Steps Towards Happiness (2015)
hintjens.com
hintjens.com
For the longest time, I felt that persevering past my exhaustion point was virtuous and would pay dividends in the long run. And there were cases where this was true (e.g. meeting a deadline), but otherwise it was just false. Not only was my short-term happiness harmed, but it wasn't even worthwhile. I was working slower and remembering less.
Often what on the surface appears like virtuous fortitude is actually obstinacy and lack of self-awareness / imagination!
1. Cutting out alcohol
2. 15 minute meditation before sleeping
3. Regular exercise - e.g from YouTube
4. Eating less…sort of intermittent fasting
5. Reminding myself to do actions/thoughts that my soul would approve of. Others can do what their soul approves of or not. This has been especially useful. For example I am no longer hurt if someone is being mean. Ultimately they have to be a witness to their soul and are probably just having a bad day. I can’t get inside them and fix it for them.
Edit:
These steps have essentially made me more alert - more capable if you will. I am able to deal better with good and bad.
1. Sleeping 8 hours a day 2. Eating less processed foods & more fruits and vegetables 3. Walking
Simple things, and they all took time to turn into habits, but better health/more energy eventually made everything else so much easier.
In this regard I just succumbed to this brain quirk so I prefer to find 5 things this month that irk me and do my best to remove them from my life, as opposed to meditating hours every day trying to find those 3-4 ultimate things that will instantly make me happy.
Better chase the mouse in your feet than to try and find the elephant beyond the horizon.
Intermittent fasting is the only way I have been able to control my weight as an adult.
Exercising makes you feel better and live longer.
Alcohol is a poison that offers short term fun for long term sadness and pain.
Sleep makes an immediately and daily impact on your life.
Meditation (I don't do it anymore) is like cleaning for your brain and short amounts can be very helpful.
Alcohol in excess? Certainly, but I don't buy the idea that alcohol in moderation is harmful.
There have, of course, been studies that draw negative conclusions about alcohol, but they either commingle societal effects or discount the cardiovascular benefits.
TLDR: Alcohol in moderation is fine. Just don't drink to excess. Nearly all the negative impacts of alcohol are on a J-shaped curve that increase exponentially beyond about 20 drinks / week, and that is far from 'moderate' drinking.
There are long-term effects associated with heavy drinking, but there are also short-term negative effects (for some people) associated with pretty much any alcohol consumption at all. Headaches, acid reflux, etc.
For example, see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803651/ or https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31571-X (has some useful references)
If you have seen other studies which refute these ideas, I'm interested (as an alcohol consumer :)).
Personally, I typically limit myself to a 6 pack a week. I think even a 12 pack a week wouldn't do much harm, and if we're talking about happiness, having a beer with friends certainly does add to that. I am perfectly willing to accept a small increased risk for that. None of us are making it out of this life alive.
That I can definitely agree with. Over-optimizing your every action solely to lower your mortality chance by tiny fractions is no way to go through life.
That being said I do know a few people who actually only drink a beer or two a month with buddies. Good for them. I suppose that they could also drink an iced tea or diet coke and enjoy their friends company/be enjoyed my their friends just as much without the negative impact of the booze. I'm able to.
If someone is drinking more than a few beers than that isnt actually drinking in moderation. Many people who "drink occasionally" actually binge drink occasionally but since it is not that often they think no harm is being done.
You'll find about 1000 research articles stating alcohol is bad for you for every one saying in very specific circumstances it is okay for you in moderation.
At the end of the day its one of the leading causes of death in the world and for MOST people it does more bad for them than good. But its fun and the negative effects are not always immediate in the short term and its part of many cultures so its not going away anytime soon.
If you get curious doing really any amount of research about the negative impacts of booze, even small amounts, will show an overwhelming amount of evidence.
The clarity I got from meditation was nice but it also feels like it impairs the way I am used to my brain working so the trade off was not really welcomed.
I cut my caffeine consumption drastically (several expressos a day to 1 regular cup) which helped with racing thoughts and started taking melatonin before bed which helps prevent me staying awake trying to sleep for hours. Those two things also came from meditation but I'm able to get them elsewhere now without losing some of the creativity I find in my thought patterns during the day.
Expect to be poor and if you hit middle class you’ll be happy and grateful.
Expect to be rich and the same outcome will produce depression.
Not to sound like a stoicism fanatic, but that’s one aspect that helps. Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is.
And yes, acknowledgement that humans evolved to never be satisfied with their current situation helps as well. Breaking free of “things need to get better” is great for mental health but means your also fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
> Reminding yourself of everything you could lose drives some appreciation for what you have, whatever it is.
I have observed many people having trouble with that and I agree with you that this is very much needed in our lives to give us some humility.
That being said, to some people -- myself included -- this happened way too many times and they can't have appreciation through that vector anymore. My brain switched to "I am sick of hearing this! I will level up and won't have to think about never being threatened with living under a bridge ever again!".
Of course, the hedonistic treadmill the article mentions is very much real -- we are never satisfied with what we have. However, it's very possible to arrive at the mindset where you are like "eh, I'd feel a bit better if I had a $500K in the bank and not only $200K" but objectively, when you've grown up and lived in a poor country for most of your life, I think it's easier to NOT get stressed about the statement in quotes.
And I agree on the evolution part. I'd theorize this mindset of ours has evolved because we developed in a very harsh environment (ice age) and we wanted to optimize our lives for less work and more leisure. Ironically, nowadays humanity at large fails miserably at just that... but that's really a very different topic.
But at least for me, a lot of it is driven by distraction. Work becomes overwhelming. Or family becomes too hard to juggle. So caught up in what’s in front of you that you lose the big picture.
Where I’ve found clarity is in the “being present mindset”. Giving my son a bath and noticing just how much he changes everyday and what that experience must be like for him reminds me that time is fleeting. Often what we value most in the future are the experiences of the past. And taking the time to truly connect with my son will be one of those things I’ll look back on in 10 years and truly appreciate that I took that time.
And don’t get me wrong. The hedonistic treadmill is the reason we went to the moon. Never being satisfied will drive humanity to do incredible things, but it will also drive people to depression. It’s neither good nor bad but just is. Acknowledging that and seeing it in yourself can help immensely.
Thank you for this phrase.
I am acutely aware how fleeting time is, believe me. It's just that most of my life I've been way too stressed to do anything about that. It's a death spiral.
If you came to me 5 years ago and told me "just relax, man, take your time" you'd likely receive a fist to the face and I'd yell at you: "THAT'S NOT AT ALL HELPFUL RIGHT NOW, SHUT UP!".
You likely live in an environment where realizing the things you mention is 99% of the battle so your advice is optimized towards that. You have to understand however that in most of the world the 99% of the battle is not being smart of understanding these things; most people around me are well-aware of them by the time they hit 23 at the most. Our 99% of the battle is allocating the time and energy to live in the present and just manage to have any leisure at all.
For many us just stopping to smell the flowers is physically impossible because we'd lose valuable capital (in one form or another) if we do it even for 30 minutes. Yep, I am not exaggerating, my life has been hell in the past.
So don't get me wrong as well -- your perspective is valuable. Just not to me and to many others who found that out ages ago and are now extremely saddened because they can't employ this wisdom yet.
Currently in my life I am fighting tooth and nail to be able to start living my life under the principles you mention. It's the hardest thing I ever did but IMO it's worth fighting that battle.
Does that actually work for some people? Thinking about loss usually gives me a dragon like need to hoard, and guard the hoard.
It’s not so much reminding yourself of everything you could lose. It’s more like “hey my friends wife’s got cancer and might die from it”.
Instead of saying “I feel bad for them and lucky it wasn’t me” the thought is “that could have just as easily been me” and “that could be me next year”.
It’s the realization that you’re not special. All the maladies that afflict your peers could just as easily afflict you.
That attitude definitely helps to clarify priorities. When you partner says “let’s go out for breakfast” instead of saying “we can do that another day, I have a meeting”, you decide to go because who knows what tomorrow brings?
At 41 y/o I have arrived at most of the same wisdom but I can't see how and where can I implement it.
As others commenters said, I wish I could take a pay cut and work on things I love more than my current job. I absolutely can't afford it; not because I can't take the income hit month by month -- I surely can, let's not forget us the programmers are rather privileged -- but I can't afford not saving, especially having in mind where does the world seem to go (potential economical crisis on the horizon).
If I arrive at a point in my life where I can unquestionably abide by the philosophy described in the article, I might cry emotionally, while yelling of pain and happiness at the same time. For now though, it's still not happening.
(And that's leaving aside the fact that I don't necessarily agree that material minimalism leads to happiness necessarily.)
I agree on WW2, sure, but after WW2? I've spoken with 30+ elders and they all unanimously agree that life in general was much, much better than today. Mostly in terms of upwards social mobility. An insane amount of very regular bank tellers could afford house, two apartments and 2-3 cars. And to put 3 kids in an university.
Nowadays that's a very questionable endeavour.
In the 1950s, the average house was still ~3 years of average income. Cars were about 9 months of income. So the "regular bank teller" with a house, 2 apartments, and 3 cars... there's something missing in the story.
Let's not even get into the fact that life was significantly worse if you happened to be not white or male. Black people didn't have their voting rights significantly curtailed via Jim Crow laws. Married women didn't have the ability to have their own money. Beating your spouse was A-OK.
Yes, social mobility was better (for white men). Universities were cheaper (a year of tuition was still ~1-2 months of income).
Medical care was... not so good. Nutrition a non-existent concept. (And before we go to the "all natural food", quick reminder that the 1950s were the decade of TV dinners and truly atrocious recipes)
The 50's certainly had less of the constant stream of demands that our current time has. It's not like it was purely worse, or the "golden age" image wouldn't hold. But as a net, across the population, we've seen improvement. We are backsliding the last ~20 years, absolutely. But we're still not in 1950.
Today you'd be lucky if that's 10 years; most likely very well paid too. For most people with well-paid jobs it's 15, and for everybody else it's a lifetime endeavour (20-30).
Not sure how you're contradicting me exactly with this.
I guess we are both showing bias and filter bubble effects. I live in a poor country and even if I am not poor myself, how almost everybody around me lives is sadly too visible.
Lack of clear goal? Talk for yourself.
I don't think this is even close to true. In fact we've got it pretty soft compared to many earlier eras. Think about having to wake up prior to daybreak to feed the animals, milk the cows, start fires for cooking, heating (a lot of wood chopping), etc. Having to haul drinking water. Scratching out a subsistence living. No or very minimal medical care. Lifespans in the 30 to 40 year range.
I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising and peer pressure.
I am not looking to the past with rose-tinted glasses, mind you -- definitely not all of it. And I didn't mean the farm life in particular. I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist. Very much not the case for most modern people who are just scratching to have subsistence living as you mentioned.
Theoretically we can stretch this argument to infinity but in practice most people are not going anywhere on the social ladder for their entire lives. Let's be honest and realistic and look at how things are today.
> I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising.
You might be projecting a bit with your statement?
To me, having my own house, no debts and job / business that does not burn me out on a regular basis should not be in the league of "fantasy lifestyle", no. (Oh, and let's not even mention all technology and bureaucracy that by now it's super clear was never meant to make our lives easier.)
A short period of the modern era in which the US was pretty much the only nation with it's manufacturing capability completely intact after the destruction of WWII. The US also realized that funding education was important for a time after the war to retrain veterans. It's how so many people were able to get college degrees essentially for free which helped boost the economy for a generation.
> at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are
Since it sounds like you're limiting the modern era to after 2000, it seems we can stretch things a bit and look at the era of The Great Depression as being pre-modern by that definition (I think The Depression falls squarely in Modernity, but for the sake of argument...). Mortgage debt increased 8X from 1920 to 1929. Installment debt increased at similar rates. This is far from the first generation that's taken on a lot of debt.
Yes, I agree that there are forces at work which conspire to keep people in debt, however those forces are not new. Things are made worse by the high cost of housing which is caused by constrained supply (and a greater population now putting more demand on housing), but again, I'm not sure we haven't been here before. Pendulums swing. And why are houses so much bigger now than they were in that postwar era when families were larger? That also leads to higher housing costs (some of it is demand and some of it is perverse incentives for builders to build bigger houses).
IMO that's the key insight in your comment. And the full swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other can take more than one generation, essentially losing valuable wisdom and letting different generations feeling resentful towards each other.
I never claimed we have it worse in history during all of its recorded parts. I am simply saying that compared to some 60 years ago things are looking quite bleak by comparison, economically and in terms of personal well-being.
Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.
That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.
As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.
So Capitalism has only recently taken hold of the US?
> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased.
Even worse than it was during The Great Depression leading into WWII? Even worse than it was if you were black in the Jim Crow south? Things aren't great now, but let's try to keep things in perspective.
That is not plausible. And that is not what you find where we have written texts about farmers lifestyles. And, if you look in very recent history about lifestyles in behind-the-times villages, you don't find that much slack either.
Also, pretty much all arguments about how little farmers worked I have seen ignored pretty much any work that did not involved food crops directly: making and fixing tools, beds, buildings. Making candles. Raising and spinning flax to make linen. Sewing cloth, bedsheets etc. Chopping wood. Caring about children and animals. All that had to be made at home or at least inside village. In an interview with old lady from such village, I heard her saying that making bedsheets and all that for bride took years. They started making it when girl got born.
> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.
Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.
> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.
These statistics don't really exists of old farmer communities. They did not had modern diagnostic criteria, all that was created much much later. We can guess from what people wrote in literature and chronicles.
As for psychological pressures, there was serfdom, slavery, impressment, wars. "Wars" meant armies stealing food from farmers, that is how armies fed themselves. There was poverty too. But of course, a lot depends on which period and which place and which social class you talk about. Nevertheless, generally, people in the past were in fact subjects to stress.
> Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.
Whoops, should be *child mortality. So yeah a lot of kids used to die, but we can't really blame them now can we. The way I've seen it measured is as life expectancy after a certain age, e.g. in preindustrial eras, once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60.
As for people measuring psychological stressors, yeah that's really only since the inception of the profession. Not too many 12th century psych majors...
First not true. Looking at wikipedia, "If we do not take into account child mortality in total mortality, then the average life expectancy in the 12–19 centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then they had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years."
Also, 30 is quite a lot. It means, you survived childbirth if you are woman. First one is the most dangerous. It means, you did not got injured in accident with animal or tool in your teens and twenties - when you are at your physical prime and do heavy work the most.
> As for people measuring psychological stressors
I think that child mortality is yet another stressors they faced. But also, if your relative is bipolar or has schizophrenia and whole family lives in one room cabin, I can only imagine things to become super stressful for everyone.
The pressures of life 50-70-100 years ago were very different from what we experience in our time, just as the emotional and physical pressure and fatigue that come from doing manual labor (e.g., moving furniture) is different from the stress of a well-paid white-collar job. Naively, one might assume that manual, back-breaking work is significantly more stressful than a professional job. From a physical, chronic body strain perspective, this is true. Also, the white-collar professional, say a worker in tech, can make 2-3 times to 10 times (and more) than a non-specialized blue-collar worker. As we know, more money in hand never made a life worse.
But I've been around blue-collar and professional environments my whole life, and anecdotally, white-collar workers are much more stressed than blue-collar workers, more frequently in emotional distress, and almost always in-between distressing work issues. And envy and constant comparisons that seemed to be endemic in, say, the tech world, do more damage than one imagines. There may be a former colleague who now has the title of vice president, another who invested in crypto and earned a fortune, yet another who took home a few million dollars when the start-up company he worked for and on which nobody would have bet by hook or by crook was acquired, have ruined more than one existence.
I, a tech professional who is well paid and has no health problems, should be much happier on paper--and I might say more relaxed, satisfied, enthusiastic--than a worker moving cartons back and forth with a forklift and than I was when I had much less money, a less comfortable life, less leisure time and fewer professional and personal opportunities, and an economically uncertain future ahead.
Why am I not then? Is it because of "more money, more opportunities, more problems"? Is it because years ago I had the enthusiasm and arrogance of youth and now the more careful and cynical pace of those who know they have more to lose? Is it because I had that lightheartedness that perhaps those in less intellectually demanding jobs have had fewer opportunities to lose over time?
I lived all of my youth with my grandparents: born before World War II, modest families to be generous, all their lives working in the fields, driving trucks, assembling furniture. However, I saw very few emotional problems (overt, at least), perhaps because they were born and raised in an environment that didn't let them dream much and thus didn't favor disappointment later on. A wife or husband who "just needs to be a good person and work a steady job", a day at the beach that was an event they talked about for months if not years. There was little envy because in the end relatives and friends all lived the same life and the serious problems were those coming from poor health. Work ended at 5 or 6 in the afternoon, and you would arrive home tired, but you would think about work the next day. Dinner and lunch were homemade; during the weekend you did the housework and visited relatives or friends, and maybe you had ice cream here and there.
Would I trade my life for theirs? I wouldn't; I like to have opportunities and I have a lot more ambition than my grandparents. But, would they have traded theirs for mine? I asked my grandfather some time ago, "Would you like to take a plane once in your life ?'' He replied no. Maybe that's part of the secret.
I too grew up quite poor (although not on the level of those videos about Africa and various isolated Indian villages) and nowadays I am unhappy that I can't replace all Apple tech at home in one fell swoop.
That's an extreme example to illustrate a point: it's OK to change your values and want something more (as long it's not only hedonistic and just a blind greed and hunger for more and more, of course).
How many periods in history have there been where the average person was comfortable taking a pay cut? Even if there was such a period, it would have been true only for a privileged subset of the population.
We should operate with what can we do realistically . Not what can we do hypothetically.
Hypothetically I can stop working now and have money for 3 months ahead. Realistically, I won't be able to pay rent afterwards, or even have food on the table. So I seriously disagree with your stance -- but I don't expect you to change it.
Modern times are a hamster wheel grind. At one point you just get too tired and die, and then the system yells: "NEXT!"
That's the reality in most of the world. Likely not where you live though.
so the only solution is to just make a damn decision, and have a plan for either scenario. trying to time unforeseen black swan events, or economic factors seem to be a losing game. if it wasn't, we'd all be billionaires.
If the advice is more nuanced and has more details, then I absolutely can respect it and engage with it in an interesting discussion. But when it's framed as "live in the moment" then I can only roll my eyes.
i was just surmising based on extremely limited information that OP would be much less miserable if they weren't at their job, and then provided a scenario where if they try to time the market they might spend years more being miserable vs doing something sooner and dealing with the hopefully planned for consequences if the market were to crash. that's about it.
People's fridges, ovens, air conditioners, dish washers, vacuum cleaners, smartphones etc., nowadays seem to start breaking like clockwork literal weeks to months after the warranty expires.
So while personal financial responsibility and education can and will go a long way, it's important to recognize that we live in a fairly rigged and predatory system as well.
My fear is just that: "will I will be stable financially?". So far I never was so I can't just drop this fear and start breathing freely come tomorrow. These are problems that still need addressing.
I agree, but say that to my parents. You might as well say it at least 50% of all parents worldwide while you are at it. I personally am very mad at mine for practically not teaching me anything (not even cooking).
I am getting financial education after I hit 40. Pathetic to some but I couldn't have predicted the unknown unknowns. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Both my grandfathers were farmers who also had additional jobs to make ends meet. My paternal grandfather worked 365 days a year with a day off at Easter and Christmas morning in the lumber camps for several years to save enough money to buy his farm.
This was not unusual for my grand parents generation.
When I was younger, my father worked a full time job and then worked in the lumber mill on the weekend and also ran a trap line to afford our house.
Even there, elders regularly say life was easier (even if it was hard before in the first place). Things can go from bad to worse, you know.
That was always the case in history and I would argue we are living in one of the best periods ever when it comes to that.
To that end, the ten items presented in the article are decent pointers towards "good" problems you might want to have (and which "bad" problems you'd want to avoid). It's part framing and part steering your life circumstances.
Relatedly, I really love this line from Meditations:
A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"
Don't confuse it with the similarly titled book with Mark Manson, which reads as if Shia LaBeouf's motivational video was turned into a book.
I was cringing so hard in the first pages there is no way I could read it. It reads as a sort of pop culture, edgy (and trendy) mindfulness / Buddhism comboniation in a self help package.
The slew of self help books with sht and fck in the titles after this books success is amusing though.
Fact check: The author's first mention of himself is on page 10. The word "fuck" first appears on page 5.
Yes, the author uses informal language and sometimes relates personal experiences (but half the stories are of other people). I don't recall any allusions to his own coolness or enlightenedness - in fact, many of his own anecdotes relate to his own failures and lows. He's neither humble nor grandstanding in my eyes, just open and honest (which can be perceived as either, depending on context).
If you already knew all the points he was trying to make - good for you. I can see how someone telling you something you already know in the style of the book can be grating. To me, the book pointed out many things that I knew were true but that I needed spelled out by someone else.
“Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.”
— “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self“, Thomas Metzinger
Since my son was born earlier this year (first kid), I certainly see how he can effortlessly make me happy in a way I found hard to achieve earlier.
While I handled most of my depression-like issues before (mostly anxiety), he seems to have a great impact on making me feel fully recovered, motivated and wanting things from life again.
On the other hand, you are basically forced to deal with it instead of running away, can’t leave the kiddo alone.
I don't think the author of the quote would agree that giving up and doing exactly what the system was designed to force you to do is the best solution.
- Yes, bcz this reptile models is not accurate. It's at best an outdated but very intriguing analogy (which I agree can be misleading) but not here.
- No bcz a bit irrelevant to the our argument above. You may refer to [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234157/) quoting:
> "The preponderance of the cerebral cortex (which, with its supporting structures, makes up approximately 80 percent of the brain's total volume) is actually a recent development in the course of evolution. The cortex contains the physical structures responsible for most of what we call ''brainwork": cognition, mental imagery, the highly sophisticated processing of visual information, and the ability to produce and understand language. But underneath this layer reside many other specialized structures that are essential for movement, consciousness, sexuality, the action of our five senses, and more—all equally valuable to human existence. Indeed, in strictly biological terms, these structures can claim priority over the cerebral cortex. In the growth of the individual embryo, as well as in evolutionary history, the brain develops roughly from the base of the skull up and outward. The human brain actually has its beginnings, in the four-week-old embryo, as a simple series of bulges at one end of the neural tube."
Despite what that paper says, the lizard analogy goes to this, and I agree it's loose, outdated and misleading one but doesn't change the argument we're discussing here.
It’s hard to worry too much when someone else’s existence depends on you. It’s incredibly hard, but like most things that are incredibly hard that’s where the contentment is found.
That's a pretty universal ingredient in any roadmap to happiness, isn't it? I mean that's basically the Christmas Spirit right there.
It's even worse than that. From an evolutionary point of view happiness is a dead end. There is no reason to evolve if you are happy.
I've read the accounts of near death experiences in The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, and I recall many people being exceedingly euphoric, as if they have been freed of the grasping and attachments of life, like a river joining back to the sea if you will.
Temporarily we wear this meat-suit and then rejoin the spirit world / etheric world, and many people call this 'heaven' or other words. Imagine being permanently on MDMA or something.
Any form of transport I take where I am not driving the vehicle myself gives me time to read, relax, think – even meditate (trains are great for this).
I know for a fact that I read most books/month in my life in times I had a job that included at least 20 mins of commute (one way) on public transport.
Those things build character. Sitting in a bus just breeds resentment.
Anything up to 20 minutes is zero in my mind.
I used to commute 90 minutes via public transport. Twice daily. Did I read a lot? Sure. It still was a nightmare.
I now commute 17 minutes by car. Biggest improvement of life quality I've ever had.
If the train station is hard to reach, you have stress along the way.
If you have to switch three trains, you cannot concentrate on your book/podcast/whatever, because you must always check if it's your stop, and then maybe you have to sprint to take the next train.
Can be unpleasant.
That said, I am very happy to work from home now!
Commuting, walking, can be those break times between productive bursts.
"Social Architecture" should be read by any aspiring open source developer.
Everyone has heard the story of the person who toils under great hardship and still manages to find joy in life. That's sort of the opposite of depression and it isn't necessarily good. People who are content to toil in hardship might find it difficult to motivate themselves to change their situation. It's a balance between the internal and external. Even the definition of what is good food is malleable. The chef or food critic might be repulsed by Taco Bell while someone else might enjoy every bite.
I think we fill our days with positive and negative "karma" all the time and are unaware of it, losing clarity of even the bad karma as so much background noise.
Perhaps it is only in times of crisis that we are specifically tuned to see the accumulative effect of the negative karma, can see it for what it is. I feel that way myself anyway — and then try to redouble my efforts going forward of pushing away those detrimental influences.
I've experienced death of loved ones, loss of job, homelessness, mountains of debt, abuse and I've experienced a huge range of emotions through all of that - yet, I've never attributed it to depression.
Most people I know who express they suffer from depression actually suffer from anger.. (and for valid reasons)
A more serious challenge is that the relative importance of the different levels isn't fixed, but varies according to environmental circumstances, individual desires and social context / pressure.
> Do things you are bad at
I would actually offer the opposite advice: do things you are good at. The world today is full of "anyone can do anything" and awards for participation etc. But nothing feels better than being good at what you do. I attribute a large amount of my happiness to doing a job that I'm actually good at. I'm better than 99% of people at doing what I do. I don't feel like I'm struggling. I don't feel like I'm inadequate. I feel like I'm useful. I feel appreciated and respected.
I'm all for continual learning and pushing one's boundaries, but start by finding what you are good at. Otherwise you're forever going to feel mediocre and out of your depth.
Seek satisfaction, satisfaction from a job well done after long hard hours of work.
OP touches on this in:
> 2. Do things you are bad at - Learning makes us feel alive. Challenge yourself, and keep proving you can learn. Learn to juggle, to hold your breath underwater for longer, to solve a Rubik's cube. Learn to play music and play for yourself. Learn to paint and draw.
I spent about 9 months logging, and found these to be the top 5 activities that improved my overall happiness:
- 1. Strenuous exercise (e.g. going hard at the gym, playing a sport, taking a dance class, etc.) was a clear winner. (Going for a walk or doing light bodyweight exercises at home helped a bit, but not nearly as much.)
- 2. Creative activities (e.g. writing, playing music, programming), particularly when I could get into a "flow" state.
- 3. Reading long-form content (for at least 20 mins).
- 4. Meditating (for at least 5 mins).
- 5. Spending time with close friends (as opposed to e.g. going to parties with acquaintances).
A lot of these things are fairly obvious (and may also vary a bit by personality type) but being able to see concrete, quantifiable results made it much easier to adopt habits that made me happier in the long run!
[0] https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/...
[0]: https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592?s=20
And here I was just not setting aside my negative emotions like a sucker.
Yes I see the irony.
He used to bring a Nerf gun to conferences just to shoot down people’s drones because he found them annoying.
I enjoy these reminders about what is important in life and find I agree with their tenets (just unable to put them into practice to the degree I would like).
"Accept everything" was a big one for me. It helped me deal with anxiety about future, amid uncertainty.
This can be a big obstacle to contentment for me and many people I know. It's just so easy to think "What do I want right now/in the future?" and then get down-in-the-dumps because reality doesn't correspond to this totally arbitrary thing you just imagined
"Mingle with others" because it makes _you_ happy implies _using_ other people; a better way is to _serve_ others ("Love thy neighbor like yourself"), which leads to a deeper happiness based on purpose.
> Nothing makes us happier than other people.
> Nothing can make us more miserable than other people.
Go all Yoda eh?
"Do more, want less"
Dali Lamaschema: http, domain: hintjens.com, url path: /blog:99
It looks a bit like a port number, but it's in the wrong place. For that you'd want http://hintjens.com:99/blog
> Stop wasting your time on commuting, boring jobs, meetings, TV. Do only things that you feel are worthwhile, with people you like. If this means a cut in income, so be it.
TV - sure, commuting - thanks to COVID only, the rest - sorry, but I would like a house/pension/family.
I mean, if I had the luxury of taking a cut in income without having to sell my house or whatever, I wouldn't mind. But as it stands, it's a luxury I and many others just can't afford.
And I don't 'waste' my time on commutes either, WFH and all. My commute, once the office is open again, is actually the main exercise I get (20-30 minute bike ride)
The author seems to think that people have infinite time. Many points require an allocation of time that most people - in particular those with families and caring responsibilities - do not have.
Remove bad actors? What if the bad actor is the mother/father of your kids? What if they're a parent who requires care you/they can't afford so you have to do it yourself?
It's all so simple isn't it. 10 steps to banality.
It could be rewritten as "have enough money to do what you want without being overly concerned about the consequences, because you can make the consequences someone else's problem with your money"
If you live in a place where you must care for your parent because professional care is not affordable then perhaps look into organizing or supporting political will to make it affordable (4. Be part of bigger things). And if you live in the US where this political will is destroyed before conception, then I guess find another blog post to help guide you to happiness.