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If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling. There are lots of unhappy people in the Firs

If you think it's miserable to be a healthy middle-class 50-year-old in the 21st-century USA, you need counseling. There are lots of unhappy people in the First World. Telling them that they should be happy because of how much worse things could be is the equivalent of telling a child to eat their broccoli because there are starving children in Africa. I liked your comment enough to upmod it, but this argument struck me as being considerably less insightful than the (excellent) rest.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping. My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault. --- [1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)
- raganwald 17y ago
  Get well soon.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jseliger 17y ago
<i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i> Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.
- raganwald 17y ago
  I have never heard of the book. Is this a serious suggestion?
  - angelbob 17y ago
    I'm not the poster you replied to, but it's a very good book on both how to be happy (somewhat) and when you're most likely to be happy (most of the book, and most of the examples). It's short on hard research, but provides a lot of good generalities, and some excellent starting points for finding the hard research. Overall, it's a quick, light read and I'd recommend it as such. It's not life-changing, but it's a great little overview of modern research on happiness, and on many kinds of common, widespread irrational behavior, along with an occasional bit of how to avoid succumbing to it.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping. My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault. --- [1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)

raganwald 17y ago
Get well soon.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jseliger 17y ago

<i>There are lots of unhappy people in the First World.</i> Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.

raganwald 17y ago
I have never heard of the book. Is this a serious suggestion?
- angelbob 17y ago
  I'm not the poster you replied to, but it's a very good book on both how to be happy (somewhat) and when you're most likely to be happy (most of the book, and most of the examples). It's short on hard research, but provides a lot of good generalities, and some excellent starting points for finding the hard research. Overall, it's a quick, light read and I'd recommend it as such. It's not life-changing, but it's a great little overview of modern research on happiness, and on many kinds of common, widespread irrational behavior, along with an occasional bit of how to avoid succumbing to it.