The downside of being happy: creativity kindled by sadness | Hacker News Reader

The downside of being happy: creativity kindled by sadness

washingtonpost.com

177 pointsllovan73 comments

People conflate happiness with joy. I can be happy and sad at the same time. I cannot be joyful and sad in the same instant, though I can flit between the two rapidly enough to occasionally cause alarm.

What you want to avoid is misery. I banished misery from my life sometime in my early twenties. I am unhappy somewhat often, but never miserable. Misery means not seeing a way out of the circumstances making you unhappy.

I believe emotional health revolves as much in how you see your emotions as which emotions you're experiencing. Reframing the emotions you feel can be a quite powerful experience for those not too jaded on the woo-woo aspect of it. "I didn't lose my girlfriend, we just weren't right for each other." If all you do is reframe, and never do any real learning, then sure, you'll end up miserable. But in general finding a way to reframe setbacks is a great way to find the energy to keep moving rather than wallow.

For some people, creativity is tied intimately to misery; I believe that people for whom their creative output relies on drug use are ultimately deriving it from misery. Minds need to be in a loose, free state to mix seemingly-unrelated concepts together. When one is truly miserable, they cannot see a way out of their predicament and so mind naturally finds a way towards that state. If they could see a way, then they'd focus on that way, and having a single point of focus is pretty much the opposite of creativity.

The most prolific creators make a workflow out of managing their minds. They'll tune out in order to become unfocused enough to get an idea, then they'll focus on putting that idea to paper, or electronic media or whatever. Good coders are well-attuned to such a workflow, but often don't think of themselves as creative, perhaps because their output isn't immediately pleasing to the senses. Artistic, maybe not. But creative? Absolutely.

There's one exception this rule regarding creativity and misery: philosophy.

Here's my reasoning: if you're doing philosophy and you saw "a way out of the circumstances" making you unhappy (philosophical circumstances) you would be able to become a political theorist or a religious figure.

The misery is mandatory if you plan on being truly (i.e. purely) introspective and avoid being compromised by the hope of external circumstances being favorable, it seems.

There are certain culturally universal emotions; happiness and sadness are two of them, but joy or misery aren't, and I've never seen this definition of misery before in the literature. Is this based on your own framework and anecdotes or is there a source for it?

My own framework. When I outline stuff like this, I try to be careful to situate them on easily-relatable concepts so that people who use different words for the same concepts can work out what I'm trying to convey. Not being a trained scientist, I can't really relate my own experiences to published literature.

Interesting distincion. Can you please also elaborate on the distinction between joy and happiness?

Possibly relevant: there are languages [1] where you have two verbs to express states of being, a long-term being (e.g., traits of character) and a short-term being (e.g., when describing a behavior or a situation).

Is this aspect relevant for your distinction between sadness vs misery or joy vs happiness?

Finally, are native speakers of languages with 2 states of being happier because they learned to distinguish better those emotional states?

[1] e.g., google for "ser vs estar <language>" where <language> in {Portuguese, Spanish}

Not the original poster, but...

Happiness: For me is calm, equanimity. Happiness can be sustained without negative effects. Happiness is not an emotion.

Joy: Is an emotion which means it is more more intense but also shorter in duration. If someone was always stuck in a state of joy we might start to worry about them (mania?). Experiencing joy is pleasurable but clouds the mind, and is tiring if sustained for too long.

Generally, all emotions put a cognitive filter on the mind: anger focuses the mind on a perceived threat and is known to exclude other information for example.

True happiness unclouds the mind and makes it see more clearly.

Most interesting, I make the exact same distinction, but have the terms reversed - joy is what can coexist with sadness, happiness is sadness's mutually exclusive term, in my own in-mind lexicon.

  I banished misery from my life sometime in my early twenties.

Could you please elaborate? I don't mean any personal details but maybe which methods or books etc helped you achieve that?

A combination of "this too shall pass," careful consideration of just how shitty the less-privileged really have it, and the realization that the only thing wallowing in misery was really getting me was more misery.

My own experience led me to a slightly different conclusion.

I'm considered to be "creative" by my peers as I enjoy the arts and applying them for practical use. Contrary to the article, I found that I was significantly less creative when I was depressed. What was extremely frustrating was that it all felt 'stuck' - you can imagine a composer letting out his black-hole reservoir of pain and sadness in a stream of intense, out-of-world music, a cry for the greater ... but sadly for me it was less romantic. I just got stuck. Unable to speak properly, unable to write or draw or express anything for that matter. And yet it felt like I was ready to explode.

Now that I've recovered and drawn a line to separate those demons, I can get intellectual. One consequence of depression is too much noise; of bad chattering and self cruelty and emptiness. Emptiness can also be crushing. That could explain why I couldn't be 'creative' at all.

On the other hand, the author of the article mentioned a very good point:

>>Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died.

But I interpret this slightly differently. Poverty gives pain but I don't think this is the part that gives rise to creativity. I grew up in a very rural area where there was nothing interesting to do like video games and cinemas. That was when I was at my most creative and proactive, like using poor materials to make something really awesome and crazy. I prefer to call this "resourcefulness" but thinking about it now, maybe that is what creativity is all about: the ability to transform something deemed to be poor or average into another thing that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's a weird irony that when my family moved to a "richer" environment, I found myself hopelessly stuck. Here are the things all laid out for me to draw and model. Here are the information to do this and that. Here's an infinite supply of paper. What a joykiller.

To me this feels like a... difference between depression and sadness.

Personally I tend to think of depression as draining; it takes out your energy, your willingness to live your life and push through. Like you said, emptiness.

Sadness feels... sad, it brings you down, but it doesn't necessarily affect you in the same 'draining' way.

Edit: This turned out to be a mini memoir, please skip if irrelevant to you

This is veering off-topic so apologies. I tried to match my experience with the feelings described by the author in the article, but yes, you're right, depression can be much more than that. Now I say can because I visualise depression as a spiral, not necessarily consistent throughout, but definitely like a bottomless well. The feeling of being a "pressure cooker" is a level of depression, but I'm tempted to say that it's not the worst. The worst, and the most dangerous, I felt was self-transparency, where I lost all sense of what makes "me" and the world feels like a ghost and passes straight through. It was much more than numbness, it was emptiness that felt more white than black, yet I remember tears that won't stop welling, of shaking and shivering and lots of switching offs, usually to actual sleep. This was different to melancholy though, this was really the point when you don't consider but believe that you're absolutely and weightlessly nothing - and consequently there is no difference in physical life and death. There's no more anger nor confusion, just whispers of what's the point. I know that all this sounds poetic (and I haven't covered all that precedes this point such as guilt/imposter/self-ripping) but damn it wasn't beautiful. Suicide might be an idea my mind fiercely puts a gate around, but the desire for death creeps in anyway: there were a few incidents when my foot slowed down when crossing the road, when I walked alone at midnight ... no it wasn't nice.

I'm glad no harm came to me. It turned out that the worst was actually the beginning of my recovery; I managed to hold on for a little longer (thank you to my few friends and family) and gradually the world trickled in. I became fascinated by the sky though it hurt my eyes, but it had so many colours with clouds of different shapes, and a depth that showed that there is much much more beyond. Then the sounds came in. And looking at small children, I realised that I had become one too because we spoke the same language. It was very strange, but that was when I first felt happy! And proud and glad that I had hold on after all.

Falling into the spiral is like your world collapsing into a pile of cards. But let it collapse, and be patient: you will have the chance to rebuild, except with a cleaner slate and more thought for the now and the future. Just need to hold on for a little longer, and sleep, lots of sleep.

Thank you, that was very beautifully put!

Have you seen "Inside out"? In that movie, joy and sadness are depicted as two characters cooperating whereas depression sets in when these two are absent and the infrastructure starts to shut down and crumble...

I feel that "Inside Out" is more of a rites of passage story, where the falling of those childhood 'infrastructures' is due to change, especially disruptive ones (just the denial of "sadness" felt a little too simplistic).

But I think with depression, there is less 'logic'; it's much harder for you to follow what the hell is going on. Kinda like a big mess of yarn that's so knotted up you really wanna grab a pair of scissors and cut them up, and throw them in the fire for good measure. It's destructive, and that's why depression is awfully dangerous. Now you might think that the process itself will lead to that blank slate - I gave a pile of cards metaphor earlier - enabling a chance to build better and even turn the experience to some sort of character enrichment. But it's not that glamorous; not everyone can hold on for that long. I do count myself extremely lucky.

But one thing the film definitely got right was the concept of support. Riley eventually got through by allowing herself to break down and tell her parents everything, acknowledging the bits that she consciously feels to be weak, pathetic et cetra, like sadness. And that's really important for someone who's depressed; you will not be able to help yourself. Contrary to your belief, you need outside support to help you battle those demons and tell you that A is A and not a+b+c-d. It might be difficult to find good support, and initially I didn't either, but I knew my mom to be fundamentally caring about me and by approaching her, we slowly went down the road to detangle the mess. I'm not gonna kid, it was rocky as we didn't have a very good relationship, but we got there eventually. And learnt a bit more about humanity.

I agree with this. I find that when I'm down/depressed, esp. from a major life change I 100% stop all creative pursuits. My mother passed away 3 years ago last spring and I was in the middle of recording new material for a music project. I basically full-stopped and didn't touch it again until about a month ago and finally got back on track and finished it. I went through a similar few year hiatus in 2006 when I got divorced.

Anyway, it's nice to have a little better insight into this stuff even if I don't agree with the article, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Here's a link to the single if anyone is curious about it:

https://n-o-w-h-e-r-e.bandcamp.com

https://soundcloud.com/n_o_w_h_e_r_e/sets/the-traveller

Creativity does spawn from constrained environments, as any game developer can tell you. Most of the beauty in hacks or interesting ways of getting around things is the context of limited resources.

I think people who are consistently creative can frequently either find an environment that constrains them (a writer taking a retreat to the woods, for instance), or tackles problems with existing constraints.

If everything in your life is going well and there's not boredom, there's not a whole lot of purpose to creativity - you are however free to create constrained environments. Burning man for instance creates a lot of opportunity for creativity because its out in the desert, temporary, and must be packed up or burned afterwards. Same with living out in the country with few social connections. Its easy however to just get dragged down by depression or just the dreariness of boredom when living out in the country for me at least - there's a reason a lot of people turn to drugs in rural areas (in the US at least).

Can you expand that argument to work life - as in creative people may be better at dealing with situations such as startups where a constrained environment is often time and money. Are there trends that successful founders often had prior creative outlets in their childhood more often than not?

The general trend that I've seen is that founders in general (successful and not) is that they have a propensity for risk thats out of line with the general population - frequently (in my anecdotal experience) stemming from a strong sense of security and exposure to possibilities from a wealthy upbringing.

Ah but my mind is very good at stripping down artificially constrained environments - just artificial. The lazy part of me will always seek for the comfort zone.

That's another wild horse to get in control of I guess.

Depression and sadness are very different emotional states, especially when we are talking about clinical depression.

This jibes with my experience. When I was feeling down because of financial reasons, it became even harder to solve problems, and interviews. Catch-22.

A couple of years later, I was much more fluent.

I work more like you than as described in the article; when I'm depressed, I tend to get worse at everything other than focusing on the thing or things that seem to be causing the depression.

I feel more creative after depressed periods, not during. The depressed period seems to provide me with a lot of like, empathic vocabulary to draw on afterwards.

To me sadness is seeing black, while depression is being blind.

When I'm sad, I want to work with that feeling.

When I'm depressed, I can't interact.

I find it odd how they seem to use depression and sadness interchangeably. I'm not myself entirely sure where I would draw the line between the two though. The most simple analogy I can think of is sadness can result naturally from a loss (like the death of a family member or friend) that takes a natural course that fades over time. Depression can be much more ambiguous and is not always directly related to life-events and is sometimes rooted in mental illness.

Speaking of mental illness, I'm pretty surprised bi-polar disorder is not mentioned at all in the article. I think its been fairly well researched that bi-polar individuals (both today and before bi-polar was an understood mental illness) can have highly productive periods (manias) that have lead to great works of music, art, and science and oscillate with periods of depression.

I have known multiple people to fit this description (some diagnosed, some not) and it would be easy to miss or not understand these cycles and think that their depressive nature contributed to their creativity when its really their mania cycles that produce the most.

Personally, my creativity takes a nosedive when I am sad or depressed, which likely changes from person to person. Things that reduce depression also increase creativity for me (exercise, sports, good food etc).

To me, sadness is when I feel sad. Depression is when I feel almost nothing, the whole world seems pointless, and have no enthusiasm for anything.

_Clinical_ depression is when that depression has reached the point where it needs treatment, is caused by brain chemistry issues, etc.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but on first glance, there are some things that jump out at me:

- Sample size of three.

- Linguistic analysis. Perhaps they're not actually sad. Perhaps they just happen to be writing about sad things.

- Unrepresentative sample (they're all successful musical composers).

A few years back I was significantly depressed. Every day felt the same and without meaning. Desperate for an outlet, I began to keep a daily journal to remind myself that every day, whether good or bad, was a day in my life, and therefore had meaning. The journal itself did not lift me out of depression, but it helped me cope through those dark times.

Last year I met someone more dear to my heart than I had ever imagined. Nearly every day since then has been of joyful bliss. However, I was enjoying myself so much that I stopped bothering to record my journals for months at a time. How ironic is it that in this time with so much meaning and so much happiness and shared experience to record, I felt that there was no need to record it, because I was having such a great time. Now I regret not having a reference for us to look back upon.

The article may not apply to everyone, but to me, it certainly does.

I can most definitely relate to that :)

I also kept a small journal (which I was very ashamed of!) when I was depressed, and like you I found that it was helpful as it was at least a small but very free outlet to express what would definitely be difficult to talk about.

And I've also recovered :) And like you too, I don't keep a journal so much now, in fact very rarely I'd write in it and come to think of it, it was usually when I was very grumpy that I turned to it.

So I can't help but be glad that I don't have much of a journal now. I also feel your conundrum with happy memories, but one thing depression has taught me is to count every "now" moment as a blessing. I've a goldfish memory but I'm very precious about remembering the good emotions, like happiness, peace etc, and that for me is enough. And enough to carry me forward and whack the occasional blues. And anyway, I always find that we inadvertently store memories, be it random phone captures, spontaneous scribbling, reminders of cringey moments by friends and family ... as corny as it sounds, we're all made of our past and we all love to share things. So no need for fomo!

Actually I have consistently been updating my journal over the past month after a long hiatus. Things are heater than ever, but keeping a journal helps me keep on track with other things. It's like making your bed and brushing your teeth every morning: if you're consistent with those things, you'll likely make a consistent effort to do more than just coast from day to day.

You definitely have more discipline than I have, I could never consider writing as something as consistent as brushing my teeth! Most of the time I'm just stuck, or feel bored with myself. Did I mention that I don't like journals! I think that I will regret it though, just as I sometimes now wish that I've been less photophobic when I was a teen.

Can I email you? I'm working on interesting software that does something like this and it'd be great if you could try it.

Yes please! I tried something along those lines but gave up after a while when I got tired of making the app and just stuck with Evernote.

Here's the repo for the abandoned project:

https://github.com/nikkoschaff/Sumer

What about a simple time-management explanation? When one is feeling melancholy, one tends to also be anti-social - this leaves more time to focus on one's artsy tasks.

Yeah I don't think there's a reason to perpetuate what is in the article. (I also recall another study that found startup founders from broken homes were more successful? yikes? I'm also calling B.S. Freudian analysis here.)

I'm probably more happy when I'm creative and am around creative people. I'm sad when I can't be creative and don't have those outlets.

If you are having trouble with things, there are ways to get a bit better. Talk to someone, look into mindfulness about accepting current things more and worrying less about the future (this is pretty great really), etc. And in some cases you can take actions to make sure you're in a better situation.

I get a lot of good ideas from being around other people. Yes, you do need time to implement them, but having a good feedback loop if you are externally motivated is also a useful thing.

I think it's ok to want to fix the "being unhappy" part, and you can also be creative along the way. We definitely don't want to perpetuate the idea that we have to stay unhappy to be productive. Though this isn't always easy and a lot of people are dealt really hard hands.

There are some good examples of some incredibly unhappy people that were absolute geniuses (Van Gogh!) and also a lot of people that great creative geniuses that aren't as tortured. These things are orthogonal. But there are signs there's a lot of good things going on even when there are a lot of bad things also going on.

Not to say you can't find some good things about being sad about something. Developing empathy and caring about things is a pretty powerful asset. This can cause people to want to do more positive things for the world, knowing what it can feel like for them.

Or the monetary explanation; they were sad when they had financial difficulties, needed money, so wrote more compositions.

"Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died."

From a research POV ... the study focussed on exactly three cherrypicked, successful artists. It's a very small sample from a very different time and culture than today. Can a conclusion with relevance to today be drawn?

If the goal was to give anecdotal hope or inspiration to the average "sad" person today, then this is interesting. :-)

here, i will spell it out for you, as the article so carelessly evaded:

the nail that stands out is hammered down

people HATE those who are creative (don't bother with your counter-example to my blanket statement; it isn't relevant) and make a mess out of them from an early age. it also doesn't help that creative types tend to be eccentric; once again, the nail that stands out is hammered down. being hammered down results in depression/sadness that coexists with other difficulties like losing loved ones etc.

Thank you for a nice dose of reality in this thread. What you say is especially true for those who are gifted, but for whatever reason (whether it's a negative family life, a backwards school system, the natural need to fit it among less creative peers, etc.) get the creativity and the spark for life stamped out of their head before they experience enough of the world to truly realize their potential.

Thats true for Asian countries. Do you think that holds true for Western civilization or Silicon Valley?

SV is just like all other subcultures: a dynamic equilibrium of proper social signalling is necessary to be accepted and avoid ostracization. layer on enough social overhead and independent thought has no cognitive space to dwell. sure, that doesn't explicitly prevent creative people from excelling, but it certainly chokes out or chills a lot of the people in between average and brilliant.

stepping out of line is just as dangerous in SV as ever when people are trying to mentally draw invisible lines between what is tepidly "disruptive" and what is genuinely subversive or abnormal. the same could be said of the wider american culture, in which certain segments value signalling of faux "edginess" while still living in terror of actual contradiction of the status quo.

what do these things have to do with creativity, you may ask? making new stuff is perceived on some level as an attack on the old stuff-- and that old stuff is held onto with a deathgrip.

Somewhat related, but in On Writing, Stephen King talks about the cliched link between great artists and substance abuse. Basically he says in his opinion it's bunk and a really damaging belief because it leads to substance abuse and not necessarily great art.

The creativity link demonstrated in the article isn't to substance abuse. It's to sadness.

Zhirinovsky, the populist leader of the LDPR party with ~20% of the seats in the Russian Duma, put suffering and otherness at the center of creative process. In his lament to Putin about the lack of cultural development in Russia he said the following:[0]

    Why did Dostoevsky become a great writer? 10 years of hard labor.
    What conclusion do I draw? We must incarcerate.
    After being in jail for three, four or five years, a Dostoevsky will appear...

    [sic]

    The history of art and culture is developed by jail or by sexual minorities.
    We utilize neither today, therefore we don't have any great cultural creators.
    A straight person living in a luxurious Moscow apartment will not create.
    For creativity you need a trouble maker. A freak will create.

I don't subscribe to his views, but I do find his opinion relevant to the article. Hope you are richer for having read it.

[0] https://youtu.be/Hl_VvgpwNMw?t=4m54s

A friend of mine recently said something similar. He said that there's basically no new music or movie plots because antidepressants and abundant entertainment have killed everyone's muse by doping them up and making them... well... too happy.

He said something that stuck with me too (paraphrasing):

"I was driving with my daughter the other day and listening to her music and I was constantly thinking about how it was just like what I was listening to in the 80s and 90s. That's perverse and wrong. Her music should be strange and alien and vaguely alarming to me. I find this really terrifying. I am afraid for her future."

I am not totally convinced of the suffering angle but I very much agree with the second part. I find the lack of cultural creativity alarming as well, and maybe as the leading indicator of a coming dark age or something.

Creativity hasn't bottomed out, you're just not looking in the right pond. Of course your huge money making pop label isn't going to be pushing the boundaries of contemporary music, take a moment to go looking for something new and alien if you're that worried.

The driving forces behind popular music, Hollywood, TV, video games even, have never been larger. It's easier to just say their shadow encompasses everything than it is to walk over to the edge and look out.

Usually these "[art form or creator] isn't as good as it used to be" views come from finally noticing the repetition and formulaic structures that were always there. See /r/lewronggeneration. Your daughter could also just lack taste, I'm afraid. If you listen to any of top Pitchfork lists on Spotify you'll hear radically varying styles, even among the 2010s.

I stopped making music some years ago after realising that everything I created was driven by an endless dark hole, pure death. And only that. Was too much even for me to listen and, hell, I'm not even a depressed person.

And I realised that even the most darker blues, or the greatest tragedy is driven by some kind of light, by what they call redemption.

You fall down, you hit rock bottom, you see some light, you feel relieved, maybe just a bit, but you do.

I felt like I just cannot see any light.

It's all about counterpoint, after all.

The funny thing is how prevalent this is in music.

The best example I can draw is James Hetfield. In the early Metallica days, his writing was amazing. Dark, depressing, powerful. Then he decided to get sober and nearly overnight he's creativity dried up and we got "St. Anger". The albums since his sobriety have been mediocre at best and lampooned by critics.

I have other examples, but this is probably the one that really jumps out at me.

Two thoughts. 1. What is creativity? Keith Johnstone (whom I had the chance to work with) in his work on theater improvisation adds substantially to the definition of 'creativity': A work of creativity does nit need to be 'complicated', 'new' or 'extravagant'. Often the most simple thoughts and actions are 'creative enough'.

2. Is creativity linked to motivation? Motivation and resulting action is U-shaped. While being not motivated at all will result in (nearly) no action, both negative ("sadness", anger, hunger, etc) and positive motivation provide a good basis for getting active. That may explain why being sad 'is better' than feeling overall satisfied. However, positive motivation has a much stronger impact. So instead of forcing yourself to be sad and miserable in order to be creative (and god knows alot of actors exactly do that...), get interested, 'catch fire' like we say in Germany. Results wil be the same or better. And your overall quality of life, too. Just my 2 cent.

My experience is that being in a depressed state makes me want to do anything to get the depressed feeling out of my body, which drives me to write/play music/whatever it takes. For me, expressing the sadness/whatever negative emotion I'm feeling can slowly chip away at it.

Perhaps relevant, the TV Tropes page Creator Breakdown (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreatorBreakdown):

"[...] and it would be hard to argue that angst can't help you make some really good art. People who have something to work out through their creativity also tend to put a lot of effort into making it good, if it's concerning something important or special to them."

To paraphrase the author of Leftoversoup: "Every day I drive past a church sign saying in big letters STOP SUFFERING. Every drive I pass it thinking 'Fuck you but no, I will do as I want. I have more important things to do than stop suffering' "

Heh.

I am not happy because I am blocked by washingtonpost pay wall.

Well, according to the article, that must be a good thing because you are now more creative.

I rather a positive title: "The upside of being sad: next time you are down go create something"

This is true. How many ideas were created out of frustration? (Dropbox, Airbnb, etc)

Ain't called the blues for no reason

Like they said: You can't play the blues in an air-conditioned room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR8qG2ErTRI

Funny how every comment here is "I'm more creative when I'm happy!!!!!11", and their creative output is probably just some phone app or a poorly written poem that only your partner liked.

The article is talking about deep creativity. Things that changed the world forever, that are still loved hundreds of years later.

No one will remember your two creative lines of code within a couple of months. Stop comparing yourself with real creative geniuses.

I'm curious: what do you find deeply creative?

For me, observing the world, it's the: "aha!" moment. Simply realizing that this made some pieces fall together. When I discovered GAs in 1989, I had a jaw-dropping to the floor, hit-the-library-right-now for 120 sleepless-hours kind of moment. When I understood Moby Dick to be the American Bhagavad Gita, I had a similar moment.

But, for when I, myself, create - it's been very rare. Probably because I am not a creative genius. At best, I am a poly-something-or-other synthesist. Applying Claude Shannon to evolution was about my peak.

I could say that my moment of creativity came when I was borderline losing it - certainly unstable - maybe insane - probably not recognizably sad.

What is it like for you?

For me it's about creating something so beautiful and unrepeatable that no other human being could have ever created.

It's not about solving problems or finding more elegant solutions... It's about creating something almost from nowhere, as if it were magic.

And it has to be unrepeatable. Beethoven himself wouldn't be able to create the same piece twice. It's just that one-time miracle in a moment of inspiration that you'll always look back in awe...

Not surprisingly you are being downvoted so much.

And yet, he is correct. Naming a particularly egregious blindspot of the groupthink of hacker news will only get you downvoted and ignored (and flagged, and hellbanned...).

From the HN guidelines:

> Be civil.

Despite potentially being correct, I think the downvotes are merited, and not coming from pointing out an instance of groupthink, but coming because the comment was not civil. (This was my personal reason for downvoting him.) The comment is worded to attack and deprecate those people it targets — this was not necessary in order to make the point about groupthink.

Maybe you can help me with this. I am assured in normal life that I am "not normal" w.r.t. normal human convention (although I am told I'm a pretty nice guy)

Can you tell me what, exactly, was uncivil? I ask you, because you seem civil, and I'm hoping you won't criticize me for simply not seeing it. (fwiw - I'm a native speaker of the English language in the North American tradition, but I do get out of practice from time-to-time in my travels)

Indeed, you are correct.

I knew it wasn't a very popular opinion, so I didn't want to invest a lot of time trying to make it sound nicer. I'm terribly uncivil by nature, unfortunately.

I'm really sorry, but I appreciate that at least one person was able to take something from it and share his empathy with me! (Thanks, reddytowns!)

Aah, the good old romanticising of depression makes it to the top of HN again. You gotta make up reasons why depression is valuable, otherwise it would be pointless to suffer, wouldn't it?

Let's not forget that "X makes you creative" articles are bullshit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916132

Happiness, defined as self-deluded positive attitude maintained by confirmation bias and caffeine, is a mild form of stupidity.

Seeing things as they are, ideally without differentiating for "good" and "bad", and calling things by its proper names is beginning of intelligence.

Joy, contrary to happiness, is a natural state (that's what makes children so different), which has nothing to do with social and environmental conditioning.

It's just a film but the counter-argument to this is well put forward by: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/frank_2014/

Happiness? Quite simple. Practice altruism.

and the paywalls continue..

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