12 ms·

> I think I'm old enough now to confidently say that, yes: Happiness really does start from within. What does age have to do with it? You're one person. It's a

by lapcat 4y ago

> I think I'm old enough now to confidently say that, yes: Happiness really does start from within. What does age have to do with it? You're one person. It's anecdotal data. I'm old enough now (5 years later) to confidently say that, yes: Quitting my last job really did make me happier.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> What does age have to do with it? You're one person. It's anecdotal data. Actually an entire field of psychology is based on the idea: cognitive behavioral therapy. But you seem like you need to pick a fight, and I'm honestly not in the mood, so carry on.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lapcat 4y ago
  > you need to pick a fight, and I'm honestly not in the mood "Bluntly, every person I know who's expressed these kinds of sentiments is guilty of the same mistake"
sudoit 4y ago
Same in my case. I quit my first software job because it made me feel so meaningless and depressed. I was immediately happier. I quit my second job because they overworked me. Same result. I have less money now, but I don’t care. I’m much happier being where I am now. People underestimate just how much work life affects your entire life.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  You spend most of your life at work (at least in the US). 24 hours in a day. 8 of them spent working. 1 hour for lunch. ~2 hours getting ready for work/sleep each day. 8 hours for sleep... that leaves you with ~5 hours per day, but you also have to do chores around the house, maybe pickup/dropoff kiddos, commute (if you don't work from home), and cook dinner and clean up afterwards. If you have 2 hours a day to yourself to pursue your interests/dreams, you are "fucked".
  - codeOnMaster 4y ago
    What do you mean by “fucked”? If you don’t enjoy your job, you’re fucked? Seems like you’re saying you’re fucked unless you work less hours.
    - gymbeaux 4y ago
      Yeah, you're fucked unless you work fewer hours. By "fucked" I mean "doomed to a relatively-miserable existence". I don't care if you have a FETISH for writing code, you do not want to do it ~40 hours/week. We need a four-day (32-hour) workweek. Give me a 20% pay cut, I don't care. Most of us here make well over $100k/year. What we need is TIME.
    - dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
      And in the US it is rare to be able to get health insurance without working full time. Good luck with that.
      - gymbeaux 4y ago
        This is, of course, by design. ACA made it a bit more realistic for part-time/self-employed people to get health insurance, however if you have to get your insurance through the ACA marketplace (healthcare.gov), you ARE paying more for it than if you were a FTE drone.
  - scruple 4y ago
    Even if you do manage to find 2 hours to yourself, it's typically at the end of the day and you're utterly, completely exhausted. I've found that, with young kids in the mix, the best thing I can do with my hour-ish at the end of a long day is read, or draw, or just spend some quiet time with my spouse. Anything else requires mental energy that I simply don't have. Even the video games that I play at the end of the average day need to be fairly brainless or else I'm not enjoying my time.
    - gymbeaux 4y ago
      I don't even have a wife and kids yet, but I already find many of the video games I enjoyed as a teenager to be too demanding. Fallout New Vegas was an awesome game, and I remember spending virtually my entire summer vacation one year playing through Fallout 3. I gave New Vegas another go recently and it just feels like work. It sucks. Like I just want to get through the game so it will be done.
- bumby 4y ago
  >People underestimate just how much work life affects your entire life. It would be interesting to see how cultural aspects affect this. In the West, it seems like so much of our life/identity is focused on our job. "What do you do for a living?" is one of the most common opening questions upon meeting someone. I wonder if the impact of work life on one's happiness more muted elsewhere.
trynewideas 4y ago
You can both be right, is the thing.
dylan604 4y ago
It's one of those things like "time heals all wounds". Nobody likes to hear it when the wound is fresh, but it's absolutely true. When you're younger, FOMO is much stronger. As you get older, FOMO starts to get replaced with "who gives a...". With that in mind, age might matter
- saurik 4y ago
  How old do I have to become for "time heals all wounds" to work? I am 41 now, which is seemingly old for this website, but figure it might take another decade or two for that one to make sense? (How old are you?) In my so-far-limited experience, it isn't time that heals wounds, but active shifts in perspective (which of course require some time to happen but it isn't like time is doing it: I have many "wounds" that hurt just as much now as they did 20 years ago, because I have not been able to obtain any kind of closure and the thing that happened didn't retroactively change or anything... at best I just try to ignore it, but that was my same strategy right after stuff happened ;P).
- rexpop 4y ago
  Some wounds, emotional as well as physical, far from healing actually leave chronic and debilitating scars. The aphorism is far from "absolutely true."
- themitigating 4y ago
  Just to note, as middle aged person, the "who gives a .." might not be from a deeper wisdom due to age but cynicism.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    maybe true. but for me personally, i just realized that the constant comparison of what i have vs what other people have is just dumb. as long as what i have makes me happy and the pursuit of those things isn't causing me to make bad decisions about other things, then i'm okay with it. it might be why i'm so sickened by all the ad tech as ultimately it's keying in on people's FOMO. it might sound embarrassing to admit, but it was actually watching Fight Club and the scene animating the Ikea catalog and the accompanying monologue (and overall theme of the movie/book) really got me thinking about it. i was mid-20s when that came out, and it definitely planted a seed. people do remind me of that when i mention making soap!
haswell 4y ago
Age can have a lot to do with it, depending on your path through life. The adage is generally that wisdom comes with age, and there are some things in life that are difficult to internalize until you’ve gone though the experience. To me, it’s just another way of saying “the more life experience I gain…”.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > To me, it’s just another of saying “the more life experience I gain…”. I believe that if you never were in a position where your job was a soul-crushig source of misery and despair, you've been lucky to live a sheltered life. Most people don't have the privilege of picking and choosing outstanding jobs with decent work/life balance, nice colleagues, reasonable deadlines and considerate stakeholders. Most people have rent/mortgage to pay, kids to feed, and unfavourable odds of improving their life with low risk and impact on your life. I'm sure they gained a lot of life experience too.
  - haswell 4y ago
    Yes, everyone experiences life differently, and the sum total of those experiences covers a wide spectrum. Personally, I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. Grew up dirt poor, started working as a teen to help my family make ends meet, and dreamed of a “better” life where the work I did mattered to me and the money I made would be sufficient to not constantly wonder where the next meal comes from. A constant source of that soul crushing misery and despair. Later in life, I was fortunate enough to experience the lifestyle afforded by a Silicon Valley salary after working my ass off to get there, an “arrival” of sorts. Younger me had no ability to comprehend how/why this high paying job would make me more deeply unhappy than I’d ever been in my life. Life experience is contextual and relative, but important nonetheless.
  - xvilka 4y ago
    > Most people have rent/mortgage to pay, kids to feed, and unfavourable odds of improving their life with low risk and impact on your life. I would go further - majority of people on this planet live painful and miserable life.
justatdotin 4y ago
I think the thing about aging is that you have less energy, so you're less likely to make energetic mistakes, and more likely to take some calm moments to think things thru. also, if you have moderate ambitions and desires, with time you may reach a point where you've met them. Then you are less focused on those for happiness. so I do think age has something to do with it
anonreeeeplor 4y ago
Yes. I quit and then asked: “what if I stayed and do I regret leaving” on my last 4 companies. Universally the answer is no I don’t regret it. One imploded and laid off like 60% of people after turning into a nasty political hell hole. Another laid off massively and is now world renowned as a failed story. Another gave me zero opportunities and everyone was yelling at each other all the time. Believe me, I tried to enter my internal universe and be happy not learning and not growing. Being bored to death and underutilized if you feel highly talented and creative is a form of death. Op needs to answer: What has he done in his life? Built a unicorn and IPOd it? Jet skiing with super models? Inventing cures for diseases? Or did he sort of sit in a cubicle typing and reading Reddit for the last five years. A lot of those on here, I don’t listen to their input on what successs is. I will never be happy until I am climbing to the highest potential I can get to. No one is going to talk me into being otherwise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bumby 4y ago
  “No one is going to talk me into…” is shorthand for “I’m not open to any other ideas that don’t align with my preconceived notions.” It’s not terribly productive on a site whose guidelines try to foster an open and curious conversation.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    It's supposed to be about intellectual curiosity. Not questioning other people's life choices and giving unsolicited advice.
    - bumby 4y ago
      It's a little odd to me that you would seem to expect an article and discussion on something subject like "happiness" not to have personal accounts of their subjective experience.
bumby 4y ago
>What does age have to do with it? I don’t want to speak for the OP, but I think they’re using age as a proxy for “I’ve seen this same pattern enough times to…”
- lapcat 4y ago
  Enough times to... make a vast overgeneralization about human nature based on personally experienced anecdotal data. Also, there's no evidence that the OP is older than, say, me, which is why citing age is largely irrelevant.
  - bumby 4y ago
    If it wasn’t clear enough from my post, I’m implying you are reading too much into the literal meaning of the age part of the comment. As the HN guidelines say, we should be trying to take the most generous interpretation possible.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > I’m implying you are reading too much into the literal meaning of the age part of the comment. I'm not. In fact my previous comment would still be valid if the line "What does age have to do with it?" were omitted. The important point is that the anecdotal observations do not apply universally.
      - bumby 4y ago
        >The important point is that the anecdotal observations do not apply universally. We are probably reading their comment somewhat differently. Because of the way they couched their statement as rooted in their personal experience, I assumed their were implying it was anecdotal and obviously not a generalizable, objective truth.
        lapcat 4y ago
        > I assumed their were implying it was anecdotal and obviously not a generalizable, objective truth. "I think I'm old enough now to confidently say that, yes: Happiness really does start from within."

by lapcat 4y ago

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> What does age have to do with it? You're one person. It's anecdotal data. Actually an entire field of psychology is based on the idea: cognitive behavioral therapy. But you seem like you need to pick a fight, and I'm honestly not in the mood, so carry on.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 4y ago
> you need to pick a fight, and I'm honestly not in the mood "Bluntly, every person I know who's expressed these kinds of sentiments is guilty of the same mistake"

sudoit 4y ago

Same in my case. I quit my first software job because it made me feel so meaningless and depressed. I was immediately happier. I quit my second job because they overworked me. Same result. I have less money now, but I don’t care. I’m much happier being where I am now. People underestimate just how much work life affects your entire life.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gymbeaux 4y ago
You spend most of your life at work (at least in the US). 24 hours in a day. 8 of them spent working. 1 hour for lunch. ~2 hours getting ready for work/sleep each day. 8 hours for sleep... that leaves you with ~5 hours per day, but you also have to do chores around the house, maybe pickup/dropoff kiddos, commute (if you don't work from home), and cook dinner and clean up afterwards. If you have 2 hours a day to yourself to pursue your interests/dreams, you are "fucked".
- codeOnMaster 4y ago
  What do you mean by “fucked”? If you don’t enjoy your job, you’re fucked? Seems like you’re saying you’re fucked unless you work less hours.
  - gymbeaux 4y ago
    Yeah, you're fucked unless you work fewer hours. By "fucked" I mean "doomed to a relatively-miserable existence". I don't care if you have a FETISH for writing code, you do not want to do it ~40 hours/week. We need a four-day (32-hour) workweek. Give me a 20% pay cut, I don't care. Most of us here make well over $100k/year. What we need is TIME.
  - dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
    And in the US it is rare to be able to get health insurance without working full time. Good luck with that.
    - gymbeaux 4y ago
      This is, of course, by design. ACA made it a bit more realistic for part-time/self-employed people to get health insurance, however if you have to get your insurance through the ACA marketplace (healthcare.gov), you ARE paying more for it than if you were a FTE drone.
- scruple 4y ago
  Even if you do manage to find 2 hours to yourself, it's typically at the end of the day and you're utterly, completely exhausted. I've found that, with young kids in the mix, the best thing I can do with my hour-ish at the end of a long day is read, or draw, or just spend some quiet time with my spouse. Anything else requires mental energy that I simply don't have. Even the video games that I play at the end of the average day need to be fairly brainless or else I'm not enjoying my time.
  - gymbeaux 4y ago
    I don't even have a wife and kids yet, but I already find many of the video games I enjoyed as a teenager to be too demanding. Fallout New Vegas was an awesome game, and I remember spending virtually my entire summer vacation one year playing through Fallout 3. I gave New Vegas another go recently and it just feels like work. It sucks. Like I just want to get through the game so it will be done.
bumby 4y ago
>People underestimate just how much work life affects your entire life. It would be interesting to see how cultural aspects affect this. In the West, it seems like so much of our life/identity is focused on our job. "What do you do for a living?" is one of the most common opening questions upon meeting someone. I wonder if the impact of work life on one's happiness more muted elsewhere.

trynewideas 4y ago

You can both be right, is the thing.

dylan604 4y ago

It's one of those things like "time heals all wounds". Nobody likes to hear it when the wound is fresh, but it's absolutely true. When you're younger, FOMO is much stronger. As you get older, FOMO starts to get replaced with "who gives a...". With that in mind, age might matter

saurik 4y ago
How old do I have to become for "time heals all wounds" to work? I am 41 now, which is seemingly old for this website, but figure it might take another decade or two for that one to make sense? (How old are you?) In my so-far-limited experience, it isn't time that heals wounds, but active shifts in perspective (which of course require some time to happen but it isn't like time is doing it: I have many "wounds" that hurt just as much now as they did 20 years ago, because I have not been able to obtain any kind of closure and the thing that happened didn't retroactively change or anything... at best I just try to ignore it, but that was my same strategy right after stuff happened ;P).
rexpop 4y ago
Some wounds, emotional as well as physical, far from healing actually leave chronic and debilitating scars. The aphorism is far from "absolutely true."
themitigating 4y ago
Just to note, as middle aged person, the "who gives a .." might not be from a deeper wisdom due to age but cynicism.
- dylan604 4y ago
  maybe true. but for me personally, i just realized that the constant comparison of what i have vs what other people have is just dumb. as long as what i have makes me happy and the pursuit of those things isn't causing me to make bad decisions about other things, then i'm okay with it. it might be why i'm so sickened by all the ad tech as ultimately it's keying in on people's FOMO. it might sound embarrassing to admit, but it was actually watching Fight Club and the scene animating the Ikea catalog and the accompanying monologue (and overall theme of the movie/book) really got me thinking about it. i was mid-20s when that came out, and it definitely planted a seed. people do remind me of that when i mention making soap!

haswell 4y ago

Age can have a lot to do with it, depending on your path through life. The adage is generally that wisdom comes with age, and there are some things in life that are difficult to internalize until you’ve gone though the experience. To me, it’s just another way of saying “the more life experience I gain…”.

simplotek 4y ago
> To me, it’s just another of saying “the more life experience I gain…”. I believe that if you never were in a position where your job was a soul-crushig source of misery and despair, you've been lucky to live a sheltered life. Most people don't have the privilege of picking and choosing outstanding jobs with decent work/life balance, nice colleagues, reasonable deadlines and considerate stakeholders. Most people have rent/mortgage to pay, kids to feed, and unfavourable odds of improving their life with low risk and impact on your life. I'm sure they gained a lot of life experience too.
- haswell 4y ago
  Yes, everyone experiences life differently, and the sum total of those experiences covers a wide spectrum. Personally, I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. Grew up dirt poor, started working as a teen to help my family make ends meet, and dreamed of a “better” life where the work I did mattered to me and the money I made would be sufficient to not constantly wonder where the next meal comes from. A constant source of that soul crushing misery and despair. Later in life, I was fortunate enough to experience the lifestyle afforded by a Silicon Valley salary after working my ass off to get there, an “arrival” of sorts. Younger me had no ability to comprehend how/why this high paying job would make me more deeply unhappy than I’d ever been in my life. Life experience is contextual and relative, but important nonetheless.
- xvilka 4y ago
  > Most people have rent/mortgage to pay, kids to feed, and unfavourable odds of improving their life with low risk and impact on your life. I would go further - majority of people on this planet live painful and miserable life.

justatdotin 4y ago

I think the thing about aging is that you have less energy, so you're less likely to make energetic mistakes, and more likely to take some calm moments to think things thru. also, if you have moderate ambitions and desires, with time you may reach a point where you've met them. Then you are less focused on those for happiness. so I do think age has something to do with it

anonreeeeplor 4y ago

Yes. I quit and then asked: “what if I stayed and do I regret leaving” on my last 4 companies. Universally the answer is no I don’t regret it. One imploded and laid off like 60% of people after turning into a nasty political hell hole. Another laid off massively and is now world renowned as a failed story. Another gave me zero opportunities and everyone was yelling at each other all the time. Believe me, I tried to enter my internal universe and be happy not learning and not growing. Being bored to death and underutilized if you feel highly talented and creative is a form of death. Op needs to answer: What has he done in his life? Built a unicorn and IPOd it? Jet skiing with super models? Inventing cures for diseases? Or did he sort of sit in a cubicle typing and reading Reddit for the last five years. A lot of those on here, I don’t listen to their input on what successs is. I will never be happy until I am climbing to the highest potential I can get to. No one is going to talk me into being otherwise.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bumby 4y ago
“No one is going to talk me into…” is shorthand for “I’m not open to any other ideas that don’t align with my preconceived notions.” It’s not terribly productive on a site whose guidelines try to foster an open and curious conversation.
- lapcat 4y ago
  It's supposed to be about intellectual curiosity. Not questioning other people's life choices and giving unsolicited advice.
  - bumby 4y ago
    It's a little odd to me that you would seem to expect an article and discussion on something subject like "happiness" not to have personal accounts of their subjective experience.

bumby 4y ago

>What does age have to do with it? I don’t want to speak for the OP, but I think they’re using age as a proxy for “I’ve seen this same pattern enough times to…”

lapcat 4y ago
Enough times to... make a vast overgeneralization about human nature based on personally experienced anecdotal data. Also, there's no evidence that the OP is older than, say, me, which is why citing age is largely irrelevant.
- bumby 4y ago
  If it wasn’t clear enough from my post, I’m implying you are reading too much into the literal meaning of the age part of the comment. As the HN guidelines say, we should be trying to take the most generous interpretation possible.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > I’m implying you are reading too much into the literal meaning of the age part of the comment. I'm not. In fact my previous comment would still be valid if the line "What does age have to do with it?" were omitted. The important point is that the anecdotal observations do not apply universally.
    - bumby 4y ago
      >The important point is that the anecdotal observations do not apply universally. We are probably reading their comment somewhat differently. Because of the way they couched their statement as rooted in their personal experience, I assumed their were implying it was anecdotal and obviously not a generalizable, objective truth.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > I assumed their were implying it was anecdotal and obviously not a generalizable, objective truth. "I think I'm old enough now to confidently say that, yes: Happiness really does start from within."