The comfortable life is killing us | Hacker News Reader

The comfortable life is killing us

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89 pointsarbhassan97 comments

> "most prosperous time in history" That is no longer true, at least not here in the US. the most recent adult generation is now the 2nd or 3rd most prosperous generation and not by such a large margin as everyone thinks. The thinking goes that since GDP per capita is up and productivity is high, that we are much wealthier but it's not true.

Even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP can't adequately measure wealth because it uses the wrong basket of goods. if you have a million dollars and you can afford 1000 iphones but a house costs 5 million, then your not wealthy.

Wealth is being able to afford the basics of life: Shelter, food and water and by extension: transportation (because you need to get to a job), education (because employers now require it, regardless of whether its useful), and medical insurance because you don't want to loose your shelter.

Those 6 things are just as expensive as ever, if not more expensive than ever and the average person is less able to afford them, at least in the coastal cities. Calculate how many hours of work per week it takes to afford shelter. people work longer hours than ever, and nearly 50% of their salary now goes just towards shelter which equates to 20 to 25 hours a week of work just to afford shelter. Was that the case 500 years ago?

Yes we've come a long way from 500 years ago, undoubedly we can afford much more food with much greater variety than ever. we eat like kings, dress like kings. But, still live in shelters we can barely afford.

And the richest person in the world 30 years ago couldn't afford a single iPhone because it didn't exist.

Shelter 500 years ago was barely better than a single-room, unheated hut. And you probably didn't even own it. You were a serf beholden to a feudal lord. (And that feudal lord didn't even have air conditioning)

And your food was whatever you could grow. In a good year maybe you made a little more than you needed. In a bad year you starved to death.

Even the bottom 1% in the US today have access to far better healthcare than the richest 1% 150 years ago. Antibiotics didn't even exist.

All 6 of the things you mentioned are far better off for almost anyone living today.

Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.

Focusing on the plight of college educated, middle class young adults seems pretty bizarre when compared with the far greater suffering of so many.

Sure strive to make things better... But if your worst trouble in life is having to work 20 hours a week to live in a comfortable apartment in the most expensive and exclusive city in the country... I'd say things were going pretty well for you.

You've made huge miscalculations about human nature, and what we find fulfilling. Trivial conveniences and endless novelty don't make for a better quality of life, it just makes people fat, depressed, insecure and addicted to drugs.

Having a high quality of life has more to do with matters of identity. People will happily suffer through anything if they feel it's meaningful. Mountain climbers and professional athletes live physically punishing, high risk lifestyles, but they aren't miserable, because what they do is meaningful to them. Being at the top of Maslow's heirarchy of needs looks a lot like being at the bottom.

This should come as no surprise, we've been living in small groups of Hunter gatherers since before we were human. It's what we're designed for.

> Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.

So, your premise here seems to be that even though your own life may be going downhill as long as everyone else is doing better you shouldn't bother with exploring the reasons behind or even trying to fix your own backwards slide. Is that correct?

It's about keeping things in perspective. Sure explore the reasons or try to fix the backward slide, but maybe we should have a basic posture of gratitude. I suspect most of us have it pretty good in life.

Also the consequences for policies are not always easy to predict. As an example, making college free seems great for the children of the upper middle class. But what about the majority of people who don't go to college?

Every time I see someone bring up that others have it worse, everyone else has seen huge improvement, etc I've always gotten the impression that they are somehow trying to minimize the issues people are talking about as not being worthy of consideration because of the other. From your reply it seems like I may be missing something because I can't see how anyone's level of gratitude or acknowledgement/lack of acknowledgement re the improving status of others is relevant to the concerns they have regarding their own situation or productive in resolving said concerns. And thus, I usually conclude that the only reason it is brought up is to minimize whatever issue the original poster brings up.

But I'm really curious as to what the underlying reasoning here is. I can sort of understand when it comes down to obvious luxuries, so long as those luxuries are not in fact mandatory for being a productive member of the corresponding society (eg complaining about not being one of the 100 people to have one of those newfangled telephones vs complaining about not having a telephone in an age where having a telephone is the default expectation).

How would having a basic posture of gratitude aid someone in resolving issues they face that deal with what may be seen as luxuries in areas that are improving but which may be necessities in their own area? What relevance does the improvement of others have to resolving or mitigating the backwards slide of another? Is it not better for everyone to be experiencing improvement? Is there some fundamental mechanism that requires some areas backslide in order for others to improve?

I'm genuinely curious - you aren't the first person I have met that makes the assertions you have, and I have experienced the same sense of bafflement every time.

having to live in the "most expensive and exclusive city in the country" is not a plus.

I'd take shelter over Iphone any day of the week.

Most of All 6 of the things I mentioned haven't improved much in the last 50 years (Granted Food & Water are already very very good).

Using the US as an example: Housing, Medical and Education are all far less affordable and accesible today. All rising far faster than inflation.

Even our ability to transport people effectively from home to work and back has not improved much. The cost is just as high as ever. Cars/public transportation aren't able to move any faster than they could in the 70s (safety reasons, etc) and as the housing situation worsens, people's commutes get longer and longer. Thus the time it takes to arrive at ones destination hasn't improved. And it doesn't help that we seem to be moving the homes and works further and further apart (due to the cost of housing).

The improvements we're making these days are increasingly minor. Compare a car from today vs one from 20 years ago. there's not a whole lot of difference in terms of impact to you as a human being. even safety improvements are becoming increasingly incremental as we fight for every last 1000th of a percent of improvement.

The first point isn’t true. Median income for millennials is as high as for any previous generation: https://images.app.goo.gl/c1LwKJDCB3diXGfr7.

Limiting your analysis to “coastal cities” is where I think you go astray. I grew up in the DC suburbs, in Northern Virginia, in a 3BR, 1,100 square foot house that my parents bought for $175,000 ($350,000 adjusted for inflation). Today, that same house is almost $700,000. My parents couldn’t have afforded to buy it today. But it’s also a totally different kind of town. Back in the early 1990s, the town I grew up in was squarely middle class, devoid of trendy restaurants, high end retail, etc. There was no Northern VA tech scene, no Dulles Technology corridor. It might as well have been suburban Ohio. Outside Georgetown, DC itself was a sleepy commuter city full of chain restaurants that closed at 6 pm. There was no Hermès. The Michelin guide didn’t even review restaurants in the city back then. That’s all changed completely.

So I don’t feel like comparing the price of housing back then and today is fair. You’re buying a completely different product for your money. Today, a similar place to what Northern VA was like back then would be like Crofton, MD (not to far from where I live in Annapolis). You can easily buy a house like the one I grew up in for a price similar to what my parents paid in 1989 (adjusted for inflation obviously).

People can't arbitrarily choose where they want to live. People have to go where the jobs are, otherwise there's no money to pay for the house.

Having more unaffordable overly fancy michelin star restaraunts nearby doesn't reduce the hardship of not being able to afford shelter. And who needs high end retail when you can't even afford a place to live? How many gucci bags does it take to keep you happy when your stuff is out on the street and you have no place to plug-in your 1200$ iphone?

now you might be thinking, we already have shelter and we're not at risk. but the vast majority of people are just a few months away of no paycheck from absolute homelessness. even engineers, often don't have more than a years worth of runway saved up.

This is a really tricky position to take. How exactly do you measure the benefit of video chat with your grandkids every week, no matter how far away you live? Ubiquitous access to the internet?

This hit home for me when I watched the movie Brooklyn. A hundred years ago, when you emigrated from Europe to America, you often left elderly family behind. You knew there was a high probability you would never see or speak with these relatives again. Your parting could very well be a final goodbye. Technology has certainly closed that gap in a very positive way.

A hundred and twenty years ago, when you emigrated from Europe to America, you wrote back home and told them that steak was the most popular breakfast in America and that coffee was a luxury good in Europe because America was drinking most of the world's supply.

Happiness and satisfaction with life ratings. Suicide statistics. Measure between societies that do and don't have access to those things.

It's too subjective, which is why you need to focus on more objective things like those basics mentioned above.

where do you plug in the laptop to make that video chat, when you have no house to stay in?

All our modern day luxuries are contingent upon access to basic shelter. That shelter is harder to get than it has been for a long time: at least in the coastal cities - where most of the jobs are.

Does that matter much when you are working two jobs to afford rent?

Are most people doing that?

I read a nice explanation on LW. Imagine you need goods X and Y to live well. And imagine that in the ancestral environment, X usually came with Y. So evolution could get away with giving you the drive for X, but no drive for Y (though lack of Y would still make you suffer).

Now switch to modernity, where goods can be obtained more independently. For example, you can get tasty food (X) without some necessary nutrient (Y). So you end up suffering for lack of Y, but your drive is only for X. Moreover, as the market tries to provide X cheaply, it has an incentive to drop Y. I don't know how many such Y's we're missing now, but probably a lot.

There's other variations too. Say you need some X and a lot of Y. But X is rare and Y is plentiful. Evolution leads you to an insatiable drive for X but not for Y. Then, suddenly mankind figures out how to cheaply produce X, e.g. salt and sugar.

Another- suppose food supplies are variable and insecure. The optimal amount of muscle & bone is exactly what you need and no more, and the optimal behavior is to be as active as required and no more. Viola, you get humans, one of few species whose bodies require ongoing training to stay fit & healthy, while paradoxically being quite lazy.

Agriculture. We got calories (X) from grain without whatever Y was in other plants and animals. Perhaps that's why the keto diet and others like it are helping so many people with a variety of problems. Regardless of what we eat today, there is little physical effort (another Y) required to obtain it, just a credit card.

Huh, that's interesting. The first example that popped into my mind was hunting. I'd imagine there's a lot to the experience; from tracking & pursuing, to the kill & paying respect to the life spent to sustain oneself, that one misses out on from picking out meat from the grocery store.

Forgive me, what’s LW?

lesswrong, if I had to guess

I spent the first part of my life pursuing what was interesting and engaging to me for its own sake, not putting much effort into status signaling or a cultural mask. All I got was crushing loneliness and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.

I spent the first part of my life pursuing an impeccably planned career trajectory, setting myself up with all the markers of status and culture that my peers and family expected, discarding the things I loved because they did not contribute back to that.

All I got was crushing existential depression and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.

I realize this is a glib comment, please don't take it as an insult, just the tongue-in-cheek response of someone who felt a surprisingly mirrored experience of yours.

In fewer words, I'm not sure anecdata is not going to help in this case, but if someone is feeling "something missing" in their life, some of the avenues of questioning and introspection presented in the article may be useful.

It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness. I don't see why chasing either status or what you love has to necessarily entail isolating yourself from other people and letting social skills deteriorate. Either path could be pursued with others, and indeed would probably be helped by having friends and allies along the way.

The problem is obscure preferences. Maybe 30% of the time there's someone in my world who shares them, and maybe 10% of the time we're friends. Having a community usually requires openness to activities that would not have been my first choice, or my tenth. I never used to make that trade. It's worth it, though.

It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness.

Traditionally it was easy to be part of a community, because humans structured society that way, because instinctively that’s important: we are mammals after all. But those traditional communities have all been eroded for various reasons. So people are lonely and desperate and aren’t clear why: after all your parents never had to “do” anything, their community was “just there”.

I guess the lesson is that you need to find a middle way which is really hard. There is a lot of clarity in extremes but the middle way is pretty fuzzy. Looking back at my own life I would really love being able to try again. It took me decades to find a path that works for me. Some people have that knowledge when they are young but most people need a lot of time and learning to know what they need. Some people never find out

As someone w silly and weird and boring interests... If the things that interest you are interesting to NO ONE... you might have (subconsciously or otherwise) picked something intentionally to avoid human contact.

Hell, tech is boring to other people. How many of us are just in the position where our sole tech hobby happened to be lucrative on the job market, so now we've just doubled down on our boring antisocial single-dimensionality?

Took me quite a while to cultivate interests outside of tech, and pretty much all of them move me closer to other people where tech did not.

For example, there are definitely apartment parties with more wine than tequilla and more talking than dancing. Even in my age bracket. I’ve been to a few. But these kinds of social circles are inherently more difficult to identify and break into. It’s a hell of a lot easier to find the group headed to a nightclub.

When did you know you had to make a change? And how did you give yourself the framework to enact that change?

> Just take a gander at Twitter or at the comment section of a political article and you’ll see just how violently enraged we’ve become.

Ahistorical nonsense. Ever since the vast majority of humans have become politically aware political violence has been a fact of life. Repression, revolution, purges, terror, assassinations, progroms, riots, barroom brawls, slander, muckraking, bribery, insightment are a constant fact of the modern and pre-modern world.

Before there was such a thing as popular political awareness the nobel classes engaged in all the same in their own way.

Since the 70s, America and Europe have enjoyed and continue to enjoy one of the least politically violent stretches in world history all the while carrying on an inflammatory and sometimes vial discourse. If you find the current rhetoric jarring it's probably because you lived in an enclave which was protected or benefited by the hegemony of the white professional class and so had no reason to be exposed to the anger and violent language that often accompanies the desperate demand for change.

Some simple examples of that last point:

The Tulsa massacre in 1921, where a single mistaken claim of assault by a black teenager led to massive mob violence against the city's black community complete with private planes dropping homemade incendiaries on black neighborhoods. Estimates are that at upwards of 100 black people were killed and more than 10,000 were left homeless. More than 6,000 black people were arrested, but no action was ever taken against the whites who took part.

The zoot suit riots in Los Angeles in 1943, where mobs of thousands of American military servicemen and local white residents sought out, assaulted, and stripped every Hispanic they could find (as well as the occasional black person). More than 150 people were beaten. Police joined in on said beatings, and then arrested more than 500 of those same people who had been targeted by them, for 'vagrancy' and 'rioting'.

The Kent State killings of 1970, where the Ohio National Guard indiscriminately fired on a crowd of protesting college students, murdering four and injuring nine, and the Jackson State killings ten days later, where city and state police fired on student protestors, murdering two and injuring twelve. No criminal prosecution was ever taken against the people who did the actual killing or the leadership involved in either case.

Didn't know about those last college incidents, thanks for sharing.

The more comfortable life gets, the more knowledge people will receive. The more time they have, the more they think. If you combine these two, it's inevitable to start asking questions about your own existence. Because there are no logical answers to that, people retreat.

That's why you have so many depressed people. They might not know it though.

To move on, we, as society, will need to grow and change. When there's no need to fight for everyday survival - shelter, warmth, water, food- , we'll be free for the first time in the history of our species. That's when it gets interesting.

The answer to feeling disconnected and alienated from the world is not to disconnect further or to embrace the alienation. It's to call your parents and tell them you love them and ask about their week, to message your friends and ask when they're free next week, to learn the name of the cashier you always see at the supermarket, to volunteer to help fix whatever problems you worry about, and in general to build genuine connections with other people.

Investing money in experiences instead of goods is less important than investing time in others instead of isolated activities.

Hello, modern commercial advertising here. No, don't invest in people, invest in yourself, in fact we have the perfect product to sell you to do just that.

It is going to take a major change in modern lifestyles to force advertisers not to sell us lies. It seems every screen is selling is separation.

The modern life is horrible to mental health articles that ignore alcoholism and violence and social problems of the past are always suspect.

Yes, some kids are on psychiatric drugs that should not and we don't have tolerance for kids that don't do well in early academic. But we also don't beat the shit oit of them when they misbehave, so it is not all just bad.

"embrace your suffering"

Sorry but I don't understand this.

The whole "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" meme is meaningless. Challenging one self to get pain and pretend you will feel better after is a pointless way to live life.

There is little point in climbing mount Everest. It's good for your health to practice physical activity and to occupy your mind and time. But this constant idea that we have to challenge ourselves, while we can't manage to fight inequality or climate change, shows that we're deluded.

Climate change will be the new equalizer. The right to emit co2 will be the new currency.

> The right to emit co2 will be the new currency.

Don't hold your breath.

> Challenging one self to get pain and pretend you will feel better after is a pointless way to live life.

I don't think he meant that. He wrote: "This world breaks us all". Life is full of suffering by design. It's not going to be a sugary Hollywood movie - you will suffer. Use this experience to grow.

> The right to emit co2 will be the new currency.

Well yes, that's exactly how cap-and-trade and carbon-credits work.

Not in the us it doesn’t. The two cap and trade programs in the us do little to stop someone at the individual level from needlessly emitting - there is no economic signal to stop. Even some large emitters aren’t subject to any economic signals in rggi, and California has an odd habit of handing out allowances. In a more perfect world, you would be correct.

how do you propose we fight inequality? Inequality of outcome?

The book Radical Markets has very innovative ideas in combating inequality using market strategies. We are deluded if we don’t acknowledge Inequality is one of the biggest challenges facing us that we have to solve.

There's solutions to inequality but human nature ruins all those solutions. Solving inequality means solving human nature.

I guess this a nature fallacy? Civilization is built by humans. I don't see why human behavior could not change how civilization works. Freedom of speech is an important evolution that goes against human nature. I don't see why human instincts of domination would always prevail.

Also welfare already exists in many countries including the US, so it's an accepted thing. It needs to be accepted without shame or arguments that it's a socialist measure.

even if you have very very generous welfare (and I agree that this should exist) - it would not ever fix the inequality of outcome.

I just don't see how those who can perform literally 10x more productively than others will settle for less than an absolute top prize, and with technology being such a great amplifier - winner take all dynamics seems to be so inherent - I am not even sure what can be done?

The issue is that civilizations have also been destroyed by humans.

Its not all humans but a minority of greedy sociopathic humans make it difficult to impossible to do anything meaningful towards societal advancement and tend to ruin any sort of collectively equal society.

I hope I'm wrong but that has been my observations so far at micro to macro levels.

Challenging oneself gives people the strength to challenge the world.

I'd rather have people who go to the gym several times a week be the one's responsible for combating climate change than people who pursue meaningless pleasure (drug use, pornography) several times a week.

Except you're failing to see the difference between self-help and fighting for political progress. One is individualist, the other is societal.

>Carl Jung, one of the most prolific psychotherapists of the 20th century, remarked that about a third of his cases were suffering from “no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”

I don't agree with his methods, but the Unabomber was a brilliant mathematician (and, incidentally, a victim of the MK Ultra experiments) and wrote on this subject in his manifesto. He observed that our modern lives are far removed from the hunting/gathering of our ancestors. We evolved to seek frequent small stimuli - hunting for mushrooms, picking fruit, occasionally chasing down an animal - and the rewards tended to be immediate and tangible. Now most humans spend all day working in one specialization with intangible rewards that come in the form of payment every few weeks. It's much harder for most humans to find natural meaning in these tasks, and they don't typically feel critical to survival because, well, we really are quite comfortable most of the time!

No, a life that kills you is not comfortable.

An American life values money over ease of living though, as rightly pointed out in the article. But it's definitely not something to say to one who will view it unfavourably.

Putting people under constant adversity does not make them do better: Only happens if that adversity teaches them something.

Enough struggle encourages growth, too much struggle kills.

It is much simpler than this. Humans are social animals, we need upto 1000 close family members. Not friends, not colleagues, not church members - relatives. They should be really close, like you should see them almost every day. If you don't you develop unhealthy relationships with people who really don't care about you much. And this means you are alone in this world and you must be stressed - something is going to happen and nobody is going to help. This is natural reaction to an abnormal situation.

I hear you but in this situation what else can be done other than marching forward with self reliance and accepting the circumstances?

I accept that I cannot fix it for myself, but I am trying to make it easier for my children. Hopefully, they will have enough resources to fix it for their children.

How do you keep track of 1000 people a day? What are your thoughts on the existence and estimates of Dunbar's number?

Small villages where everyone is a relative are very common in the recent past. In same places it is still the case.

Modern man has up to 1000 "relatives" for sure. It just happened to be people who don't care about that person or not even aware he or she exists (celebrities for instance)

I heard about Dunbar number from pop-science articles, and it feels right. Isn't Marines companies size based on this number? Must be true then.

It’s a nice piece on breaking out of the conditioning of society and gratefully embracing our time on earth by living fully and taking risks.

Some nice quotes from wise people:

> But as Alan Watts once reminded us, “This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

> In the words of Henry Miller, “the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”

> “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” - Charles Bukowski

I feel very much the same way. Working in an office is incredibly dull, society feels incredibly dull.

I romanticise primitive life, and people often rebut that you would die at 30. I would be ok with that though, trading some amount of life expectancy for increased excitement, purpose, and struggle. I do this in some ways through moderately dangerous activities, off roading (moto and Jeep) and snowboarding.

I do not think the incredibly comfortable and coddled bay area corporate life is for me. It is another matter to figure out what is, and what will be sustainable.

The premise that you'd drop dead on your 30th birthday is ... largely false.

Infant and childhood mortality was increadibly higher, though this also may have improved overall fitness through selection pressures. Once adulthood was attained, life expectency was ... at the very least modestly comparable to modern experiences, and long-lived individuals were not uncommon throughout history. Ironically, the development of cities and trade (and their contingent roles in providing for incubation and transmission of disease) added substantially to mortality.

Even in (the relatively disease-ridden) England and Wales of the mid-19th century, as a 20 year old, you'd be likely to live to about 60, by 30, nearly 65, and at 50, you'd likely ive to see 70.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...

Beyond disease, other causes were accidents, injuries (infection being a real possibility), famine, war, and violence. Though most of those causes tended to be episodic. See:

http://www.fraser-courtman.co.uk/list_of_famines_&_pestilenc...

Keep in mind that without cities and trade, few infectious diseases could spread much beyond a localised tribe. Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome makes a strong argument that the plagues and pestilences which afflicted the empire co-evolved with it.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...

> die at 30. I would be ok with that

Speaking as someone considerably older than that, I bet you change your mind on your 30th birthday.

Fortunately, also their odds:

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...

I'll take that bet. I'm past 30. What did I win?

> What did I win?

Life after 30.

It is harder to blame others for my failings if I have total freedom and opportunity. This forces me to direct anger towards myself.

With imposed constraints I could at least make myself content with my situation as it is. This is probably why monastic life appeals to certain people.

". . . Rollo May, defined it more accurately — “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”"

That is especially true in the era of inaction/regression on climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/01/out-on-i...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/business/energy-environme... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s...

This is why I run ultra marathons, often in the mountains in incredibly bad weather. Well I should rephrase this, I run the first 20-40 miles, the rest is a hike, until the last ten of so miles which are a zombie shuffle. The thing is though, I spend hours just on my own (most of the time), with only my own wits to keep me going and entertained. I also get to side up real close to nature at it's rawest.

Things that helped me the most: cardio, diet. It's hard to escape biology and I don't know who said it (probably hardmaru retweet) but the brain is a motion co-processor so general movement goes a long way towards maintaining a healthy mind. It won't fix all your problems but it costs nothing other than some willpower and a trail you like in your local neighborhood.

For me it takes no willpower at all to go out for a walk. It does take a lot of willpower to sit in a comfy chair and do nothing.

I once went on vacation to a beach resort. I went out to the beach all set to spend time sunning and sitting, like they do in the movies.

That lasted less than 5 minutes.

You make a good point. Even walking goes a long way for mental well being.

Every day I can go for a walk is a beautiful day.

> Depression rates have been steadily rising in the US since the mid-1930s.

Are we accepting that as true? Is not our awareness of depression greater? How was depression among those in a small town reported back then? Was depression even a “thing” in common knowledge then? All the sudden everyone seems to have a gluten problem — a problem that, while real for a select few, is mostly a manufactured fad. Did human biology actually change that much, or are we just getting more messages that make us notice or perceive more? When the media says everything is a nail, we start to buy more hammers.

I see mention of neither crippling medical debt nor the inevitable societal problems caused by widespread ignoring of the climate emergency. There is little comfortable about seeing the world as it is as an American.

People forget that the harder is to do something the higher the satisfaction when you do it right. Life is a journey not a destination, death is the destination of life.

Yup. Once you achieve a goal, spend a few minutes celebrating, then on to the next goal.

There may be a survivor bias here.

Its not the comfort, its polluted environment and economic burdens. No one has died from too much comfort. The article feels like another out-of-touch rich person harping on about that "money can't buy happiness".

A much better piece of writing on this topic is “Industrial Society and its Future,” also known as the Unabomber’s Manifesto. You have to forget who wrote it and also ignore the worst 20% of it to get the most out of it though.

I can't forget who wrote it. I can't forget taking my computer in to get it repaired, and how much pain the repairman was in. A month or two earlier he had picked up a package left by the Unabomber. I can't forget what the Unabomber's ideas led him to do. I've seen the results of his ideas, written in pain on a man's face. I can't forget.

The way I recommend reading it is, there is something in those ideas that you can act on, in a constructive way, in your own life, without hurting anyone.

But where do you draw the line? I'm not going to read Mein Kampf looking for constructive ideas. Why? Because Hitler's position is so destructive that trying to untangle constructive ideas from the destructive seems like a fool's errand. (Also dangerous - I don't want to miss some of the destructiveness and incorporate it into my thinking.)

So the question is, did the Unabomber have good ideas, but follow them to bad conclusions? Or is the destructiveness more pervasive in his writing?

For me, the destructiveness was too vivid and too personal.

I had troubles understanding the article. The very first point is: Let Go Americans are among the most stressed people in the world. Eighty-five percent of workers worldwide....

So, how can you have a comfortable life and have a job that you hate?

I had an incredibly comfortable life working at Google while hating my job. I was making excessive amounts of money, they provided food, job was incredibly relaxed, pretty much there were no worries in life.

On the other hand, I felt like I was going insane because I couldn't stand it. I was working on a web application. I'm a security engineer with a passion for low level code. Web work and the Google code bureaucracy (read: mature software development practices) were so frustratingly dull.

That is how your life can be comfortable while having a job that you hate. I now work part time remotely (not for Google). I go on trips as often as I can. I'm working on work that I'm engaged by. I am making less money, but life is tolerable.

I make $0.00 working on the D compiler, but it is very fulfilling.

I assume you have enough income from other sources which gives you the freedom.

Over the past year and a half I've had some personal insights into my own personal happiness. I would agree that for me at least some modern day comforts tend to dull me down rather than fire me up. Here's a personal experiences:

- Netflix and TV - I really love watching movies,and series. I've binge watched a crazy amount of Netflix TV series. At my worst I'd stay up until 3am on a binge, and would sometimes combine this with drinking whiskey. Doing so would interfere with my sleep, the alcohol would affect my mood within the next few days, and of course living this way means I'm not spending time on more productive or worthwhile activities.

These days I hardly ever watch TV, and instead of watching movies at home I like to go to the movies instead. It's much more enjoyable and makes watching movies feel more special.

- Coffee - I tend to think of coffee as the equivalent of little kids drinking hot milk - except we're adults now and our hot milk has been combined with coffee. One thing I noticed drinking coffee is that the caffeine increased my general anxiety levels. Another thing I've noticed is that consuming lots of dairy products makes me feel a bit sick and yuck afterwards. So I switched to a combination of herbal tea and sometimes have decaf coffee - I did get some headaches after I did this, so would recommend slowly weaning yourself off caffeine rather than going cold turkey.

- Food in General - A lot of food these day is made for convenience. Cereals, bread, high in sugar products etc. I've slowly been getting a more nutritious diet and cooking a lot more. As mentioned with coffee, milk makes me feel a bit sick after so I don't buy any kinds of milk anymore. Sugar is something I'm still working on and is super addictive (also non-dairy milk usually has ~10% sugar in it!), so I'm working on weaning myself off that as well. I find that having a better diet has allowed me to recognize more easily what foods make me feel yuck. I believe diet is huge in affecting how you feel.

- Exercise - Intense exercise makes you feel sick when you first start doing it, but over time the sick feeling goes away and it can lead to a much healthier lifestyle and feeling better about yourself. If I eat something bad or drink alcohol on a Friday, during my intense Saturday workout I know instantly what I did wrong. Creating a routine out of this has helped change my behavior because on a Friday I will intentionally not do certain things in order to avoid the sick feeling on the Saturday. Not comfortable at all, but totally worth it.

- Sleep - I've been working on getting to bed much earlier (around 9-9:30pm). It's a work in progress but I feel much better for it.

- Following your Dreams - Over the past year I've sacrificed a cushy salary and tried new things to support my dream of being a successful entrepreneur. I spent thousands of dollars on courses, and had a crack at phone sales. It hasn't always been easy, but I'm proud of myself for giving it a go. I believe that a big reason for feelings of depression or anger in life is because we've forgotten our dreams, and aren't being true to ourselves. Recently I found the book Think and Grow Rich and have been reading that, and have also had friends that have been supporting me with their words and thoughts. In particular I have a friend I've made in recent years who is actively encouraging me, and I can tell you that having just one person that encourages you can make the world of difference.

- The Mind's Focus - A work in progress for me is where I focus my mind. If I can actively do something to make a situation better, then I think of what action to take to improve that situation. If I'm unwilling to change that or if I'm powerless to do so then I do my best to let it go, or to remove myself from that situation. Sometimes this is difficult. Sometimes I have to take a big action, let people down, or there might be things I want to care about that I've realised just aren't worth spending the emotional energy on. This is a big one when it comes to comfort - it may be more comfortable not to step up and do something, but you're worse off for it.

This article is insultingly bad. Americans are depressed because we have no social safety net and are one medical incident away from financial ruin.

That link is not exactly clear cut. There’s probably something to it, but there are unhappy rich countries and happy poor ones.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/15/depression-is-not-a-pr...

So therefore no social safety net and no medical is acceptable?

That isn't a charitable interpretation of @https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=closeparen's response, no matter how laudable the goal you're advocating may be.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Indeed, I jumped to a conclusion

Maybe it’s because neoliberal economical policies (deregulation, austerity, lower taxes for the rich) has accelerated economical inequality in developed nations such as the US and UK, and the majority of the working class people are no longer able to pay for critical services such as healthcare and education. And the establishment has been so quiet about this issue and just acting as everything’s perfectly fine, and smartphones are the “real” reason people are so depressed. The basic reasons behind today’s societal depression and eventual political instability can really be explained with simple economics, even if you ignore the cultural changes that neoliberal ideology have brought.

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