What Is a Minimally Good Life? | Hacker News Reader

What Is a Minimally Good Life?

psyche.co

96 pointsbertdc150 comments

I often contemplate what it is that leads to a "good life". I am very fortunate in so many ways, yet I allow myself to feel envy, call circumstances unfair because I didn't get what I want, or forget to be grateful. I see my kids growing up not knowing what struggling really feels like and realize that I don't have a true perspective of being without. I'm not saying that I would rather experience the feeling of hunger when you haven't eaten in days or the fear of not having access to medical services if my children or I were sick or injured. It seems that often times people don't "wake up" to an understanding of what truly matters, what really makes a good life, until they have faced tragedy. I don't want to wait for that. Instead, like the article states, I hope to be more considerate of the circumstances others have and are experiencing, thankful for opportunities and pitfalls of each day, and open to other perspectives; and I hope to pass that along to my children.

I've read several articles / books on this topic lately. In short: it's not only you that's contemplating on the "good life", plenty is being researched and written about. Our genes make it hard for us to be consistently content and happy. It seems like evolution may have given the slightly paranoid / always needing more genes an advantage for obvious reasons. One research even showed lottery prize winners aren't any happier 1 year after winning than average. So we're very good in experiencing contentment for short bursts and then it's back to our normal mental mode. So a lot of it is genetic. Some you may be able to control with different techniques. Different things work for different people.

"So we're very good in experiencing contentment for short bursts and then it's back to our normal mental mode." That is exactly what I've observed and experienced. Well said!

At first I was freaked out by this revelation. But after thinking about it kinda takes the stress out of a lot of things. Doesn't matter that much how much you earn / what you work on / where you live. You get used pretty fast to all those things. So always be suspicious of yourself when you're over-analysing big life decisions. If you're trying to optimise happiness a lot of those decisions won't make much of a difference.

"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living. " - The Count of Monte Cristo justifying having basically tortured his friend and driven him to suicide.

I've read a lot about community, or the sense of being part of a community, as being the most important factor in human happiness. Winning the lottery doesn't automatically put you into any community and I would argue it actually has the potential of separating you from a lot of your current peers.

The book has some pretty controversial opinions, but _Sex at Dawn_ has a lot of good insight about how important community and sharing are to a social species such as humans and how we might have lost that strong sense of community with the advent of agriculture and consequent abundance.

Indeed, connection to other human beings is very important.

You only have to spend some time with a bunch of sheltered rich kids to realize this is not what you want.

How children are parented makes more difference than anything else. Having 'good' parents vs. 'bad' determines not just what is needed to have a good life, but in many cases, whether one even has the emotional capacity for feeling good for an ongoing period.

Hmm. That sounds familiar. I guess we share a similar experience.

Current thought about parenting (environmental effects) vs parents (trait heritability) is that one's parents has more a role than how one is parented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture

It depends on the trait in question and nearly always is a mix of both environmental and genetic factors.

I'd go even further and weight-in the whole lineage.

I believe my grand parents on both side were damaged, leading to damaged parents, producing a very dysfunctional me.

It's like driving with the brakes on.. I speculate that the efficiency of not having to fight toxicity constantly leads to a thick rain of happy.

To the point that if I have children, I'd be sure to regularly send them away so they can see the world outside my sphere of influence.

Sounds like a recursive problem.

What if the parents were parented badly and thus lack emotional capacity.

What if they were parented badly because the grand parents were parented badly?

What is needed minimally?

- a loved and loving partner, a sane and fulfilling sexuality

- enough income to not have any substantial worries about the future

- absence of other justifiable existential worries and anxiety about the future such as cataclysms, threats, oppressive social, political and work environments, political instability, etc.

- a decent amount of recognition in work or private life (one of them suffices, both are optimal)

- good mental and physical health

Beneficial is also frequent contact to about 3-4 close friends.

That's what I've gathered from what I've heard on the Net during the past 20 years or so. If any of the above is missing, the life will not really be good.

This sounds more like maximal requirements.

This seems like a pretty good list. I'm sure it's possible to debate the details, but it seems to hit the big points. What I think is interesting about it though is that aside from "enough income to not have any substantial worries about the future", none of these items can actually be provided by society / government. Government certainly can't provide a loving partner, fulfilling sexuality, good mental and physical health, or work/private life recognition. And as 2020 has seen with COVID, it also can't provide absence of existential worries due to cataclysms.

While a government can't necessarily provide these, it can certainly deny them.

A government's environmental policy has an objective impact on every measure of mental and physical health.

Urban design, whether you're stuck two hours in traffic to get to work, whether you work 35 or 60 hours, whether you can take a walk in your neighborhood at night in peace...

Is this sarcasm?

Because this seems like a list of "pick some, but not all"... I'd say that 99.99 percent of humanity has not hit all of these goals ever in the history of humanity. If this is the minimally required list, then depression is way, way underdistributed.

Should have added that if a person is sufficiently in denial about negative externalities and risks, black swan events, etc it would be possible to achieve the feeling of accomplished that list, even without having in fact accomplished it... Just as good?

Also, one might have all those things but be fully occupied by the very realistic fear of loosing any one of them at any moment, cancelling most of the happiness.

It certainly wasn't meant sarcastically. I agree with you and others that maybe only ticking off some of these points might suffice to some persons to feel overall satisfied, and that it's what they believe/how they feel what counts, not whether these criteria are objectively fulfilled.

There might also be a semantic issue here. For me as a philosopher, leading a good life is not the same as leading an acceptable, overall satisfying, or mostly good life. The way I understand "good life" sets the bar relatively high.

Not sarcasm perhaps but I sense a confusion between “having good life” and “feeling happy” - there’s a huge difference between those.

And here I am, a single-by-choice hermit, with enough money to get by from a below-average-salary-for-my-position job, and no real achievements to be recognized for (which doesn't bother me, since I don't care what others think of me), and no real worries until I have something to worry about and deal with it then. And yet I feel perfectly content with my life in general, and happy 99% of the time.

If I was single with no dependents, I would also be happy with very little security. But with kids and a family, I now feel obliged to make sure I’m doing all I can to ensure their security, at least until they are adults.

With kids and a family, I wouldn't be happy. I was just illustrating the point that "minimally good" is subjective, as a response to OP attempting to objectively define "What is needed minimally?"

Using the definition of “minimal” you seem to be applying, I’d add children and family, and some sort of communal religion. Tons of people all over the world in places like Bangladesh who have few of the things on your list, but derive happiness and satisfaction from their family and their faith.

(Like 90% of the people in the entire world would agree with the above statement and find the omission from the list above perplexing. During the Cold War, Sting actually had a song about how kids was one of the things Americans and Soviets can are on. The fact that people are downvoting it here is an indication of the outsized cultural influence of a set of views that are held by an extreme minority.)

Things done in the name of religion are a net negative on my life. It's not the fault of all religious people, but the people doing it are hard to avoid if I get involved, even if I were inclined to try.

While that may be the case, 84% of the world identifies with an organized religion, and that number is growing (as the Christian population in China, the world’s largest putatively atheist country, grows rapidly). Religion is a bedrock for social organization nearly everywhere in the world. And actively religious people in nearly every country are much more likely to report being “very happy” compared to inactively religious or irreligious people: https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_19-01-31_wellbeing_activelyre...

None of the things in OP’s list are universals. Most people are happier if they have financial security, but some people find happiness in an ascetic and minimal lifestyle for example. And many poor people are very happy. The list therefore seems to reflect major factors that reflect happiness for the population in general. And, worldwide, participation in religion and having kids are to such factors. For much of the world that’s financially or politically insecure, they are two of the most important factors. Overlooking them completely is quite misanthropic.

Sorry, but there is plenty of happiness research that contradicts most of what you say. There are world-wide studies about it every year in nearly every country of the world. Just look up "World Happiness Report", for instance, but there are many more studies. You can barely find a topic with less empirical research in psychology, sociology, and economics.

You're right that religion and community also play a role in happiness. That should be in the list. However, the rest of what you say is just wrong, or at least very misleading. People in very poor countries are overall less happy or satisfied with their life (according to their own reports) than people in richer countries.

There is a basic level of welfare that anyone who wants to be happy needs to attain. If you don't have that, then there will be all kinds of worries, e.g. you're worried about losing your income when you get sick or how to get enough food for your children. In that case, you cannot be happy. The basic needs and any existential worries associated with them cannot be substituted with religion or anything else.

You’re thinking of happiness as a binary, but the surveys you list describe it as a scale. Most people in Bangladesh don’t meet many of the criteria in OP’s list, particularly income security. (They can feed themselves but that’s about it, and that’s not guaranteed.) So why do they rate themselves a 4.5 out of 10 on global surveys instead of 0? Because family and faith is an important source of happiness. Having kids and being able to feed them (which is a condition short of “income security” as postulated by OP, and is one that even most people in Bangladesh achieve) and participating in your religious community produces a certain baseline level of happiness. Those people would be happier if they also had income security and a fulfilling job. I agree with you on that. But their families and faith are a main source of what happiness they do have. Omitting those things from the list therefore overlooks a huge swath of the human condition.

You usually really like to use Scandinavian countries in your arguments but "somehow" you miss out on doing so now since they blatantly disproves your point in this argument.

I don’t see how it disproves anything: https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/WHR20.pdf. The United States is among the top 20 happiest countries in the world, happier than France, Spain, or Italy. Seeing as how the US is always portrayed as a dystopian hellhole with no income security, no healthcare, etc., and certainly France, Spain, and Italy fare better on those metrics, that would imply that something, perhaps our religiosity, is doing a lot of work boosting our happiness rankings.

At least like 5 of the top 10 countries in that report are also among the least religious countries in the world.

The percent of the population that has a partner, is in the top half or third of the income percentile, who enjoy their work, and who have good physical and mental health must be 15-30%.

That seems like a strange use of the word minimal. Of the 40 people in my life I know close enough to know if they meet this definition only 4-8 meet it. And I'm probably close to the best age for finding all of these items, my mid 30s. Old enough for people to make money, and find a fulfilling career but before mental and physical health starts knocking out a bunch of people.

As someone very poor, for me good life means having money to the point where my choices are not based around it.

But does that include choosing not to work (because you do not have to in order to survive)?

I wish you well in attaining the good life to which you intend.

I also reflect that the most significant choices are those which are within one's locus of control, the awareness of that is foundational to a life of virtue and money never seems un-constraining even if objectively one controls more of it.

I'm not rich, but I'm comfortable.

Most of my choices, and certainly all of my major life choices (like where to live, what car to drive, what job to take) are still based around money.

Edit: good points in the responses. I don't worry about eating out, what to order, what brand of sundry to buy. I do try to optimize but as others have said, that's more of a desire than a requirement.

Having said that, I think the only people who truly never worry about money are children. I've heard stories about international students at universities whose parents buy them luxury car after luxury car when they crash them, that kind of thing. But I suspect it's pretty rare.

That's definitely true up until a pretty obscene level of wealth, but there's definitely a difference between basing all choices around money, and basing major choices around money.

For example, I no longer scour the grocery store for the cheapest available option for every item I select. I no longer have to spend months finding the best value for a pair of shoes, a piece of furniture, etc.

Basically, if I spend a couple hundred dollars too much on stuff one month, I'll hardly notice it. Whereas, when I was poor, that was the difference between making rent or not.

The poor stand in the paper products aisle calculating the relative value of one multi-pack of toilet paper versus another. While a person with money might look and decide one is too expensive, it's not an optimization problem. There's not pressure to get it right. The cost of a mistake is rounding error not a meal.

Or buy the 4-pack because they literally can't afford 12 rolls - even though they know it is more expensive.

Kids have to worry about money up to a point. I heard "we can't afford it" a lot growing up.

I remember being 8 knowing my parents were poor and rarely asking for anything I wanted because of it, even food. If I did ask, I felt guilty afterwards and would debate if I should have.

I played cautiously knowing that an injury could upend my family and my little sister’s future, and I didn’t partake in school sports or anything that could disturb my parents as they were already busy working 24/7 and it would have stressed them even more to have to pick me up or pay for equipment.

Agree.

There is a sad, almost Catch-22 in the typical U.S. city where you need a car to make money and need money to buy a car.

When I was unable to afford a car though I was able to find a (minimum wage) job and a place (well, room) to rent within a reasonable bicycle ride. (Yay, I did have a bicycle still from my high school days!) I did succeed though (was even able to begin college at a small community college — rode to my classes via bicycle).

The first thing I bought though after food, rent, tuition and books was a rust-bucket of a car so that I had more choices in employment. (Sucks that gas, repairs, insurance, and registration then ate even more of my paycheck, but that's another rant.)

To be sure, I still now experience discontent, anxiety, stress and other things in life even though money is no longer making my choices for me. But, yeah, money is not the one calling the shots.

It's easy to in fact look back on those impoverished times and feel like they were somehow less stressful, and I felt less anxiety and discontent then than I have in the decades following. I'm not sure if that's the big lie we tell ourselves or if instead it is correct: either because money then was such an overarching issue that all other issues had to "get in line", or because when life boiled down to work-school-rent there really were no other 2nd-order "Maslowian" needs that I could be bothered to trifle with.

I think everyone's choices are based around money (wealthy or not). I think the crux of what you're getting at is that the opportunity cost of choices when you're not wealthy is inherently stressful. If the choice is between going out with friends and buying groceries, both options will cause stress due to lack of the other.

I'm at a point in my life where I can essentially go on autopilot when shopping for groceries and not worry about the cost. I still have to make other decisions based on money (do I take a vacation or upgrade my laptop?), but the side effect of those choices is NOT stress.

So there's some minimum income that everyone needs (and it's different between people) where they can "forget" about living expenses and still have a relatively stress-free life. I'd wager somewhere around 1.5x - 2x the cost of living.

Many people choose to do without a car, and/or curb their consumption, even though they could affort it.

> So there's some minimum income that everyone needs (and it's different between people) where they can "forget" about living expenses and still have a relatively stress-free life. I'd wager somewhere around 1.5x - 2x the cost of living.

I take into account volatility of future income in order to be stress free. Hence my goal was to own businesses where my labor wasn’t needed to keep the income flowing in case I get injured.

Dual income household where each person earns enough to cover expenses can serve a similar purpose.

Imho every time you access the next step of the ladder you'll have a few months of happiness and fall right back to where you were.

Money is important if you either don't have enough to meet your basic needs or have so much that you don't have to worry about it 1 second in your life (99.9% of people won't reach that state). Every steps in between is the same with extra distractions that won't do much, if anything at all, for you overall happiness.

This isn't true. There's definitely a baseline of happiness, but my life turned around dramatically once I had basic control over my finances and I didn't have to worry anymore about my financial future, the baseline increased and isn't coming down.

Definitely this. There is having money, and there is being poor/broke.

Where you might not get to go to the doctor no matter how you feel daily, and you might have to walk to work because you can't afford a tire. I'm still happy to have hot water simply because I couldn't afford it for some years.

Life is so much less stressful when you have money leftover at the end of the month - enough to cover small emergencies and keep a $25 expense from ballooning into having electricity disconnected.

Granted, I think they've proven that after a certain point, money has diminishing effects on happiness, but I think it is mostly that you simply that it consumes your life less and less and gives you the means to think about other, more positive things than how to afford new shoes.

This is because there is the tendency to reduce stress by throwing money at the problem. Car unreliable? Got a raise? Buy a new car that won't break down at random. Now you are stuck in car payments for the next 5 - 7 years.

There's things other than lifestyle creep. For example, many families tend to increase their income as they get older. But the expenses also go up. Having one kid, vs 2 - 3 later on, or kid expenses when they are young vs. teenage years (where you now have to worry about increased car insurance, getting them vehicles, etc). And upgrading housing as the family grows. The effect is that your income constantly seems to be outpaced by increasing and recurring expenses.

So what happens is parents get into the mindset of doing without, so their kids can thrive. And when problems come up, they will sacrifice so that additional money can be thrown at fixing those problems. This doesn't let up until the kids are grown, and then you can sell the house and downsize. All of a sudden, your cars are paid off, the kids are doing good on their own (or you've disowned them), your housing costs is lower because you moved to a smaller house, which means utility bills are smaller too. This is now the point where people hit midlife crisis, they have surplus money and have pent up demand to "treat themselves" so go out and buy something expensive (sports car, motor home, boat, etc). And the tightened budget stress starts all over again.

You need some perspective on this. A solid half of the world has so little money that these people routinely die from easily preventable conditions.

Which falls in the "don't have enough to meet your basic needs" category and in which case I agree.

> The way to do that is simple: we should consider whether we would be content to live the lives that the least fortunate in our society actually live.

I like this framing a lot. It's sort of the aggregate societal-level Golden Rule. Would you be willing to play "Real-Life the MMO" if you didn't know which character you'd be dropped into?

However, there is an interesting wrinkle you can apply to it that I think explains many of the moral differences along the progressive-conservative spectrum that I see in the US today. Consider:

* Would you be content to live the life that the least fortunate in our society lives?

* Would you be content to live the life that the least fortunate in our society lives including the personal choices they have made?

In other words, how much are you willing to chalk up misfortune to personal responsibility versus random unfair vagaries of life? Would you still be willing to play "Real-Life the MMO" if you might be dropped into a level 20 character with an already established history and had to take their life from there?

The conservative American perspective stated hyperbolically is that all bad outcomes are a result of poor choices. Many even seem to imply a just-world hypothesis that random events like disease are the universe magically punishing people for moral failings. The equivalent hyperbolic progressive view is that no one ever deserves any bad outcome and that misery is always a result of systemic factors outside of the individual's control.

Somewhere in the middle is probably closer to the truth.

I expected to see at least some links to Stoicism. They do not exist, which is why the article does not answer the question in the title. My opinion is that Stoicism answers this question and in general it is one of the most useful directions of philosophy.

I agree. I strongly suggest people look into Stoicism for some real answers to this question.

I'm confused, the article seems to be actually asking the question. "It varies" is brought up multiple times, but that doesen't exactly help outlining how we would be able to define minimally good life.

It also asks whether a reasonable, caring and free person would trade places with the worst off, which I'd find very unlikely. What you can realistically do about it is unknown.

But it does. The typical "it depends" applies perfectly to this question.

>The thought is that having some distance from each person’s experience will help us see whether that person really needs all the things they think they need.

What works for you, doesn't work for me, and the other way round. Apart from the basic NEEDS (some call it "four walls" - shelter, utilities, transportation, basic groceries) everything else is a WANT. And it is great to have wants. A friend wanted to buy a desk globe for herself. She offered to buy me one too. I responded with a big NO. Not that I would not appreciate the gesture, I know that I would not appreciate a big thing on my table, that I can't use for nothing.

On the other hand, a nice puzzle hanging on my wall is cool, and it takes no space, and I don't have to move it around to make one more puzzle :)

>would trade places with the worst off

During COVID I saw with my own eyes that you can go from 100-to-1 in 6 months if you haven't made sure you got emergency funds on the side, if you don't have a solid safe work, you don't have amassed consumer debt, etc. As a mental exercise it is good to think the scenario "what if I lose my job, and I can't get another one for X amount of months"? Dave Ramsey suggests emergency funds to be able to fully cover 3-6 months. Those 3-6 can be stretched to 6-12 if you decide to make major cuts in lifestyle (food, subscriptions, smaller house/flat, sell a car and start cycling, etc.)

It's just that "it depends" is not very satisfactory, it's the default answer to all questions.

All questions are fractal in nature, and unsolvable without a problem-domain. By defining the domain a thing can be answered, such as "how much force do i need to throw this ball over there?" Otherwise no definite answer can be provided, because the next galaxy over tips the scales just a bit, as does the infinitesimally small difference in the ball's structure, and so forth.

>During COVID I saw with my own eyes that you can go from 100-to-1 in 6 months if you haven't made sure you got emergency funds on the side

This is why I think a social aid/basic income system with free healthcare is a must. You can't choose to be healthy and not to have accidents. I think we must all provide a basic net for the things outside our control. Of course I'm biased, being a finn in covid times is a tremendous blessing

Been asking myself this question for a while, and have found the following reading to be very enlightening:

- Letters from a Stoic, Seneca

- On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

- Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

I was going to post that, Letters from a Stoic, single best book I read. I already bought it 4 or 5 times and end up gifting it to friends/family.

Why Grapes of Wrath? Like dont work in a field which changes rapidly and get pushed to the sidelines to die poor in misery?

More along the lines of practicing altruism even when I perceive things around me to be bad

The lesson to be learned from that book is that we can do some cruel things to people we feel are beneath us, but we can also do some beautiful, empathetic things. The lesson to be learned from that book is not "don't be poor".

- This Is Water, Wallace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

I read somewhere that the universal problem of existence is to survive with dignity, and mathematics being the language of the universe is uniquely poised to address the question.

As someone with ok health and a decent education to provide me work throughout the pandemic, I feel like the minimally good life is just life itself. It is enough to survive, and retain the will that you must choose to live. I've been very fortunate and very lucky, but it all feels so flimsy and discriminatory. I think the only "better" life one can work towards, is one in service of making it better for all of us.

I ate at the restaurant shown in the lead photo while in Trinidad Cuba in January 2020. It's amazing how long ago that seems now. Trinidad had an amazing ecosystem of shops that catered to the tourist industry and the proprietors of these shops could make a good living outside the government's more socialist system. One shop with amazing hand-made crocheted garments had four generations of the family creating goods. Talking with them reminded me of value of extended family which we've (at least to some degree) lost in the U.S. simply because of our ability to move long distances easily.

I learned a lot of lessons (even entrepreneurial lessons) while in Cuba and hope to publish a series of blog posts on them when the day job becomes less frenzied.

I suggest something similar. When we are constantly buying and requesting things we create work and stress for others. We become a high-maintenance humans. We contribute to the rush and tension we feel around us.

By consuming less and demanding less, we live a low maintenance life. Not minimally good, just low-maintenance. This along with looking for ways to serve our communities is the better way to go.

> Pregnant women, for instance, need more food than those who aren’t pregnant.

Only 200kCal a day — less than half of a Snickers.

"To crush your enemies; see them driven before you; and to hear the lamentation of the women"

This sounds biblical. But it could also be Conan the Barbarian.

In combination, good mental health together with other people (as in relationships). You will struggle have one without the other. Following on, decent enough physical health to maintain the first two. Anything else is gravy, as they say.

For a good take on this topic I recommend the "The Art of the Good Life" by Rolf Dobelli.

The definition of minimally good life is “being able to survive without too much effort.” (Feeling happy has nothing to do with it. Notably, some people managed to have a “good life” while being prisoners, say, in a concentration camp).

Living isolated within a Bond Lair, with nukez!

Good life is the absense of bad life.

Absence does not imply presence.

It is easy to enumerate what is bad for ones life - much harder to define a good life, hence one is able to achieve "good life" by substracting all that is considered "bad life".

> what do members of a society owe to one another?

> we should consider whether we would be content to live the lives that the least fortunate in our society actually live

Stopped reading right there, because it's a complete non sequitur. People only owe one another what they have contractual obligations for; claiming that you owe to provide any kind of minimal standard of living for another person just because he also happens to live in the same society as you is completely absurd and deeply immoral.

Now, I agree that being charitable and thinking about others is moral, and that people who enjoy very comfortable lives without giving anything back to the community can be frowned upon. However, there is critically important distinction between doing something out of your own free will and our of obligation.

I always defend Nazis, who openly advocate for killing me and my family, right to free speech, and I would always defend the property rights of the heartless and greedy. Not because I want to condone this behaviour, but because no morality can be more important than personal freedoms.

There's a social contract among communities that has all but entirely collapsed. It's not about being charitable. It's the fact that when we collectively let our neighbors suffer instead of helping we are opening the flood gates to greater suffering for everyone.

This is a good read:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/elal2/have_you_e...

Although I expect I share many of your concerns, there are two aspects of ideal libertarian world view which trouble me. The first is that the masses who are unable to provide a productive life for themselves continue to multiply, ultimately driving society to collapse. The second is that wealth will be concentrated in a tiny fraction of the population, who will then convince the masses that it’s unethical for the elite to be taxed. The elites will continue to perpetuate their wealth through generations, and the masses will never be able to achieve socioeconomic mobility.

+70k/year

Been seeing a lot of “Do as I say and not as I do” articles being pushed to the orange site. I wonder if all the SV capitalists would take up this offer of minimally good life.

Men aren't built to be happy. Men are built to be effective.

As are women.

In the English language "Men" can also mean "human beings in general". Granted, this usage is a tiny bit archaic.

I assumed the gendered usage here was intended, since it's not a poem or a format where character count matters. Unfortunately it's ambiguous without further clarification.

No need to drag sex into it.

I'm pretty sure he was using "men" in the generic since, similar to "humans". That said, looking at stats like suicide rate reveals that a literal reading may be more correct.

I note you've assumed the poster is male.

The "generic sense" of "men" to mean humans is sexist - blatantly so. It's also quickly becoming archaic, for this reason. Going out of your way to use it, instead of "people" or "humans" or "humanity", is now a statement.

People, as any animals, aren't build "for" anything. Evolution doesn't have a brain or intentions, it's just a stochastic process that happens to prefer some traits over others in certain circumstances.

Evolution as a dynamic does build things that are able to reproduce.

On the simplest level. Direct reproduction is far from the only way to propel your genes. You can never have kids, but lead your ethnic group to win a genocidal war against its neighbours, and will be much more successful at it.

With complex minds like those of human beings it can't even be reduced to just genetic survival. Memetic survival is often weighted just as much, if not more.

But then it's evolution of memes, not genes, which is a different evolution.

Wait. Is this thread becoming a weak paraphrase of The Selfish Gene?

In this sense, nothing and nobody is "built to be happy" yet here I am, a perfectly happy man.

I don't think there is much substance to be found here.

happy != good

The intersection of the set HAPPY and the set GOOD is not the null set. HAPPY is not necessarily a superset of GOOD, and GOOD is not necessarily a superset of HAPPY.

I think these appeals to humanism often fail to see the rational realities that underlie the moral questions. Morals and culture are just a simplification of principles which make a society competitive. The scope of possibilities is massive even within our own observation: totalitarianism, constitutionalism, fundamentalism, nationalism, anarchy. Competition among and enforcement within these societies has been, by far, the greatest modern historical risk for premature death. This article seems to be proposing a society where everybody is guaranteed a good life. Sounds great, but the bigger question is whether such a society is competitive against ones where individuals are driven to contribute through fear of failure. My guess is that, yes, it could be, but only under conditions where pro-social motivations are greater than the fear motive they replace. We know that this exists in our natural tribal state, but small homogeneous tribes were not competitive against massive hierarchical use of force. The brilliance of capitalism is that it provides an indirect fear/greed motive that requires little organization, mostly enforcement of property rights and taxation. It was writing, e.g. the domesday book, that enabled this, and the result gradually proved superior to feudal slavery. We have great technology today, maybe even a crisis of overproduction, or misallocation to negative social goods. Unfortunately, redistributive welfare has a definite social cost, and, ignoring the personal benefits, a terrible track record for motivating pro-social contribution, in some societies. In others it seems to do better. The moral heuristic that people should be taken care of at others’ expense, is only rationally valid within certain social organizations and cultural norms. An objection to this may be that the moral reasoning is superior by nature, and I believe this is massively flawed, simply because the cost of non-competitive morality, is death by social competition, which cannot be avoided. I do believe, maybe blindly, that there are conditions in which universal guarantees of a ‘good life’ increase a society’s competitiveness, but I do not certainly know what those conditions are, so without that, this moral pleading seems hopeful at best.

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