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I couldn't get halfway through the article, as it's filled with pointless details. This TED talk, on the other hand, is straight to the point. Watch it instea

• greendestiny 17y ago
  The article truly has nothing to do with the role of choice on happiness, its about the study of entire lives with depth.
  • silentbicycle 17y ago
    I thought this was a good capsule summary, actually: Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, "Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break." The other boy runs to him and says, "Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!" His study seems to support the idea that the way people react to problems in their lives affects their overall happiness more than the problems themselves.
  • badger7 17y ago
    Exactly!
• ilitirit 17y ago
  I suppose it depends on how you approach the article. I didn't really expect a concise, scientific piece from The Atlantic, especially one that starts off as a flashback reminiscent of a mild psycho-drama. I didn't expect it to give me the secret to happiness either. I read it more as a collection of non-fictional short stories with a binding theme (life and happiness) I suppose. That's probably why I enjoyed it more than you did.
  • silentbicycle 17y ago
    It's the Atlantic, not a psychology journal, so the expected audience and writing style are going to be different. Coding Horror is usually pretty short on depth and detail, too. Articles like this are a good way to hear about studies you want to read about further. I don't have time to keep current on neurology, linguistics, psychology, history, archaeology, epidemiology, etc., etc., etc. journals, and I highly doubt I'm the only one. I'm grateful for authors like Oliver Sacks who write about the material in an approachable manner. (This same point came up yesterday. Some people here seem eager to jump on psychology as being not science, and all writing about it being fluff.)
    • timr 17y ago
      Yes, the "all writing must be clinical and concise" comments are one of those absurd nerd memes that I wish would die. The Atlantic is not the primary literature, and you can't impugn an entire research program based on a pop-science summary written for mass consumption. If I could teach nerds only one thing about the world, it's that dismissing non-technical forms of communication as useless does not impress anyone with your intellectual skill -- it just makes you annoying and hard to tolerate.
      • silentbicycle 17y ago
        It seems like a lot of good programmers have hobbies to help get out of the all-tech, all-the-time mental rut. Balance is healthy. Also, the information bandwidth of social communication is incredibly high. Much of our mental resources are dedicated to social decisions (friend or foe? are they lying?), which computers tend to handle very poorly.
      • akamaka 17y ago
        I posted my comment as a helpful warning to HN readers. People come to this site because they value their time, and want to be picky about what they read. My personal preference is academic-style writing. But there's a few simple things article writers can do to improve readability. -Summaries (explain what the reader can expect to get out of the article) -Sideboxes (highlight key passages or points from each paragraph) -Descriptive paragraph headings This article had none of those, and I felt like it was just trying to keep me hooked so I'd keep clicking to get to the next page and find the good part.