensp 4y ago

> Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals and get up every day and work like mad to try to achieve them. > Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch? First of all, the everybody/nobody in this article is scoped to the author's circle/bubble. IME, a lot of founder types are pretty happy just working and not doing much else. After their company IPOs, they will probably just start another company. They aren't necessarily working to retire. Having enough money that you don't have to work is never a bad thing, IMO. I have a chunk of money right now from selling some stock, not enough to retire (with my lifestyle), but enough for now. Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money. (I have kids, and lots of code I want to write; I'll always be busy, and if I'm bored it's because the things I'm busy doing are boring.) I'm sure it's fair to say that retiring takes some adjustment. You can take some time to get in touch with yourself. You can work if you want. You have a lot more options. The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to. I was brought up to go to school every day, do my homework, and achieve. Not to prioritize myself and building a fun, joyful, fulfilling life for myself. It's a matter of culture. And there are also stages of life where it makes sense to focus on one's career.

Swizec 4y ago
Yeah some of us enjoy work. People pay me to do what I started doing for fun at 9 years old? Hells yeah! More!! If I win the lottery tomorrow (IPO or otherwise), I’d probably continue to have a job of some sort. Maybe I would prioritize a different reward than cashflow, but my day to day wouldn’t change much.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  A good model for this (don’t laugh) is Downton Abbey. Some characters are fine just chilling, some want to do a “job” like working at a hospital. But none of them have anything near the level of problems of their staff, who need their job to live.
  - slickdork 4y ago

mrsmee89 4y ago

I think this is incredibly self evident but I’ll say it anyway, becoming well acquainted with the fact that you’re gonna die is the best way to gain clarity on what’s important. It’s the backdrop to everything else. It’s still shocking to me that people don’t understand how important this is to living a life that YOU want.

dasil003 4y ago

Statistical studies of happiness are interesting, but I feel they are borderline useless for practical application. There's just too much subjectivity lost in the quantification of happiness. Individuals are not populations. On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy. Trying to design a goals or future state in pursuit of happiness feels like setting myself up for disappointment. All else being equal, having money is better than not having it, being engaged in some mentally challenging "work" is better than being bored, having good family and friend relationships is better than being isolated, but trying to optimize these things with some kind of master plan feels like it induces FOMO and general anxiety about the finite possibilities for one life. I prefer to go with the flow, stay engaged in whatever I'm doing, and keep my eyes open for opportunities. I'm not sure if this makes me "happy", but I'm sure more content when I'm operating then when I try too hard to size up the big picture.

krisrm 4y ago
> On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy These are wise words that I needed to hear after a hard day and feeling like I've always been getting the short end of the stick lately. Thank you for writing them.
christophilus 4y ago
I think you’re right about the way to be unhappy. You might even generalize it to be: too much self preoccupation. The most miserable people I know are self absorbed. The happiest ones are always focused on something other than themselves. I’ve found this same pattern plays out in my own life.

plutonorm 4y ago

Most of the time people are talking about a kind of 'cognitive' happiness. Which is essentially divorced from the experience of positive valence emotions on a day to day basis. If you ask prisoners if they are happy, they will say no because it would be weird for them to say yes, wouldn't it? it would break our expectations and their own. It would break the model we all have of how we are supposed to feel about this or that. I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.

jvanderbot 4y ago

"Happiness is love. Full stop." George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Longitudinal studies on happiness and fulfillment exist, and show that satisfying relationships dominate other factors. I'll so glad I adopted this mindset before it was too late.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Drug overdoses are real. Optimization in the abstract is meaningless.

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strken 4y ago

> Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch? I'd buy and eat roughly what I do now, in roughly the same area, but I'd own a small house or townhouse near the park with a nice garden and no mortgage. > When you wake up, what will your bedroom look like? Who (if anyone) will be in it with you? What clothes will you put on? What will you eat for breakfast? What will the breakfast room look like? What will you do all day? Who will you spend time with? What will you talk about? My bedroom will look basically the same, but I'll be allowed to fix all the peeling paint and weird broken plaster because I won't be renting. I'll put on clothes that are identical to my current clothes, walk down to the cafe for a coffee and take it into the park, and jump on a zoom/slack call with a friend around 10 or 11am to talk about our project. I know this is what will happen because I work a normal job four days a week and the fifth day already looks like this. Reading this, I don't understand what the author's talking about. My life's fine, I just want to own a home and work a bit less. Most of the people I know are like this. The grand plans are "get married," "get enough money to support my parents in their retirement," "get enough for a house deposit," or "bring my family over from the old country." Is this a Bay Area rationalist thing where everyone the author knows is trying to cure cancer/study X-risks/align skynet/defeat malaria?

granshaw 4y ago
Yeah I’d say once someone’s into their first or second job, maybe late twenties, those grandiose dreams are left behind

roenxi 4y ago

There is a slightly different frame on "Increasing happiness is impossible" that the article misses (despite being quite thorough). Optimising for happiness is a terrible goal. Particularly for people of a strong materialist bent, because the obvious answer is drugs, but even spiritually it is quite clear that personal happiness isn't something valuable. Major religions tend to optimise for community. The two I know well - Christianity favours forgiveness and a relation between sinner and God, Buddhism optimises for reducing suffering but in the context of a communal setting. From the extreme materialist position note that happiness has no evolutionary advantages. Power and wealth do, being gregarious does, having lots of partners does. So humans are not going to optimise for happiness. Those that do get bred out of the gene pool. So in practice happiness is only a signpost pointing towards more pressing goals.

eric4smith 4y ago

Continuous happiness is impossible, since happiness comes from accomplishing things. So the only way to optimize for it is to plan to accomplish the things one likes to do. Our society is too fixated on being happy. Which is why for example the divorce rate is so high. Sure there is a baseline of “contentment” when huh become rich. But if one has money in the bank and nothing to accomplish you’re left with the same unhappiness and lack of purpose - just in a different way.

rufius 4y ago
Honestly, I think you were on to something re: contentment. I’ve never really optimized for happiness. I tend to frame it all in terms of being content. I think that is more sustainable - or at least it is for me. I don’t have any fancy studies to back this up - just my own life experience.

bobthechef 4y ago

mikpanko 4y ago

Is optimizing for happiness a worthy goal? Another approach is optimizing for having meaning in life. As humans we can’t escape some suffering in our lives, but doing it for something we consider meaningful makes the suffering more bearable. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a classic book on the topic.

moviewise 4y ago
Why not both? We can optimize for happiness and meaning: "First, let’s disentangle the difference between feeling sad, empty, and dissatisfied with life, versus wondering that the purpose of life is all about. They are somewhat related in that people who are content with life and the opportunities it offers don’t generally feel bad when thinking about philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life?" From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? Some Advice On Happiness From A Few Good Movies https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existential-crisis https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...
cortesoft 4y ago
Yeah, I was going to respond with a missing possibility: maybe happiness is not the point of life. Personally, I feel like happiness is a PART of a fulfilling life, but not the whole of it. I know in my life, I was likely ‘happier’ when I didn’t have kids… I spent more hours of the day doing things that I wanted to do, and those things made me happy in the moment. Now, with two young kids, I am spending less time doing the things I would choose to spend my time on, and I have fewer moments where I am in the flow and maximally happy. However, I feel WAY more satisfied with my life now, and feel much more compete and with a clear purpose in my life. There is a reason why hedonism is often looked down on; if your only motivation is your own happiness, your life will end up lacking.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  The Bluey episode "Fruit Bat" touches on this -- when you decide to have kids you're choosing to forego a lot of fun, in Bandit's case pickup football matches with adult friends. It's a conscious choice and the tradeoff is a very different life focus. I don't think one or the other purpose is inherently better, just different. Having two young kids at home for the past two years with full-time jobs and minimal childcare has really stretched things further than I would have expected. Watching how much the older kid loves going to the library, check out a stack of books, take them to the playground and read them while his sister plays -- while they both exude sheer joy -- has been unforgettably good. It's not all happy times; the kids need a lot of help and they aren't always cooperative. But it's the job I signed up for and it has a uniquely valuable comp structure.

paulpauper 4y ago

Happiness is getting the promotion, things going your way, your article on front page of hacker news, making money, etc...quantifiable , rare accomplishments that are valued in the yes of others and confer status. I don't know why people have to act like happiness is complicated. I think the depressing reality is most people are not that good at anything, thus cannot feel the satisfaction that comes from achievement.

ezrast 4y ago

> If it’s possible to cause unhappiness, surely it’s possible to cause happiness, too? This isn't a reasonable conclusion. It's easy to make someone unhappy by denying them basic human needs: food, comfort, entertainment, security, community. Once those needs are met, it's much less obvious how to get to the next tier. It's mostly well-accepted that money is correlated with happiness for people in poverty, but the relationship quickly flattens out for folks who are comfortably middle-class. People instinctively know how to get to a certain baseline, once they have the resources to do so. Moving past that is a separate question entirely.

pedalpete 4y ago

It seems to me the author is looking at happiness as it's a destination you arrive to and then just live there. Perhaps we should look at our emotions and mental states as food. I remember a GF in high school telling me I shouldn't be happy all the time. That I was missing out on the broader scope of emotions because I was always "happy". I think that is probably an outward appearance rather than reality. I'm not always happy, and I don't think I'm at my best when I've achieved happiness. If everyone was always happy, is that the world we want to live in? I'm not suggesting that some people should be happy while others live in sorrow, but there is a reason all of these things exist. I find meditating on being grateful can often bring great sorrow, which is can be cathartic. It's not happiness, so should I be trying to remove that feeling and replace it with happiness? Everything in moderation, I suppose that applies to emotions as well.

tehsauce 4y ago

Successful people probably are most happy when they are chasing after ambitious goals. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

mherdeg 4y ago

The news coverage made it sound like in the last few years, Tony Hsieh was surrounding himself with people whose full time job was to make him happy. If that's accurate I wonder whether it worked?

randallsquared 4y ago

Because optimizing happiness (at best) leads to pointless bliss, a la Goodhart's Law. Happiness is the coarse measure of your brain/subconscious/whatever estimate of how you're doing at life: are you effectively working at achieving your goals? This is why people reporting being happy when they are focused on doing what they really want to do, and lack of happiness is just a sign that, at some deep level, you do not believe you are trending toward success at your goals. You might need to fix your goals. You might need to fix your trend. But happiness is more likely to come as a side effect of doing the right thing (in your own estimation!) than as a direct effect of trying to be happy.

kingkawn 4y ago

I do

danrl 4y ago

FWIW: I find that a well-sized challenge and some minor suffering in overcoming it provides me with meaning, resulting in happiness. All other happiness I experience can be traced back to spending time with friends, spending time in nature, eating and moving in a healthy way. YMMV

chmod775 4y ago

Optimizing for happiness is how humans work at their core. We just easily get stuck in local maxima. Everybody optimizes happiness, most of us poorly.

deleted 4y ago

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braindead_in 4y ago

There are certain spiritual traditions where the goal is to achieve a permanent of bliss: samadhi/Nirvana/enlightenment etc. Some of these schools of thought go back 5000+ years and the philosophy and science of happiness has been worked out in great details. I'm a recent convert to Nondualism and right now all I want to do is to meditate. Sometimes it's so peaceful and blissful that everything else pales in comparison.

6510 4y ago
You can do many things but if the source is external or material it can vanish at any time.
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  Everything can vanish at any time. Even "internal" sources are not forever nor are they independent of external factors.

alecfreudenberg 4y ago

I don't know much about Maslow but I tend to resonate with the archetype of that hierarchy. I think people climb the pyramid and eventually find a state of seeking increasingly profound self realizations. They then optimize for things like fulfillment and a well protected lower pyramid. Happiness is an emotion, and not one that seems viable to try and maximize for continuously. There are other emotions that are not compatible with happiness, and they are neccesary to achieve a sense of self actualization.

inglor_cz 4y ago

"Maybe it’s not the achieving stuff that makes us happy, but rather the act of chasing after achievements." I think he is up to something here. Some people enjoy (real world) hunts enormously; I don't, being squeamish about blood and death, but an abstract hunt feels captivating to me. That said, the piece is written in a deliberately black-and-white way. There is a lot to happiness. For example, I don't have anywhere enough money to retire, but I have enough not to be forced to bow down to any single boss or customer; they know it and treat me respectfully.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Sold company, moved into a smaller flat, moved to the sea, work much less, got dog, gave away most things, increased happyness. Should have done this ten years ago.

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

There's a quote from John Bogle's book Enough, something to the extent of he wanted to leave for his kids "enough money that they could do anything, but not enough money that they could do nothing."

Aeolun 4y ago

Because nobody can measure happiness, nobody optimizes for it. When you do anything you don’t know if the thing is going to make you happier or not (and if so how long it will last). Anyhow, I’m fairly certain if whole communities of people FIRE’d together, they’d be much happier than doing it by themselves. The big issue is the social isolation it brings.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

Happiness is too fleeting to be the goal. It depends on such small things it can change hour by hour and it's entirely based by my perception. I can't plan if I'll be sick or if my partner will dump me or anything else that may upset me. Happiness shouldn't be the goal, it should be something we strive for, despite of the negative in our life. I can try to achieve some form of success (professional, monetary, social) and that will increase the chance that my life won't fall apart. From experience that's not enough to be happy all the time. I felt the most miserable right after achieving great results and relaxing. Keeping myself busy (with work or family) is what makes it easier to be happy. I don't think the alternative should be an hedonistic plan on how to be happy (eg. schedule a meditation session everyday or pamper yourself, eat your favourite food, get in bed with tons of people); still aim at greatness, live your life like you wanted it to read it if it was a book - and try to see good in everything to be happen in fortune and misfortune.

Hadriel 4y ago

Uhm, that's exactly what Tony Hsieh did.

closedloop129 4y ago

>Maybe it’s not the achieving stuff that makes us happy, but rather the act of chasing after achievements. It's called happiness, like happening. If nothing happens or can happen, how can people be happy? People do optimize happiness by making money, because then, anything can happen. The problem is that they buy products, where things are already done, instead of buying the tools to get it done by themselves, or better, get it done with their friends.

collimator 4y ago

Then, become nobody

mathgladiator 4y ago

It took me a long time to figure what makes me happy, and it took six ketamine trips to figure this out. It's important to detach from the outcome and just embrace the day. Stop thinking about long term plans and goals, and just wake up and make. Wake and make. This works for me because at my core, I'm a artistic coder. I love to code for the sake of coding. I find these machines beautiful works of arts, and the way of code speaks to me. So, what am I doing about it? I'm building a cathedral. I'm taking all experience, all my wisdom, decades of side projects, and I'm building a new platform. The ultimate platform. A glorious platform that I named after a goat which I named after a character from battlestar galatica. I wrote a bit about this here: https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-monastic-code-machine.html https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo... Optimizing for happiness requires discovering a repeatable behavior that sparks joy. For whatever reason, working on a programming language to drive a new type of platform sparks joy. Sometime, I'll make a game with my platform, but I'm not anxious of even worried. I just show up and polish things here and there. Just today, I spent a few hours ensuring that document events, message handlers, constructor all have access to @context variable. I'm working on this right now, running my test suites with ridiculous code coverage (99%) over thousands of tests. It's great. I have no expectation of financial return, and I'm grateful to be retired. I sucked shit through a straw in big tech, and it was worth it to get to this point. Now, I can commune with the machine, and work on my physical health.

psyc 4y ago
I’m not sure who asked you to ghostwrite my autobiography, but thanks. Saves me the trouble. Minor correction though: my cathedral is my dream game, or more accurately whatever my dream game is in the present.
scotty79 4y ago
> Optimizing for happiness requires discovering a repeatable behavior that sparks joy. Oh, well. For me that's gaming. And to some degree helping others. I also like solving some problems but it's hard to turn it into repeatable behavior that reliably sparks joy.

collimator 4y ago

Therefore become nobody.

MauranKilom 4y ago

Quoting (abridged, of course) from The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck on this topic: > There is a premise [...] that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were getting accepted to law school [...]. If I achieve X, then I can be happy. > This premise though, is the problem. Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature, and, as we'll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness. > We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no - our own pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution, they're a feature. > There's no such thing as a life without problems. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. And maybe the central tenet of the book: > Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is "solving". If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. > To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you. It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house. You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job - or even a book, for that matter. Much of the rest of the book goes into depth about choosing what problems you want to have - because you will have problems no matter what, but it's up to you what those are. Both on a factual level ("you won't get a great physique if 'wake up early to go to the gym' is a problem you don't want to have") and on a mindset level ("Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is unhappy about his success because earlier he was kicked out of Metallica, who are now more successful"). In other words, what to "give a fuck" about - and what not to give a fuck about. Would recommend!

Expez 4y ago
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dives a bit deeper into what sort of "problems" we should choose for yourself if we want a happy life. The gist of it is that we should pick activities that we can loose ourselves in. Everyone's experienced this, where they work on something, look at the watch, and a surprising amount of time has passed. A few examples of good "problems": learning an instrument, coding something or learning a sport. I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.

mullikine 4y ago

https://mullikine.github.io/posts/the-most-surreal-day/ https://mullikine.github.io/posts/the-most-surreal-day/ The meaning of life. This type of happiness can't be bought with money. You have to give away money actually to find happiness.

a_c 4y ago

Just get rich first. If you are an asshole, you get to be an asshole. If you want to spend time with family, you get to spend time with family. If you want to build some useful product, do music, paint, drink tea, you get to do all that.

danielunited 4y ago

Happiness is overrated. I don’t live to be happy. I live to make an impact.

Ataraxy 4y ago
Yeah but that's what would make you happy...

endymi0n 4y ago

„Dr. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, believes there are five factors that contribute to our happiness: positive emotion and pleasure, achievement, relationships, engagement, and meaning. Of these, he believes engagement and meaning are the most important. Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way to finding lasting happiness. When our daily actions fulfill a bigger purpose, the most powerful and enduring happiness can happen.“ — The One Thing After studying the science of happiness for quite a while, this paragraph resonated a lot with me, summing it all up pretty nicely. Can recommend the whole book!

makeitdouble 4y ago
This kinda flies in the face people who don’t try to find deep meaning in their everyday life, accept it as it is and enjoy the best they can. This strategy usually comes with not getting too engaged and not getting hang up on small annoyances. TBF the article is also looking at people chasing after a dream, so people living average and happy lives might not fit either.

smartbit 4y ago

To me this article seems written from the perspective of United States. Eg. Social Engagement as a mean of personal happiness imho is not part of the core US values as (earning) money is so prevalent that all other happiness values are nothing more than checkboxes on a bucket list. Please let me know what you think. If you don’t agree please explain what I misunderstood.

pdimitar 4y ago

I am not sure what is this article trying to prove exactly. As a start, it conflates "nobody is thinking about what happens after they achieve their goal(s)" with "nobody is thinking / optimizing for happiness". Needless to say both are VERY different things. Cherry-picking a few people who can never be at peace and using that to peddle the message of "you don't ACTUALLY want to stop working" seems weird as hell. If I can retire tomorrow -- I am 42 -- my remaining years on this Earth will still not be enough to do all the hobbies and non-work related goals that I have. Even if I live to 85. And I know others like myself as well. So I don't know, strange article. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd call it a propaganda in the direction of "keep working, don't think about anything else". I am willing to accept that was not the author's goal but it does come across this way. There are several nice tidbits though.

metacritic12 4y ago

There's a catch 22 in optimizing happiness. The people who are most effortfully, consciously aiming towards happiness never seem in the happiest 10% of people. The happiest 10% of people are appreciating nature, or spiritual and trying to glorify God, or on a mission to save the world. It's like trying really really hard to fall asleep. The act of conscious aiming makes you sad every time things are less than optimal. Happiness itself is also a raw goal: you could be really happy hooked up to heroine, aiming for that gets you to a place that is ironically very depressing.

_fat_santa 4y ago
The way I see it, happiness is a derivative, meaning you can't directly influence your happiness, you can only do things that might influence it. The struggle is optimizing that activity to deliver happiness in the best way. Your example about heroin is a really good one, because while it's one of the most direct ways to happiness, it does it in the worst way imaginable. But I don't think it's a catch-22 because people achieve it in vastly different ways. My buddy likes going clubbing on the weekends, it brings him loads of happiness, I personally would not be happy spending time that way. Likewise I love going outdoors and hiking, and I'm pretty sure he would be miserable in my form of "happiness".

langsoul-com 4y ago

You can play the then what game. Keep asking then what. You have enough money to retire, then what? You go travelling all around the world, then what? So and so forth until reaching a conclusion on how you consciously decide to live your life.

deleted 4y ago

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carapace 4y ago

Everyone optimizes happiness all the time, they are also Yak-shaving, and that's why we can't have nice things. Item: you are an evolved system. Ergo, "happiness" is a non-specific proxy for your unconscious estimate of the degree of present and future ease and success at living and reproducing. You are always optimizing for "happiness" by definition, four and a half billion years of evolution has seen to that. You are the direct descendant of untold millions of successful reproducers. (As an aside, for FIRE folks who find themselves bored or unsatisfied, the blindingly obvious answer is that your unconscious estimate takes into account the conditions of other people around you. Just because things are good for you doesn't mean you're done. "No man is an island." and all that, eh? The solution is equally obvious: help other people, make the world a better place.) Item: your brain is easily programmed. Due to the ad hoc nature of our upbringings we acquire models of the world that are wildly inconsistent (above the level of basic physical phenomenon.) We are following quasi-random programs. That's the reason why we work so hard and get such poor results: we are using lousy programs. Fortunately, it's easy to re-program your brain. In fact there are specific algorithms and techniques. I'd like to call attention to the "Core Transformation" technique particularly. ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/ I have no affiliation with them BTW) It's an algorithm for "popping the why stack" (cf. "Five Whys" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys ) Without going into a long spiel about it, the basic idea is that behaviors are motivated by a chain of intentions, a series of indirections. Behavior -> A -> B -> C -> Happiness You do FOO to get A which achieves B which in turn does C which engenders Happiness. (There can be more or fewer steps in between.) What these folks found is that all behaviors eventually wind up at one of five "core states": Beingness, Oneness, Bliss, Okayness, Happiness (I think I remembered them correctly, but maybe not, check the website.) The fascinating thing about these "core states" is that they are not dependent on anything else. (The idea that they are is part of the "lousy programming".) They are not contingent. You can access them at any time, in any location or condition. As you can imagine, going directly for the "core states" rather than through a chain of indirection brings a lot of simplicity and grace to life. Everything else comes together effortlessly, fulfilling the evolutionary mandate of happiness: present and future ease and success at living.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I don’t really try to optimize for happiness. I like a feeling of contentment. If I can walk into my living room, sit quietly doing nothing, and feel contented with who I am, my life, etc. then that is enough for me. I don’t always chase after “fun.”

Borrible 4y ago

Happyness is boring.