Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
sloanreview.mit.edu
sloanreview.mit.edu
For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year.
He checks it out, and starts noticing a lot of semi-interesting factoids about names, merged cities, obscure places, old mapping conventions, etc... All of this with an absolute positive energy of pure interest. We spent a fun hour just looking at it. I should have known all this, and yet an hour with him makes me look at it with new eyes.
Wherever he was, he instantly attracted a group of friends and wannabe girlfriends, and never really seemed to notice. Same in this case: There was a group of beautiful partygirls we'd never met before, no nerdy interests at all, which accreted around the map in less than 5 minutes. They loved the situation just as much as us nerds did.
I learned a lot from him, and try to follow this example, but I still can't do this today and am humiliated (in a positive way) by this way of living.
I would add: and the ability to share that enthusiasm with others. I consider myself a very average person, but from time to time I do experience what I have highlighted from your paragraph. Most often than not, I keep that enthusiasm to myself. I don't have the ability to share it with others, and when I try, it's not like you have described it.
In Dutch we have a word "relativeren" which I think loosely translates to "being able to put things in perspective". I think that is a really important super power. It has helped me immensely whenever things got bad, or I got into a depressing mood.
I'm not sure how you can "grow" these attributes, but I'm willing to say that travelling, seeing the world, discovering other people, other cultures, other habits probably contributes a great deal. Having open-minded parents and an education that doesn't stigmatise helps a lot too.
I don't think that travelling necessarily helps. Only having the time and resources to travel also means you probably have some leeway to pursue hobbies and follow your curiosity.
A lot of resource —> happiness.
A lot of resource —> energy for curiosity.
A lot of resource —> energy and time for high achievement at work.
So happiness is a correlate for staying in high-resource state in a stable manner, which correlates with high achievement, the quality employers seek.
Immediately one can consider a trap of unhappiness, similar to the trap of poverty: being worried makes you perform worse, which leads to problems with employers, which males you even more worried. Unlike poverty, this potentially could be countered by antidepressants.
Sometimes your mental state is so bad you can't make any decision or improve your current situation. Maybe you're working during the day and dealing with your family the rest of the time and feel stuck and sinking. Antidepressants can help dissipate the fog in your mind, allowing you to think clearly and actually make the decisions you needed to make and improve your live to a point where they are not needed anymore. You also talk with the doctor prescribing the drugs, if it's not improving how you feel they will suggest other solutions.
Also I totally agree with parent. Decent material conditions and the knowledge that they are stable are absolutely needed for a healthy and flourishing mind.
Anecdotally, I’ve gone off Zoloft after years of daily use without any side effects more seriously than temporarily being a little mopey.
As for benefit … we’ll, in raw numbers plenty of people see some benefit. Given the low side effect profile they’re worth trying as a first line of defense for therapy-resistant anxiety and depression. Particularly severe depression may require interventions such as ECT, but for mild to moderate cases a combination of an SSRI and CBT is often pretty effective.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with...
There are plenty of people with hereditary wealth who are otherwise very ordinary, and not particularly happy, too.
Think about good health, no depression, loving parents and/or partners, no previous crippling / traumatic experience, absence of all these things that drain energy from a human being.
Anyone who's not "secure for life" and has to keep the salaries coming in will have to deal with bad people, bad decisions, bad culture, etc. and become unhappy.
I've sort of dabbled in that situation: I made and lost a fortune on the stock market at the start of this millenium. Not filthy rich, but enough to never have to work again and live a comfortable, middle-class life.
I didn't "get out" because of greed, and voila, the bubble burst and the comfortable situation was over - I was at the mercy of my salary again, and everything that comes with it. Dumb colleagues, inept superiors, boring work, etc.
My employment situation didn't change - but when I had the theoretical opportunity to just quit with no financial worries, I was happy despite everything. Once that stopped, I became unhappy, or rather, baseline neutral again.
When I was in the comfortable situation, I was carefree and open to pursue ideas and projects brought to me which I knew were stupid and prone to fail. My colleagues loved it, of course.
I learned that worrying about whether I'll have enough money to live somewhat comfortably until death is what makes me unhappy, and extremely wary to avoid failure. There's nothing else to it.
We used to have to collect change at McDonald’s for lunch. Eventually I graduated from MIT.
I understand it is not the norm… :)
- a rich kid wastes 3 years on drugs and partying, gets caught once or twice, gets bailed by parents, moves on to do something productive
- a poor kid wastes 1 year on drugs and partying, gets caught once, it snowballs from there, recovery is very hard if at all possible
The complete answer is probably that it goes both ways. People have a natural tendency to be more anxious or more energetic or happy or sad, a baseline if you will. If you take care of your body, it helps. If you're exposed to stressful situations, especially in childhood, that can become a risk factor later. But, IMO, there's definitely people out there who are genetically lucky in this area, and others less so.
I'm going to note that just suggesting that there's a genetic component is controversial because it goes against the modern day idea that "you can do anything if you just try hard enough" a little bit. The fact is though, we're all genetically unique. I think it's a good idea to acknowledge that we all start in a different place. That doesn't mean you can't work on yourself. Even short people can run a marathon and develop a lot more endurance if they train as opposed to playing videogames all day.
It also comes down to knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I feel like I have a natural tendency to feel more down and tired than others. I've developed healthy coping strategies and structured my life in a way that I can minimize stress. Being aware of my own limitations makes me better able to cope with them. Pretending that I'm one of those always happy people would not.
Although personalities tend to be sticky throughout life, that some people can substantially change their personalities is also quite obvious to anyone with (figuratively) open eyes.
Dudes who make bank almost always have to work really hard to get there. Or at least make a lot of sacrifices (for example trade most of your social life / relationships / etc for work).
Personally I just want to make enough to enable me to buy shit for my hobbies and personal projects. I’d like to do that while maintaining the ability to take lots of time off. I’d trade hobby money for time off. I’d trade a lot for time off…
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the moment my company comes to me and says "would you be interested in taking a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours a week?" I'm taking it. Even though I'd get the short end of the deal by doing more than 50% of what I'm doing now.
I think it's a mistake to think that captains of industry want productivity above all else. They'll happily sacrifice productivity for certainty and compliance.
Even idle noblity had expectations (military service, patrons of arts and society, etc).
a) either your standard of living is so high that a change to UBI-only would be very disruptive and you'd still be worried about losing your job,
b) or your standard of living is so low that you'd quickly accumulate enough of a financial buffer that you wouldn't have to worry about losing your job.
Therefore, a UBI wouldn't be better than a social safety net in this regard. In both cases you wouldn't have to worry about starving, but you'd still have to worry about losing your income.
With UBI you wouldn't need any bureaucracy, you would always get more money if you worked even a shitty job, and noone would be jealous that you are freeloading because everyone gets UBI.
You're comparing the imperfect reality of an actual situation (unemployment benefits) against the utopian fantasy of an imagined best case scenario (UBI) – of course the imagined scenario will come out on top. The real result of a UBI will almost certainly look less rosy than the picture you paint, just like every other plan once it gets implemented. For example, this:
> noone would be jealous that you are freeloading because everyone gets UBI
would likely be wrong, because people would instead be jealous because you're "freeloading" by not working and therefore not paying taxes. Other ways a UBI could conceivably be bad or even worse than the current status quo:
* Prices rise due to increased consumer spending capability, to the point where you have to work again to get above the poverty line.
* Any realistic UBI is too low for people with special needs (like disabilities), so you'll again need a bureaucracy to deal with those cases.
* If the UBI is independent of local cost-of-living, it'll most likely be too low to survive on it in high COL areas, like most large cities. If it's dependent on COL, the exact implementation won't please everyone.
By far this is the easiest to predict, but least likely to be addressed (by the proponents) concern I have with UBI.
A social safety net shouldn’t be a hammock, as it is said. I’m concerned with AI and what happens when it’s pointless to hire people because a $100k robot can do the same work as 3 of them and do so 20 hours a day. By then UBI may be our answer. But it doesn’t seem so now.
> Prices rise due to increased consumer spending capability, to the point where you have to work again to get above the poverty line.
Governments will respond to economic factors that diminish purchasing power in order to maintain the effectiveness of UBI, as a part of UBI.
> Any realistic UBI is too low for people with special needs
Diminished support for disabled or sick people is not a part of UBI. UBI should become a part (within or on top of) of their support. Bureaucracy will still be diminished for non-disabled people.
> If the UBI is independent of local cost-of-living, it'll most likely be too low to survive on it in high COL areas
So people in those areas will have to have jobs. UBI still allows them to go quit their job and move out to the country if they want to subsist on it. UBI would go nicely paired with rent controls and maintaining individual purchase power, but it doesn't even need those things to be a net positive.
UBI should have been implemented 20-40 years ago, it will surely be necessary going forward, it's time to get on board.
How? Using which political, economic, and financial tools? And what will be the side effects of those policies? That's exactly the point I was making: UBI proponents assume a downright utopian best-case scenario where everything works as planned (even though those plans are vague at best, and wishful fantasies at worst), and politicians and voters behave perfectly rational.
There's a simple answer for that: please look at communist Poland 1980-1989 - trying to counter raising prices with government intervention leads to supply crisis (since production is not economically viable anymore). Imagine all stores having nothing to sell, literally empty shelves, forcing common people to fight for scrapes.
Ein Mann geht in ein Kaufhaus in der DDR. Er fragt den Verkäufer: "Gibt's hier keine Socken?" – "Nein, hier gibt's keine Hosen. Keine Socken gibt's in der zweiten Etage."
Translated (roughly): A man visits a department store in East Germany. He asks the shop assistant: "Do you have no socks here?" – "No, we have no trousers. No socks are on the second floor."
(The joke relies on the word order of German syntax; properly translated, the dialog would be:
"Don't you have any socks?" – "No, we don't have any trousers. No socks are on the second floor"
But then the joke doesn't really make sense anymore.)
When we control oil prices by using reserves and trading agreements, does that cause people to fight for scraps?
How about when we subsidize silicon chip manufacturing? Did that collapse society?
You cannot, in a serious conversation, compare Soviet Union economic policies to modern socialist ideas. It's just silly.
"Modern socialist ideas" are basically the same ideas that were already tried in Soviet Union, just dressed in fancier words.
Otherwise I could say "erasing money would make us live like aristocrats" without explaining how or why, and you should try to figure out why I could think that way, what kind of tools and mechanisms I thought of and after that, explaining why it would not work. Obviously, I could say those are not the right tools for my idea, so you have no real counter arguments, yada yada yada...
And as a proponent of UBI, YOU should explain how it would work, not the others. What financial tools or mechanisms would use a government to control the inflation or the rise in prices? I mean, even in the late Soviet Union had to look at capitalists countries to have an idea of the prices for basic products, because they coul not put a price that would make it work.
There's a precedent why I think that people will approve of "universal" income: We have "Familienbeihilfe" in Austria. It's a payment of roughly 200€ per child that parents get. Everyone gets it, regardless of income, so noone is jealous. It's the best way of distributing financial aid in my opinion.
Regarding special needs, in my experience it's much easier to get aid for disabilities. I have a kid with special needs, and it's incredible how helpful people are. Social workers are calling us to tell us what kind of aid we should apply for and help us fill out forms etc. It's completely the opposite experience of applying for unemployment or for aid with rent payments etc.
They pay for everyone else's children through their taxes. Money they could use elsewhere for their own needs or pleasure.
-- To be clear, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I don't have population charts of Austria on my desk and I'm too lazy to Google it right now, I'd assume it tracks a similar trend to the rest of the Europe and it's slowing down. In that case it might be for the common good and might come back as a positive to the individual at some point in their life.
I'm just saying it's not easy to come up with a scheme that is/feels fair to everyone involved, especially if there's no justification for it. One could find justifications for child support maybe, but can you justify freeloading just as easily?
I'm pretty sure people would be a lot more hesitant to complain about others getting UBI if they get it themselves.
And last one: as UBI comes from taxes (the state generates 0 money, just collect from others), what about those who decide not to work at all? How long until some of them stats asking for an increase in UBI because they cannot get a rent in the city?
It seems you have an idealistic view about human nature and that everyone is good and honest, not greedy, etc. The reality is not bad, but not so naive.
It's nice to present a clean (modeled) plan, but it's something different when it hits reality. Social security now, is what UBI will look like a few decades down the road.
Somebody will find a way to exploit UBI and that hole gets patched, then there's another patch and another. Not to speak of how different political ideologies will apply their own modifications to previously established laws
Will residents without citizenship receive the UBI? If yes, how long do they have to reside to be eligible? Will expats with citizenship receive the UBI? Will children receive the full UBI starting at birth? If not, when will they? Is it an abrupt step (if yes, at what age?), or is it gradual?
There are many subtleties to the meaning of "universal". And that's just what I've come up with in 2 minutes...
Also, I would recommend to read "Debunking Utopia" about the social system Nordic countries implemented in the past, some kind of model for solving the problem of living decently for people without possibilities and/or problems to make a living. The countries are slowly but steady reducing that system because it solves nothing and creates extra problems. With UBI, which is a bigger plan than the system Nordic countries had, you would end up with the same if not worse problems than they faced: people decide not to work for low wages or in jobs that are needed but unappealing (and I don't blame them, for sure), but because someone has to do the jobs, wages increase a lot, which in turn, increases the costs and price of those services. And, voila, we are at the beginning of the problem, were people are stressed or unhappy because they have to keep jobs they don't enjoy or like.
The difference is that the UBI would be the new penny, because you could not buy anything. Maybe with AI and automation we would get there, as robots would not complain or care.
*for a while. Only very few people are able to save enough to never have to work again, even with a low standard of living.
It is not easy in any case, that's for sure. Besides, I sometimes think if I could get there, I would work time to time in interesting projects.
I got the money to get out and that's exactly what I did. I got out of everything. I'm not any more open than I was and I'm not happier. I just feel more secure and comfortable.
This doesn't work if you're literally struggling to make ends meet to the point that you're actually not making ends meet. But you certainly don't need anything near "never have to work again" levels of wealth to have this freedom.
Yep. Single person with minimal responsibilities has more freedom/flexibility than someone with a family (for example) - kids/spouse mean your time is not just your own, and your decisions have direct (often immediate) impacts on those around you.
If one does not feel comfortable paying someone to do some of the work - it is a key tell the project may not be worth continuing. Momentum is key as projects natural state is "trending towards death"
Users have been burned too much by “lean startups” and “mvps” and have become wiser to their tricks.
Agree design is much more important than before. But you can still pay a designer $1k or less and it looks pretty nice. Maybe not "uniquely different", but nice.
Agree the days of "simply put it up and get users" is probably gone. One has to work it, which is what distinguishes a project from a business. Developers may be good at one, but not both.
I mean, if this is the kind of society that any poster of such advice has in mind than I won't complain. Who am I to dictate what the end goal is? If people want a society for winners, so be it. I just wish that advice givers were aware of that and would show it. As it usually sounds like such advice is given without any thought for scalability.
Or you subscribe to the idea that a huge number of people could indeed have this 0.1% super idea. I can't really disprove that this would be possible I admit, a huge number of people suddenly having crazy good ideas all at once, and all or most not requiring a lot of resources (which they would compete over, and with all the old industries).
Step 1 is validate your market and produce something of value - that is the focus of the MVP.
The MVP doesn’t need to go from $0 to $bln. and it’s a red flag in my opinion of something thinks it does. If the market is already established or there are established competitors, and you’re building out more capacity then sure - but then you should already be able to build a spreadsheet with all the market variables, or you’re fooling yourself.
If you can’t do that with 1 person and random tools, it doesn’t mean that isn’t a business. It does mean it’s a higher risk of failing, and failing catastrophically, and destroying a whole lot more money in the process.
It blows me away how easy it is to grow your expenses right along with your income. I started in this industry making like $60k/yr and somehow managed to live and go on trips. Now that I’m older I make substantially more than that but somehow my expenses grew right along side. Car payment, expensive apartment, Uber eats, fancier groceries, lavish travel, expensive hobby stuff… shit adds up. Not to mention I’ve got graduate level student loans, maxed retirement, etc…
I dunno… I know for sure if push came to shove I could do away with a large portion of that. But man can your expenses blow up so easily if you don’t pay attention to them.
There is a risk of stepping outside. It's not all roses. People are not afraid for no reason and it's not just "all in the head" and an attitude problem.
"He lived deep inside things with indomitable curiosity and perpetual openness, surrendering himself to what Dostoevsky calls "the river of life", in the serene awareness that it always takes you somewhere".
It always takes you somewhere.
It's not just a matter of precariousness. You just have a lot more time and energy for these things. You can always sleep a bit longer, or delay work to follow an impulse with your full energy. There's always time for projects, even if they're not part of some hustle. It's an incredible privilege.
Forget about the American dream. The Victorian dream is where it's at. I want to spend my days being a gentleman scientist and a student of the arts. I want my best work to follow my morning tea in the garden, and I want to join a Society of Likeminded Nerds to talk about it.
Atop a healthy and happy family, this is all I want from life. I would be honored to apply for membership at your Society if and when you ever start it.
>> I would be honored to apply for membership at your Society if and when you ever start it.
I'd argue this already exists. We're on it right now...
YES. Anyone know of a good place for this?
Looking at your profile it doesn’t look like you have any favorites saved yet, so maybe you’re not familiar with that feature?
In another 1,000 years, think about who around you right now might have the chance to be remembered. Someone like Bezos or Musk? Those reading about our life in the year 3,022 might believe everyone in our time was a wealthy CEO funding rocketship companies if they go by the names that have stood through time.
This is bleak way of looking at things. There's one thing to have f-u money but there's another base level of security that lets you leave a job or group and move on without too much disruption. Marriage helps there too. I'm nowhere near "secure for life" money, but if I was truly unhappy with my job I'd leave and find something else in a month or two. Around a quarter of people who left their jobs in the US don't have a new role lined up and turnover otherwise is pretty high telling me people do have a choice. [0]
> When I was in the comfortable situation, I was carefree and open to pursue ideas and projects brought to me which I knew were stupid and prone to fail. My colleagues loved it, of course.
I've found the reverse. When I was most carefree and comfortable as a child and young adult, I didn't pursue ideas or projects. I didn't do much of anything. I watched TV and hung out with friends. I went through the motions at work. Only later when I had actual responsibilities and had a partner did I get ambitious and pursued more ambitious projects. "Worrying" about making it is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me motivated and feel like I have a purpose
Yeah. My “wife” (girlfriend of 22 years) was recently able to say F-U to her old hated job and start part-time growing a private therapy clientele because my pay has gone up so much in the past four years or so. Having a support structure really helps.
> I've found the reverse.
Agreed. When I had nothing external motivating me I became largely idle, despite my best intentions. I joke about early retirement but I’m not sure it would be good for me.
What stands out searching my memories at that young age is there was little cognizance or care about national/international issues, let alone survival. There was nothing particularly special about what I did with my time (some of it was creative, mostly not), but I was de-facto optimistic about my future. I may have had immediate concerns and worries (I was often lonely too), but they passed. Until they didn't. And I became sufficiently aware for social anxiety and fear of failure to take hold, alongside bad coping habits. Today I have stability, but learned conservative behavior. I have to be conscious about trying to shake things up now and then.
If they're incapable of holding realistic employment, and it's all down to you, then you're in a worse situation than being single.
Possible requirements, from best to worst:
(A has job) || (B has job) // Robustness!
(A has job) // B won't have job, but A's is enough.
(A has job) && (B has job) // Cost of living is more than max(A, B) and less than A + B.
I have a bit of time I could reserve personal projects, as a means to bridge myself to more interesting things, but I usually don't bother with much. This becomes a source of pressure on myself. I see it as my only viable option for deviating from things as they are. I have to fight through fatigue and search through crumbs for sparks of interest.
Your response seems too generalized as if it relates to everyone. Let me disagree.
I myself can be considered that kind of genius OP is talking about, at least in my earlier days. First 15 years of my career I've never had any (ANY) savings, and most of the time had some amount of debt. But I always felt simple enough to walk away from any situation I don't want to be in and was ready to live in any condition. But I always loved my job, always was super-curious and eager to learn, and employers were always looking for me not the other way around.
I can say that OP is right, at least for some subset of people.
This is the myth that keeps people trapped in bad jobs, but it’s not true.
Yes, most of us have to continue working. But no, that doesn’t mean your job must be miserable and you must be surrounded by miserable people. Look around. Try something different. There are a lot of good jobs and teams out there.
Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem and disregard everything else. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more but then demand they work 20-200% harder and deal with bad behavior and unrealistic expectations because the company knows they’re not going to leave behind that sweet total compensation to go somewhere less stressful.
You can have good pay and good working conditions, but you have to work to find it and keep it. The big company recruiters desperate to give you high total comp just to get you in the door (often to replace employees who turned over) aren’t necessarily the path to finding that optimal point, though.
I’ve taken a few salary down-steps in my career that felt scary at the time but ended up being well worth it for the increased quality of life.
This can also happen with lower paying gigs, so you still have to qualify your jobs appropriately, but prioritizing quality of life over raw compensation is a great trade in my book. With the high salaries of the current tech market, it's not actually that hard to make a very comfortable living while still staying sane/happy and avoiding burnout.
The upside being that you can also take some time to learn new tech / get your head out of the weeds, and often make much more important and broad impacts. Like Kent Beck used to say: "program as if you had enough time".
The existential unhappiness of work is from depending on it for your livelihood.
As PP described, he was perfectly happy with his job until he became dependent on it and no longer had the ability to walk away at any time without caring about the financial consequences.
Among other things, as you indicate, as soon as you become dependent on your job financially, you take on an additional, and unhappiness-inducing, maintenance burden of constantly working to keep your job and then working to find a replacement job when your job changes or vanishes due to business conditions or the economy.
(And, of course, the work becomes something that you have to do, which creates reactance, etc..)
Or put differently, we're not all around 30 anymore, live in the bay area, and might have family matters, e.hg. a wife that doesn't want to quit a job she loves so you can maybe improve your happiness by 10%.
Also, companies change over time. A great place can become hell with just one bad superior getting hired and poisoning everything.
> Anyone who's not "secure for life" and has to keep the salaries coming in will have to deal with bad people, bad decisions, bad culture, etc. and become unhappy.
Not being secure for life is what 99% of the world experience their entire life and out of these 99% a lof them are happy. I know in the Silicon Valley microcosm the perspective of being secure for life is something everyone is after but most people are happy to live paycheck to paycheck, save a bit of their revenue every month and enjoy their life.
This is a move you can pull from almost any position. No need to score a stock windfall (though sorry to hear about your dramatic rise and fall)
/rant off.... Sorry just came out of a workshop where the presenter spent half the time trying to get a bunch of technical people excited rather than just presenting the information we came for. Very exhausting.
It probably a mistake to try and project this too broadly though. I'm sure there are lots of people who would respond similarly to the way that you did, but also lots that would not.
It doesn't seem to me that anyone was saying it was a guarantee. Rather, that being able to say "I'm out" is in something along the lines of the "necessary, but not sufficient" category.
Humiliated can almost never be positive, but people often conflate these two words.
I know one guy who rushed through bachelor, master, and a PhD in mathematics in like half the regular time without ever breaking a sweat. Sometimes, you'd meet him in the cafeteria reading research papers for fun. You could mention any topic, and he'd know something related that one time he was super curious about and he spent an evening reading through Wikipedia. He's like a sponge who soaks up useful information. That made him an interesting person to be around. And it seems that it's also working exceptionally well for him career-wise.
I also believe it's an easy date tactic to ask the other person to teach one of their hobbies to you. You'll have lots of stuff to talk about, so you don't need to worry about what to say next. And that makes everything more relaxing and, hence, more enjoyable.
Explore and nurture one's motivation (the "for fun"), else the years of time/effort won't be allocated. Including topics, environment, tooling, metacognition, enjoyment, etc, etc.
Emphasize integration, making connections. As merely accumulating disconnected trivia provides less leverage for understanding and play, for engaging with and informing new observations, and for interesting storytelling. Rough-quantitative understanding can be helpful (eg Fermi questions), but utility seemingly plateaus low absent accompanying integrated conceptual understanding.
Integration seemingly requires surfing primary-ish literature (the "reading research papers"). Using paper intros, journal "in this issue" summaries-with-context, survey articles, definitive doorstop tome on topic X, etc. Because outreach and education content is very not sufficient (example: 5-yr old Q: What color is the Sun? 1st-tier astronomy grad student pervasive A: Yellow! Q: And sunlight? Common A: white. And then, not infrequently, a pause, and: That doesn't make sense, does it??? Two incompatible conceptions, perhaps first learned in K, persisting unintegrated into grad. Helped by popular intro astro college textbooks having it wrong, remaining decoupled from the science, for decades. The distance/gap between "science" education content, and science, can be very large. Despite some overlap in personnel, their goals, institutional support and infrastructure, culture and incentives, are rather divergent.
Integration can benefit from sheer quantity of material chewed on. Jim Keller (chip designer) commented his superpower was reading books, IIRC a book (or few?) a week, since he was 8 yo.
Cultivate storytelling skills (the "interesting person to be around").
Excellence is far easier if you can do playdates with excellent people. Especially in math. The delta between "I read the book and saw the lecture" and "I worked the problems" and "I did hours with someone wizzy in front of a blackboard" can be vast. And then there's people who could have a clue, but are babbling history/economics/policy nonsense to praise at DC dinners, lacking folks to push back. Being non-nutter can be hard without a good community. Witness researchers respected on their research focus, but gone nutter on some nearby-but-not-their-research-focus side interest. Or non-tech discussions on HN. ;)
What else...?
I think the study source is questionable as well. Perhaps the soldiers were happier because they got acknowledgement for their work?
Most intellectuals don't get noticed because they are positively beaming, even if that is a likable truth for management... Or is it just to get management to make people happier?
That said, people that are always happy are often not the brightest in my experience. But maybe they do perform well.
More likely it's "well enough", and that matches the needs of most organizations just fine.
I haven't worked with a lot of very obvious geniuses, strictly speaking, but I've known plenty of very smart people who weren't particularly happy. And I've known several people that I absolutely would not consider geniuses who were nevertheless brimming with curiosity, successful, and quite outwardly cheerful (though at least one suffered from anxiety and depression).
Heck, going by IQ I'm only, what, 15 points off from genius and I'm not particularly happy either. Nor am I that smart for values of "smart" that people would traditionally associate with genius, but maybe that makes all the difference? I can barely do tips in my head ...
Some people here suggest that privilege helps and I agree, but is there something else? Is there a way to develop this trait?
I think that the 99% Impossible podcast helped me look closer at certain things. I could also name a few YouTube channels. I certainly got a lot about film and literature from dating an art student.
How tall?
Did he have any speech impediments?
Obviously "happiness" is not the reason he is so popular, since "happy" dorks are openly mocked throughout culture (at least in the USA) if they aren't physically attractive, and loved (Henry Cavill) if they are physically attractive.
Unless those were Russian spies confusing you two for Ukrainian generals planning for the upcoming battle, that seems rather unlikely.
Then he unlearns that optimism because he is alone and loses that "happy" attitude.
Saying this as somebody who used to fit your description, and noticed a hard toll on his performance after a few years of setbacks and bad experiences
The reason that you're friend was so magnetic was because they could look at an old tattered map, be entertained for an hour, and be open to sharing that experience with those around them.
If what they're interested in interests you too.
Or as happened in this map genius story, if they're charismatic enough to convince you (and the gathering crowd) that it's interesting. Professor sounds like an ideal place for that skillset to end up.
I know people who are profoundly interested in certain things but you learn not to touch the topic because they'll deep dive on something you don't care about, and they aren't socially skilled enough to keep you engaged despite that.
For me it’s quite humbling to be around people who can connect with others almost instantly, seemingly with no effort at all.
I’ve resigned myself to accepting I’ll never really be like that. It’s quite exhausting, at least for me. I dunno, maybe it is just a skill I could learn but the desire to do so isn’t there and so here we are…
Some more details: Setting was evening/night at an european university college dorm.
We were both not poor, as we could go to university , but we both had a governemental scholarship, so not rich either. We had food and a bed, but not much money for anything hobby or party related. Sometimes a side job, and that's it. Both our dads had corporate jobs, and moms at home. I'd say all of us were middle class.
He had no special connections or privileges, except what he buikt up himself in the scientific world while being there. He was average looking, not specifically beautiful or ugly. He was healthy and quite sporty. A bit lower than average height.
I don't know what's the criterium for declaring someone a genius. He was a topper in the math olympiads, while I made it rarely out of the second round. He was good at a lot of other olympiads too. He also won a frw competitive sports. But it was the generality of the interest. He could do with particle physics stuff what he did with the map. Or astronomy, physics, every hard science. Or something completely non scientific. I had to take the equations and try to calculate, slowly, while he could feel where some phusics stuff was going to end up. He'd mix knowledge, probably learn something from the map and use it in his quantum stuff. He's a professor now.
The attitude was easygoing, good natured, no bullshit, honest. He was competitive, but if he lost he had just as much fun.
He was part of a loose group of like minded people all behaving like. I'd consider most of them geniuses.
Maybe I'm idealizing, or he had other characteristics I didn't notice. He was described as genius by other people than me, and when we talked about him, similar stories pop up.
And indeed, I was humbled, not humiliated. Gratefull for the experience, but it was clearly a height I would never reach. Oh well.
Can confirm. Had a friend for awhile (she and her husband moved to NZ, and I barely hear from them now) who had this same "wonder at everything / happy with anything" aspect, and her entire life is practically magic; her father is similar, both in success and vibe.
> am humiliated (in a positive way)
I think the word you're looking for is "humbled"?
"Enthusiasm is worth 25 iq points".
From 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice by Kevin Kelly
Humbled I think you mean
> Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates.
> we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important.
Good luck getting a job, unhappy people…
I don’t think they have the evidence to make this recommendation, since they surveyed people already employed (by the US army), who may have been unhappier pre employment.
> might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world
Their entire argument for this also applying outside the military domain seems to be that the military is a very large employer… However, is not the military a vastly different environment from normal civilian workplaces?
Managers hire "almost great" candidates and think they can affect change and get a good deal, and this NEVER works out. Any red flags on the interviews/trial period will and do persist forever. In the end, it's always the reason the person gets fired, and the company loses the time they invested into the person.
based on my experience of 10 years leading tech and marketing teams. Curious if anyone has conflicting experiences to share.
I would think an almost great candidate is someone who knows how to do most of what you need them to know how to do, people not changing is generally in referral to their innate personalities and not some idea that people can never learn anything.
I've been in the industry for twice your years. I've seen a lot of people changing their behavior completely and in many ways. Mostly due to good or bad management or being in the right or wrong company or team.
How do the authors separate out the causation part? May be the top performers are happy because they are performing well? Will they retain their happiness if lets say, they are thrown in something with stack ranking like Amazon. How about something like on calls? How happy are they going to be if their nights are continously ruined by production issues. What about personal stuff like divorces and family issues.
Most popular "positive psychology" is exactly that.
Unsurprisingly, companies love the idea that employees should act happy in any circumstance.
Since employment is one of the main sources of unhappiness I assume this will create an oscillating state of happy unemployed - unhappy employed people perpectually in and out of jobs as their happiness dips below a certain threshold.
I see you've never been under any economic hardship ever in your life. Good on you, but that really, really doesn't apply for most people.
Poverty sucks.
I'd wager economic instability far outweighs the negatives of one's employment. After all, it's why many people still attend their jobs.
I'd be absolutely amazed if you managed to disprove him, because nothing I've ever observed or experienced seems to fit into it.
I said "so what do I win if I disprove your 'I see'?"
you said: "I'd be absolutely amazed if you managed to disprove him, because nothing I've ever observed or experienced seems to fit into it. "
So, you've spent your whole life tracking my levels of economic hardship? What organization do you work for?
to say it another way, as I have lately noticed people not following what I say:
I have had greater economic hardships than most Americans, the poster said they could tell I have not had any economic hardships, I made a response meant to cause them to think again by asking what I would win if I showed I had been under economic hardships, finally you seem to think that both you and the poster would absolutely 100% know that I have never been under any economic hardships - either that or you have grossly misunderstood what I wrote in response to them even though it was quite a short sentence and thus should be relatively clear.
It's your claim that poverty makes you happier than employment on some average. The last thing he said and the only relevant thing to even discuss here.
Were you happier when you were homeless and needed to rely on other people's pity to survive than when you could buy your own food due to your job? I would find it rather surprising if you were.
I supposed it could be that you're from one of these places where workers' rights aren't really a thing or that you can survive on your own without monies, however.
As far as being unhappy when poor, when I spent my days in the library reading and writing poetry, but did not have any money and would dumpster dive later to get food and would have to walk through the cold Salt Lake City streets in winter to find an apartment building I could sneak into the storage area of and sleep for the night I was unhappy when I was hungry, and I was unhappy when I was very cold, so for perhaps 2 hours a day, but when I was working a job I was miserable at but could not quit for various reasons I was unhappy for at least 8 hours a day, and probably more than that as my unhappiness also affected my family after work, whereas starving and living on the street affected nobody but myself.
I hope my explanation on this matter meets with your moral approval.
>so for perhaps 2 hours a day
Didn't you find it mighty stressful not knowing if you'll get food, get fucked by the weather or other people?
The people I know who live/lived on the streets always preferred any job to it. But that might be a thing related to Brazilian streets (the unprovoked violence ain't no joke)
And heaven knows I'm miserable now“
It's so common in the software industry it's seen as normal.
1. It was a contractor position and the project was over.
2. I got tired of the project and needed something new, even though the place was great in other regards.
3. I got an offer with more money.
That seemed a bit shaky to me as well. You could just as well argue that people who are happy to go to war end up earning more medals. Happiness inside of the military is not the same as happiness in the workplace in general.
I conclude the authors are faking happiness to not get fired.
> enforced respect
You are contractually obligated to do your job. They can’t fire you or send you home. Thus getting “smoked” (physical training as punishment) or an Article 15 (losing pay and/or rank) is the only option. I only once told a superior to go fuck themselves. It was worth every push up. Is it really so hard to be respectful in the workplace?
> the indoctrination
I’ve worked places that have heavier cool aid than the military. At least the military codifies it instead of “treating me like family” or “corporate values” enforced by some kind of cult-like culture.
> the danger
Yeah, getting rockets and bullets slung at you is pretty dangerous. But by the time that happens to you for real, you know exactly what to do. It’s survival, not war, in most cases (at least for support units). You do get hazard pay, so that’s something. Luckily I haven’t had to deal with this in any other job since then. However, it does give me a perspective that is quite useful. Whenever an “emergency” strikes at work, I’m calm when most people panic. No one is dying. The only thing wounded is the business’s bank account and maybe someone’s pride at screwing up. I can live with that.
> we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators
So the job goes to the people who, in the eyes of the interviewer, can best fake happiness. The more desperate you are for the job for economic reasons, the more pressure on you to fake it convincingly. Big bright but not desperate smile. Right set of inspirational stories. No complaints or demands.
From article:
>> Here are three examples of simple exercises, each backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. In the first, the Gratitude Visit, participants prepare and present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better. In the second, Three Good Things, participants write down three things that went well each day and what caused those things to go well, for one week. The third, Using Signature Strengths in a New Way, calls on participants to complete an online strengths survey and then use one of their top strengths in a new way each day for at least a week
I don't know whether it's because I'm not American or just really cynical, but I absolutely hate this kind of mandatory public performance of fake emotions. It's also more work for the employees to do; presumably this essay-writing is on the clock, in addition to other duties? I wonder if there will be an essay mill you can go to for the right set of inspirational stories to feed to your manager?
Note that none of this stuff ever touches real concerns. Are the employees unhappy about the process? The breakroom snacks? The pay and pensions? Casualisation? Sexual harassment? (Obviously if someone gets groped at work, their happiness factor will go down, and that can be used against them in performance improvement)
All of this has already been seen with the Bradford factor, a means of measuring employee sickness and targeting them for firing.
It seems that you completely misunderstood the study, a longitudinal study conducted over 5 years and compared against a real world factor outside the study: military awards irrespective of any study.
>> Here are three examples of simple exercises, each backed by rigorous evidence of effectiveness. In the first, the Gratitude Visit, participants prepare and present a 300-word testimony of gratitude to someone who changed their life for the better. In the second, Three Good Things, participants write down three things that went well each day and what caused those things to go well, for one week. The third, Using Signature Strengths in a New Way, calls on participants to complete an online strengths survey and then use one of their top strengths in a new way each day for at least a week
Reading carefully, it is not clear whether those exercises were things that were specifically "validated" by this specific study, in the military, since the next paragraph talks about the "ENHANCE" programme in the military.
I share your sense that forcing employees to do these exercises is pretty gross, but these are not exercises that would be difficult or which I would balk at in my own private life. Not all emotion is fake...
Agreed. But when people are incentivized to show outward indicators of certain emotions, people aren't particularly good mind readers which makes it hard to parse out fakers from the authentic, it leaves the door open for opportunism, smarm, passive aggression and a different flavor of toxicity.
The way I see it:
Authnetic and happy?
Fantastic!
Authentic and morose?
Not ideal but if the person makes positive contributions and can be trusted theres potential for value add.
Inauthentic with a sunny disposition?
This screams underhanded, manipulative and untrustworthy. Fuck off.
Makes me think of an adage from Warren Buffet.
"We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb."
https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/warren-buffett-hiring-t....
It's quite possible that a percentage of the top performers referenced on the original article are just doing that.
Neurotypical people are not the extremely successful, always-happy, super charismatic elite. That's the 99% percentile. They are as outliers as the most unhappy and miserable of the people.
Neurotypical is about the norm. If you have your set of problems but you don't need to take psychiatric drugs to deal with them, then you are neurotypical. And that's it.
More like "have fun discriminating against people with psychiatric disabilities."
It’s not vastly different from other professions except software. Source: I have been in the U.S. Army for 25 years and I have been a corporate software developer for 16 years.
The only valid question is not what makes the military unique but instead what makes software unique. The answer: a complete absence of professionalism. I wrote about this here:
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Leadership_...
Edit: corrected the hyperlink.
When a dude can run faster than other people, it’s written off as genetics. When someone is resilient to depression, it’s anything other than genetics. Both cases are the same: it’s just biological.
I’ve been suffering super hard with depression recently and it’s made something clear to me: your mindset is bullshit. It might tip things one way or another but the actual mechanisms of depression will change your life. Everyone will be super humbled when we figure out how to turn off depression, and everyone gets it and everyone experienced on average a 50% boost to their intelligence and productivity. They will be humbled because they will realize that all of that relative suffering was totally pointless and for no other reason than a quirk of evolution. And that some people had it good for absolutely no reason. But it’s exciting to know that this day will come and it can’t come fast enough for me!
Obsessing over an intractable problem as if it can be improved can make the problem worse.
According to the ACE study, your early childhood environment has a dramatic effect on your life outcome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...
Soldiers in the Vietnam war all did heroin. When they returned to the US people thought we'd have a heroin epidemic. Turns out the change in environment rewired there brains. Try it.
I just had a thought - what if there is a biological or evolutionary quirk that believing in a higher power results in more happiness? It would certainly explain why some people who seem to have a supernatural outlook are so happy dispite what seems like terrible suffering.
E.g. Carlo Acutis [1] was known for his cheerfulness despite suffering and dying from leukaemia.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Acutis
Edit: spelling
It is so pointless. Why does it occur more than its opposite?
I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later) but because their task/goal is very unique to other private companies where the (primary) goal is making a profit, and the fact that at the military, sizable proportion of the employee might be in a high stress, life-or-death situation (the data was taken under Iraq/Afgan war) .
All in all this seems like a "checked all the boxes for a good study; but still whimsical result" kind of study. (I guess that's why it went to a low impact factor Journal)
I still would prefer HR people take recommendations from this article, such as: "Measure happiness in both employees & job candidates" at face value rather than wasting their time in BS Personality-type and pseudo-IQ tests for hiring/managing project groups
Edit: Might also add that (to me) it makes no sense to equate "getting a medal" to performance, when they also claim "Military also have non-combatant jobs!" as the basis for generalization of the study; yea but your success metric doesn't take that in to account? Does military-chefs get medals for extra-ordinary dishes? Does safety technicians get medals for "extra-ordinary safety"?
Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations.
Some of them adapt and get cynical.
Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part of my day to work among many of them.
I would describe myself as 'optimistic' rather than 'happy' but, in both cases, these businesses sucked the life out of me and the happiest days were when I left. Both times to my initial financial detriment.
Neither business is currently operating though, so no loss to me long term.
This is something that worries me on occasion. Certainly very few would intentionally do it, but I fear there could be some alligator-brain crab bucket game going on in the subconscious where some team members will be inclined to "even out" any happiness deltas across the team.
In my experience - not all unproductive people are complainers - but almost all complainers are not productive.
The productive people are proactive and start making change rather than complain.
I haven't met a lot of unhappy proactive people.
And that's before you get to the sharp end, which is about killing people.
It's certainly going to take a certain kind of personality to be happy in that kind of setting.
Whether you can generalise that to corporate life in general and software development in particularly is very, very debatable.
Of course this is a popular trope with a certain kind of manager - business as sport, business as military command, and so on.
I have a hard time believing that "many — if not most" people in management are actually motivated by this.
Like most people we do care, and managers may in general care too, but on the field things become murky and doubt / mixed signals / ambiguity creates more work than people will accept to really care.
It needs to exist in the team spirit already otherwise the will just dries up.
Five years ago, was when I left the company that I'd worked for, for 27 years. This was followed, almost immediately, by finding out that the tech industry really doesn't like older workers (which didn't make me happy). I floundered around, for a year or so, being insulted, ignored, and rejected, before I took the hint, and just accepted that I'm in early retirement; whether or not I like it.
Since then, I have been insanely productive. I spent a couple of years, "leveling-up," and, a couple of years ago, I found some folks with a nonprofit, that were being "gamed" by the same types of folks that rejected me, and decided to help them out.
It's been great.
My skills were (and have been, since I wrote my first line of code) very relevant, as you can actually easily see, simply by viewing my rather extensive portfolio (which no one ever does). That covers over a decade, and my last checkin was about five minutes ago (in fact, just this second, I got a TestFlight notification that my next build is ready). I never actually stopped coding.
But no one ever bothered looking at it. I've mentioned that, here, before. By "leveling up," I was really talking about developing work habits that didn't rely on corporate infrastructure, worked for a standup desk at home, and in a much smaller scope (I used to run a C++ image processing shop, and I have switched to just working on apps in Swift). Once I realized that no one was going to hire me for the skills I used to get paid for, I decided to concentrate on the ones that I enjoyed.
Also, I wanted to become much more proficient at Swift. I've been writing it since the day it was announced (and releasing apps, written in it). This had been my "nights and weekends" work, and now, it was my full-time work. If I had been employed, doing this work, I would have had to go through the same adjustments, anyway -maybe. It's quite possible that most corporate stuff is still done in ObjC.
Also, I wanted to dedicate a bunch of time to writing stuff. I enjoy writing. It also helps me to be a better programmer and architect.
And, I guess the best part of "leveling up," was learning some essential self-respect. Employers don't want employees to have self-respect (well, I did, but, apparently, I'm an outlier. My employers certainly didn't want me to have any). Once I had that, the scales fell from my eyes, and I realized what I was missing.
And, no, I never want to work for anyone, ever again. I have become spoiled, by not having my work ignored, destroyed, and misused. That makes me very happy. I suspect that employers wouldn't be happy with my "uppity" attitude.
They only want young, "Buzzword Bingo" champs. If anything, they were worse than the employers.
In "the good ol' days," we had these contract agents, that acted a lot like talent agents.
Sadly, these seem to have gone the way of the Dodo...
Given medals at least partly exist to reward extremely optimistic behaviour at the expense of personal safety, shall we say, having an optimistic outlook could singularly apply to the field of warfare where individual optimism in the face of unlikely odds is a good thing.
This isn't sort of mindset we wouldn't want in our doctors or engineers or bankers, or almost anyone else.
The author explains that happiness is subjective:
> The behavioral science literature often refers to happiness as subjective well-being because the meaning of happiness varies in different contexts
...and then proceeds to delineate how psychology defines happiness:
1. a person’s own assessment of their satisfaction with life;
2. how much positive emotion [...] they experience;
3. and how little negative emotion [...] they experience
So yeah, self-rating is an important factor to measuring happiness.
It's relatively standard in the field.
Well, it's the only measure. I wasn't saying self-rating is bad (although it, of course, is if you're trying to draw objective conclusions), I'm trying to say that performance doesn't equate strongly enough to medals and happiness doesn't relate strongly enough to how people self-report to make any conclusions particularly useful.
Er, that sounds suspiciously like the eternal question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If you start off with a "happy" state of mind because of "external" reasons, you are probably more likely to succeed at work too, but of course your work also should contribute to maintaining your happiness. So it's either a virtuous cycle of success at work (without having to invest all of your time into it!) leading to a better overall life; or a balance of work being (negatively) stressful and you needing to "recharge" in your spare time (family life, friends, hobbies...); or a vicious cycle of your work burning you out and also leading to personal problems - of course, a positive attitude helps, but IMHO asking the simplistic question "which comes first" is as dumb as in the chicken-and-egg example...
In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I think it's obvious the the second case makes more sense but some people might argue.
It's about how chickens and chicken eggs emerge (first means "very very first"), and it's supposed to point to this paradox: If you need both chickens to have chicken eggs, and chicken eggs to produce a chicken, how did either came about?
E.g. did something non-chicken-yet that could lay eggs suddenly laid a chicken egg? Or did a non-chicken egg suddenly produce a chicken? and so on...
Another way of putting the paradox is "Which chicken arrived first, the chicken or its parent"?
Which is neither here, nor there, and has little to do with the question, which is based on the paradox that you need a chicken egg to produce a chicken, and a chicken to produce a chicken egg.
It's not about whether some other random eggs existed before, but about when the cycle of chicken and chicken egg came to be, and how the vicious circle was resolved.
Edit: Even if you specify, that it has to be a "chicken-egg" you just have to decide, whether an animal producing a chicken-egg is automatically a chicken. I would argue no, because you could then prove by induction that everything before has been a chicken.
And I just explained that that alone is neither here, nor there, as the paradox is about the chicken egg, specifically, not whether eggs existed in general.
>At some point some of those egg-hatching animals had mutated enough to be now called the first chicken
Yes, but that's a different answer, which wasn't available when the chicken/egg question was posited - and it still points to a random (evolutionary) and fuzzy (when? how?) process.
We should come up with a better alternative paradoxes ...
Yes, but those initially positing the ancient chicken/egg paradox haven't discovered the theory of evolution yet, and for those later that still use it, the boundaries (when it "had the right gene combination for us to call it a chicken") are fuzzy. Those are the things the paradox aimed/aims to showcase.
Let me try - rivers or rain? - ping or pong?
EDIT: Maybe I'm not in a good mood today but right now I find it really hard to stay positive.
Every day I ask myself what is the point of all this anyways?
This is the story of most people with ambition. Nothing is new there. The only thing that will keep the light on is keeping the dream alive and thinking that you still have time to do it. That - ultimately - is a mindset shift. (And is hard to do and might feel like a bit of lying but you can shift your goals and mindset to make you stay on that goal ladder)
Perhaps that's not comforting if you're suffering. But if the cause of your suffering is that you think the world is awful, give that book a read. Pinker does a good job of breaking that sentiment down in to chunks (exactly what part is awful?) and exploring those questions.
Personally, I do think that a lot of the "world is awful and broken right now" sentiment is a bit detached from the reality. Which is great news! Anyways, I'm not trying to come at you at all, just be helpful and challenge assumptions.
I feel like this is way too general. It really depends on as who you would have been born...
Aim for contentedness and a meaningful life instead. Being content reduces the desire for state change, a major source of unhappiness, and having meaning and purpose in your life will give you a reason to endure the trials of life.
A content person with purpose will have many moments of unhappiness, but they will find such periods easier to cope with.
Because the key thing is, and that's the whole reason I write this message, is that if you learn to love something as boring as sitting still or walking circles around the room, and seeing how there's an endless potential for improvement on such a simple thing, you will see that everything is interesting. That kind of engagement can be developed.
And I'm talking about engagement, yes. Engagement equals happiness.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Shaw
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...
I'd argue self worth and personal happiness doesn't eliminate ones desire to positively change society (same with rich people), though it may be less common.
Lincoln was a rich white guy who still did good things. Tons of CEOs are money obsessed miserable sociopaths whos greatest contributions will be adding some zeros to their net worth.
There are two sorts of lazy people.
One group don't put any effort in, they avoid work, and they leave things as they are. These are the "bad lazy" people. They maintain the status quo.
The other sort of lazy people see something that takes effort and think of ways to achieve the same end result with less effort. They're the automates, the refactorers, the long term thinkers. They're the "good lazy" people who create positive change because they enable people to do more. They maintain the status quo where necessary, but also create room for improvement.
"good lazy" people don't cause industry changing disruption on a massive scale. "good lazy" doesn't invent Uber or Amazon. But I would argue that they are the cause of a lot of small, incremental changes over time, which actually has a bigger effect on our lives. It just happens too slowly for us to notice.
He ended up very rich, but he didn't start that way.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106591.Lincoln_s_Melanch...
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=497612...
It’s absolutely possible to have unreasonably high standards/expectations for “how things should be” and fight super hard for change/progress, while still being a happy person.
In order to have massive success, you need a constant state of both unreasonableness and optimism.
Unreasonableness drives results and change, optimism inspires people to rally around your cause.
If you're not unreasonable, chances are you aren't striving for more. There's lots of people out there living a perfectly happy, unremarkable life.
If you're unreasonable, that's by definition an unhappiness with the world, which creates a drive to change it.
If that unreasonableness creeps to much into your life, you get unhappy as well.
If the happiness creeps too much into your unreasonableness, you start losing your edge, the very drive that made all of it happen.
That's why you see so few truly happy billionaires and so many deeply happy people who are never even trying to make a larger impact on thousands.
It's certainly possible to balance both, but it's a very fine line to walk and constant personal development.
I'd also like to argue that I think it should be possible to be happy, reasonable, and change the world for the better. Not easy perhaps, and persistence is still required, but doable.
> Retain employees who are happy. The pandemic has reminded us of some tough realities, namely that organizations can contract in turbulent times just as fast as they expand when the economy is booming.
In other words, fire those that are unhappy. The bottom line is more important. Compassion is apparently not a useful trait among business executives. People say there is a stigma around depression. I wonder why...
Office perks had this purpose but it is no longer relevant in a remote culture. Now corporations need to snoop into our homes to predict productivity. Employees' lives outside work is not the employer's business, since most often than not, they will abuse it. Ex: They will sack an employee knowing he is unhappy regardless of the reason, creating a spiraling negative feedback loop.
The conclusion is very dangerous. It tells management to measure happiness as a predictor to success (and profit for employer). In fact, it is advocating to use employees' personal life as a proxy for performance, an abuse of data.
The machines tried at first to make humans always happy in the virtual world they've created. They did that not out of care for humans, but in order that they could peacefully harvest energy from the oblivious humans' bodies.
As I remember it, it didn't go well in terms of production. So, the machines replicated the real not-always-so-happy world instead.
I'm not trying to suggest anything btw.
Or, am I?
In a hypothetical pursuit of the definition of happiness, I tend to lean on an analogy in TCG's (trading cards, yes). Rarity.
The machines computed that happiness exists on a spectrum. As with TCG's, there must exist a high ratio of 'common' to feel the implication of pulling a 'mythic'.
To be happy, you must experience unhappy?
> The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before.
Yes, I'm sure it's that and not the record-high rates of resignation.
They have conflated the idea of winning an award with being a top performer, but winning an award has more to do with being well-liked than being a top performer. There are top performers who don't win awards, and there are people who aren't top performers who do win awards.
Really what they've shown is that if you want an award, you should be happy, and people will think you're a top performer. If you don't believe me, wait a bit and people will be citing this study as proof that happiness leads to top performers, hence happy people must be top performers.
There is a difference between "deeply unhappy" and "without purpose", though the second can lead to the first.
I "solved" it by living for duty rather than happiness.
Positivity is contagious too! I had a co-worker who just exuded genuine positivity, and he was a joy to be around and I couldn't help being in a more positive mood myself.
If one were to follow the reasoning of the authors, their data also supports disbanding Active Duty and Reserve in favor of National Guard. The next MITSloane story writes itself--part time workers have higher performance: go go gig economy!
Characteristic No award Award Effect size
Army Component: n (%)
Active duty 412,173 (52.28%) 36,761 (28.30%) 0.54
Reserve 179,790 (22.80%) 1,448 (1.27%) 0.06
National Guard 196,423 (24.91%) 76,234 (66.61%) 2.67
It's usually something like "here's a link to a free one hour e-course on mindfulness". But do take it in your free time. Or the many internal emails from leaders about how they "appreciate" the difficulty of these times.
It's all performative, hollow and cheap.
If you really claim to care or appreciate it, walk the talk. Give people 1K out of the blue, for sticking to their performance despite enormous challenges. That's still really a pathetically low number.
Or...it looks like you're exhausted. Take a few days of on my expense.
Or...we normally produce 500 of whatever unit, given the incredibly hard balancing act of you managing your family at home whilst trying to get work done, we'll temporarily slow it down to 400 of whatever unit.
All of these are just examples of humane and simple signals to tell that you really do care. If you do none of these things, you don't care. So stop pretending.
I've always seen things like mindfulness and meditation as fighting a symptom. You first put people into this overworked and anxious state of mind and then offer this "fix", rather then addressing the root cause.
When people are struggling with mental health at work, reduce the pressure on output and/or give them more free time. It doesn't solve all problems but it's the most meaningful and direct action an employer can take.
If an employer cannot afford that or is simply unwilling, I'm cool with that. As long as they admit it and don't pretend to care with a cheap email.
Same with appreciating people. Give them money. Stop making it so complicated. Money talks. Nobody cares about HR points.
How does this study account for the scenario where people are happy because they are on a good career track and others are unhappy because they are not?
For instance, someone who wanted to ace an entry exam for a new leadership position but failed to pass. Or someone who notices they lack certain core skills. Or someone who has life obligations or health issues that prevent him from making career progress?
I suggest that if you have relative high certainty that you will be successful in the next few years you will be happier on average than when you already know that the following years will be shrouded in stagnation.
I’d really like to see a bit more digging in there as to whether removing the happiness-sappers was more or less effective than supporting the happiness-supporters.
At the end of the day, “you’re just not happy enough” could become a valid rephrasing of “you’re just not a cultural fit”.
These are glass-half-empty perspectives, but there’s no principle that can be applied that can’t be misapplied.
I have a friend from school who is smart and in good health. However he always critical and points out problems with services and work. Rather than being positive and building things up, he likes to deconstruct and complain. He is then upset as to why he is not doing well in his career after having lost jobs...hard to change ones attitude. Then I play a sport with someone who is always encouraging of others, tries hard and is uplifting. When he is on your team, he adds an X factor and I think this guy, while young, will go far in life and if he wants to, could become a CEO.
Would be cool trying to think of "work projects" or experiments to find those with X-Factors.
How is instituting a hiring-time assessment for happiness and optimism going to do anything other than:
1. Sell more interview prep/gaming books and coaching services.
2. Bias hiring disproportionately towards to those who know the ritual of how to answer, as a proxy for class.
Sometimes, people really are just looking for a change and new opportunities, it's not always spin. That plausibility is what makes it the perfect spin.
(I take no responsibility for the potentially terrible career advice I'm giving)
I'm curious to dig into the paper more because at first glance, I feel somewhat confused they seem to say happiness and well-being and optimism are all essentially the same thing. Again, maybe their paper doesn't say that and it's just their attempt to summarize it, and maybe some people see those three as different words for the same concept, yet I imagine many wouldn't.
An old psych study claims that one year after some great or terrible event, winning the lottery, or breaking your back. People are roughly as happy on average as they were before the event. It makes sense in many ways, happiness does not seem to change much over life. To me it looks like happiness is regulated towards some fix point. This is often cited as a reason not to despair, which is nice, but for someone like me it is horrifying. Much like with weight, there is no reason to assume that you are being regulated towards a healthy state.
I am successful by most metrics, but I am so despite being miserable, and well aware of it. But it is also a question of what kinds of tasks I focus on, positivity and natural happiness is extremely important for most sales people, and beneficial for teamwork, especially high stress teamwork. But less so for solitary independent work like research, and too much positivity seems to make people easier to scam, and I would prefer a cynic as responsible for it sec (not that I have ever seen one that wasn't). Happiness has a wide range of other positive effects too, but it is difficult to decorrelate, and if I was optimistic Id say something like teamwork and sales are easy to measure, so anything which is positively correlated with work productivity will be biased due to selection bias. If I was pessimistic I think Id just say yeah its probably true, but hey, the world isn't fair, and while I am miserable, at least I'm not stupid, and I would not want those two reversed.
A few years ago I started going to therapy. And I found that a really positive outlet. I wasn't depressed, or angry, or anything like that. I just wanted to do more and be better.
And I've now adopted the motto: "Your friends and family are not your therapist" and it is true!! They should be supportive, of course, that is what they are for.
But your therapist is someone you pay to tolerate you at your worst and whiniest and to help you plan a path out of where you are.
And it worked for me! That is why I advocate for it.
I also recently started taking medication, and it has been PHENOMENAL. I am so much more productive!!!
---
It can be a bit of a double-edged sword though. I am a bubbly person, but some people find that very annoying. Or they see it as weakness or fae.
I feel like people don't realize that it takes me a lot of work to be how I am. It doesn't come naturally, it is a series of decisions I made:
1. To realize I have a problem
2. to seek help
3. To decide take medication
It's hard when you live with a therapist who doesn't always turn off therapist-mode when the workday is done ...
> I am a bubbly person, but some people find that very annoying.
I'll be honest, I do find exceedingly bubbly people kind of annoying. Though not every bubbly person will be annoying; they have to really wear it on their sleeve with cheerfulness that doesn't befit the situation. Or be cheerful and brutally honest, I know a guy like that. You can't criticize someone in the same way you'd wish a five year old happy birthday, c'mon.
"An employee has no legal obligation to reveal a mental health disorder to an employer. Where an employee's mental health condition comes to light, an employer cannot legally fire the employee for his or her mental health status or for failing to disclose the mental health issues previously"
The contrary is burnout, and I bet no one is brilliant in that position
In other words believe money can bring you happiness for money to bring you happiness.
My first thought on seeing the title: my experience is that this is a causal loop; the key is not to focus on how good/happy people are at their peak, but how to reverse a downward spiral where decreasing performance and unhappiness are driving each other.
How many times have you met a surly person that absolutely nails the un-glamorous but essential tasks that prevent parts of an organization from falling apart?
And if you extrapolate further, the rest of companies will end up with sad employees , with high turn over, 10x lower productivity thus lower pay and less happy. In fact this will be the common type of company to work for as the happy-employee companies will have very low turn over and won’t be looking for new hires as much.
I would expect such a well-respected publication to not make such a fundamental mistake, at least before I finish reading the headline.
There are glass half full of water people. This top performer is glass half full of: trillions of molecules that allow for the biology the most incredible aggregation of elements in the universe! What a wonder!
What a treat to work with them!
1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates.
2. Develop happiness in your workforce.
3. Retain employees who are happy.
However, in the past I've made the mistake of trying to retain angry, unhappy, or otherwise disgruntled employees too long. Some people are just irreversibly angry in life and will find a way to be upset about everything. Leaving them in the company will start to bring everyone down. If someone is clearly miserable at your company and you've made efforts to address their problems with no improvement, it's time to remove them.
If you really want to fake happiness the best way is to try to be happy
Pizza and bonuses doesn't equal happiness. Making your office look like Google doesn't bring happiness. The two main things are positive, constructive relationships and autonomy.
Floggings will continue until your happiness KPIs improve.
Comfortable (Not drinking too much)
Regular exercise at the gym (Three days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (No more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient, better driver
A safer car (Baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (No bad dreams)
Excellent books on the topic like Your Body is Your Gym, Overcoming Gravity, and Paul Wade's ultimate isometrics.
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That's driven into
Frozen winter shit (The ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics
1. Create company where you say u care about happiness but you don't actually do anything to make ppl happy. Due to randomness, some ppl will be happy, and those who happen to be treated badly will be unhappy.
2. Measure happiness (perhaps with an "anonymous" employee satisfaction survey)
3. Retain ppl who are happy.
It's the one choice you have to make in every living moment. Keep making this right choice, and life is a song. Choose to look the wrong way and life becomes hard work.
There is nothing more to it. This is all anyone ever needs to know about life.
I am leaving out no-one. Joy is absolutely accessible to every living being, at all times, under all conditions.
I don't think happiness is a destination, it is a path. The happy person is happy to have chosen to turn right and to have had the opportunity to so. The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for.
That is the decision
>That is the decision
What is the decision exactly? If unhappy people could just choose to be happy instead, they would.
It is the way one looks at and approaches the problems and/or situations. You can choose to change how you approach the problem and you can choose what you find rewarding in that problem and the approach. You can also choose to focus on what you've yet to attain.
In our little parable here, the unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. We are getting terribly abstract now. But they could instead focus on what traction they have gained, they could "enjoy the art of the search," or whatever else they choose to put value on. But it comes down to what they value.
Talks and whole books are written on this and I wont be able to do them justice. This mental outlook thing extends to depression. See CBT, Congnitive Behavioral Therapy, which reduces depression by changing how you think about things. One could choose to apply those techniques.
If I’m starving - I have every right to be upset. Yet in your mind - I should just learn to enjoy the search for food (even if it doesn’t exist) rather than being upset that I’m literally dying.
Since you bring up starving, I'll give you my starving story. BMI was under 18 and trending south. I got kind of abandoned for a bit in high school. My daily food was one potato in the morning (baked, plain), the high school free lunch, and, as long as I stole an extra hamburger that I could sell (which was not every day, depending on rotation), I'd have enough money to get a can of soup for the evening. This would be warmed on a wood burning stove that I also used to keep my room warm. The rest of the house was, literally, ice cold due to a missing wall (which is non-ideal in the mountains and also encourages wildlife to steal your meager food stores). What meager food I could stash away got stolen by raccoons once - there was a missing wall on my house at the time and the mountain wildlife could come on in if they could navigate a tarp.
I could have been upset with my dad for leaving me in that situation. I could be upset with other extended (and close by) family who did not help. I could be upset with neighbors who didn't help. I could be upset when I saw people wasting food (and, yeah, that stung... a lot). I could be upset that my stomach being in pain or some stints with nausea was a normal feeling. I could be upset by a thousand things in my situation (and these are but the surface of my hardships). I could have decided that my happiness was based on all that.
However, I tried to enjoy "roughing it." I took the time to enjoy searching for wood to heat my wood burning stove to heat my cold room and my can of soup that I got only because I stole and sold other food earlier. Would I prefer that to where I am today? Hell the no. I looked around and knew I did not like where my life was directed and the current state of it. So I focused on what I could do. I could get my school work completed. I could talk to friends before school if I got there early enough. Maybe a day was a no-hamberger-available-to-steal-and-sell day; I would enjoy that I got to sneak a slice of pizza from another classroom's party or I could get the left overs from a friend before they tossed something. I think I was a generally happy person despite all of my hardships (and these are but the surface of my hardships).
So I've been starving with every right to be upset. I chose to, instead, focus on things I could do something about. Slowly I improved my situation. I found food. I got good grades. I got scholarships. I starved some more. I worked crazy hours. I failed. And I failed some more. By my late 20s, I had started to figure things out and I, for the first time, could buy a pizza on the way home and not think about the financial hardship. I could avoid being hungry. Tack on another decade and I am wildly successful. However, I've also had to deal with depression, anxiety, insecurity, and feeling like not belonging along the way.
Edit: post question I meant to ask:
> self-deception/lying-to-oneself
I'm curious on what you mean here - why is that significant? This sounds like saying you shouldn't read fiction because it isn't real. When you pump yourself up (for a lift, a sports game, to ask out someone attractive), you are practicing forms of self-deception. Also, you are not saying, "this is great, life sucks." You are saying, "life sucks, but there are great things." Reality doesn't change, but the way you interpret it can.
And being upset does not mean you cannot focus on fixing the issue. You can be mad as hell but also be working on the problem. It does not mean you're helpless. Nowhere did anyone say that.
Free will/choice isn't a coherent concept philosophically and I find it almost impossible to take anyone seriously when they propose "just change your mind" as a solution to anything. I am already struggling to resist the urge to leave this comment at "WOW THANKS, I'M CURED!".
Twin studies show that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon where the genetic heritability of the stable component of happiness is estimated to be almost 80% [1].
If you're unhappy and reading this with a sense of disappointment, I'd just say "don't count yourself out yet".
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb...
Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics.
Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality...
Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.
The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions.
No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6
Can't tell if it's just a promotional material for the US army, or they have more objectives, but I can't agree with most of what is being pushed as "hard data", a.k.a. "science".
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026 | Good sleep, good learning, good life (supermemo.guru)
https://cupdf.com/document/paranoia-2nd-edition.html
(scroll to page 5)
Second off. There must be an evolutionary reason why less positive people exist.
US: I lost my job. I am so happy. It was time for a change, and I know there are so many better opportunities out there.
Russia: I was fired from my job. It sucks. How am I to find a new job in this economy? What am I to do? Followed by vodka with friends.
(Stereotypes that may or may not be exaggerated)
Managers reading this will demand happiness, so people must fake it even more. and they must fake it all day long at work.
Work Survey: Are you HAPPY?
Yes? (Manager wants it) No? (Won't get promoted, won't get anywhere)
It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet.
Drugs, floggings (must improve your happiness), bright colored cubicle, A new Ferrari every quarter.
One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people.
When it comes to soldiers WTF? Victim shaming?
Soldiers are successful because they are happy? Thus if you are unhappy, depressed, PTSD, all that happened because you were not happy.
(Stretching it a little for effect).
This all reminds me of evangelical churches. (Who also forces people to be happy)
> God Heals the sick.
But God has not healed me, and I prayed, and people prayed with me.
> That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed.
If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen!
... while Germans motivate themselves negatively:
If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.
And you can fall on financial hardship if for example, you took massive loan for a house and you lost your job which happens to be in a low demand filed, making it hard to find another job quickly. You usually have your 1-3 months notice period as a buffer, but the unemployment you get after that might not cover your full expenses as that's usually around the 60% mark of your pay.
Sure, like in most of Europe, it's more difficult to become poor and homeless than in the US, but Germany doesn't give you some magic immunity talisman to never loosing your job.
Then there is the fact that for a time after being let go you receive a relevant share of your average salary for the last 12 months from the state while you keep looking for work.
Does it suck to be let go? Sure. Is it the end of the world in Germany? In more cases than not - it isn't.
I work in a company with even stronger employee protection as we have a so called works council. A body representing the workers towards upper management and standing in for their rights. Additionally there are strong unions in some industries in Germany that also help a lot.
Ar there areas where companies sometimes already on the side of illegalities abuse the system and workers - for sure. Esp. in the low wage sector.
Your average modern "move fast and break things" SW company or mobile focused startup doesn't enjoy any of those benefits and usually come with overtime expectations and pressure to ship, ship, ship.
In the US, if you lose your job, you're "between jobs". In Germany, you're "arbeitslos" (jobless), which some people use as an insult. There are entire TV channels that make fun of jobless people - think TLC type shows, but strictly about poverty and joblessness.
But being "arbeitslos" ("jobless") is really a stigma in Germany. At least I feel a significant share of people see it that way.
How about instead of blaming the population, we pin the opioid addiction to big pharma and their illegal practices of lobbying and bribing their way into doctors prescribing opioids for toothaches and headaches. See Purdue.
Also, Finland is constantly rated as the happiest country in the world yet suicide rates are relatively high and alcohol abuse is rampant, so maybe that's not how happiness works.
This is just people projecting their own insecurities. Obviously they'd like to believe that if it was them that were sick they'd be healed.
A bit like the wishful thinking around Corona.
IMHO when someone needs something concrete from you, and quotes one verse from the 33, but when you’re in trouble they’re happy to “pray for you” if you’re lucky, if not break out the weak faith routine you alluded to, what you’re really dealing with is the same people who give Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead place of privilege on their bookshelves.
I’m not a person of particularly strong religion or even spirituality, but I’m on team: the 33, while flawed, are my preferred mode of interaction over the 66.
But my little primer-as-Internet comment is based on not only reading but memorizing these documents at a young age, it’s likely a reasonable place to formulate some Google search terms.
In roughly 420AD there was something called the “Counsel of Nicea” where representatives from different Christian sects hammered out a consensus on what counts as the “Bible”, and they reified a distinction that had predated the debate into canon: 66 books of the “Old Testament” beginning with “Genesis”, and 33 books of the “New Testament” beginning with “Matthew”, or, “The Gospel According to Matthew”, and ending with “The Book of Revelations”.
I was never a good scholar of the “Old Testament”. It’s part of the family tree that’s often called “Abrahamic”. Islam’s holy text is in this family tree in some sense.
The “New Testament” is 4 allegedly first-hand accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, a set of writings called the “Pauline Epistles”, and some other stuff (“Acts of the Apostles”, etc).
The “Old Testament” is especially complicated and random-seeming, but is broadly concerned with laws and punishments. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “an eye for an eye”, that’s very “Old Testament”.
The “New Testament” is also complicated and random-seeming, but broadly concerned withers of grace, forgiveness, compassion, and redemption.
Those are both wild oversimplifications, but I think give a flavor.
I'd agree, your post does a good job summarizing the common perception people have of biblical exoterica. There are much worse jumping off points.
My understanding is that the Council of Nicea took place in 325 AD, and had a lot more to do with church teaching and management than with establishing the canon of scripture - though secondary sources suggest canon may have been discussed there as well.
The number of the books seems to be off, I am not aware of any canon that is 33/66... It's understandable to mis-remember the number, and round it to one thirds, two thirds given that by page length, the old testament dwarfs the new.
Canon list: New/Old
Protestant: 27/39 for 66 total
Catholic: 27/46 for 73 total
Eastern Orthodox: 27/49 for 76 total
To what you said in your first post, I can commiserate with the social phenomena you're talking about... If anything, it should be "Old Testament for me New Testament for thee", to remember that our own actions carry consequences for us, and burdens of responsibility, and to be forgiving, and loving, and self sacrificing towards others. Do I do that? Not nearly enough. Can I change? I hope so.
In Melbourne, where I am (~10% church attendance rates, most left-wing/liberal city in Australia), I see the same thing from liberal atheists.
As soon as these arbiters of morality see a friend or colleague in need, they have nothing but platitudes about mental health or mindfulness followed by a rapidly-constructed mental wall.
It wasn't until two coworkers from Brisbane experienced this, one of whom was very open about how her experience her differed to tough times back home, that I realised how fucked up it all is.
Few of even my critics would call me a fair-weather friend. And I’ve grown ever-more impatient with fair-weather friends. There’s another word for that, but everyone knows it and so I do to spend it.
Real Christianity, in my opinion, is a lot like FDR-liberalism: compassion, love, and second chances.
I don’t know what that philosophy is even called these days. I want to join that movement.
In all seriousness, I think the only place to find this "movement" is offline.
>One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people.
That has been my goal, which has been more or less achieved. What more can you really ask for or expect out of life? Sometimes extraordinarily bad things are going to happen, and you are going to feel sad for a while. Likewise, sometimes extraordinarily good things happen, and you are going to feel happy for a while. But you can't (shouldn't) live your life with the ever-present anticipation (or dread) of these infrequent events. We're all on this planet for a very short time in the big scheme of things, and we'll all experience a variety of pleasant and unpleasant things. At the end of the day all you can do is navigate down the bumpy road as best you are able and not worry about things that are outside your control.
Exhibit 1:
(boss) great job team, could you maybe fix this one thing?
(me) ok, if you say so, I thought we did pretty badly this sprint actually
(my friend) he means that, it's just how British people say you're not doing great
(my american Dungeon Master in the game we play) any feedback on the last session? I want to hear your thoughts.
(me) it was great but I thought that X, Y and Z were kinda boring
(other players) why are you so mean?
(any American person) how are you?
(me) actual response.
(they) shocked.
There was a poll in a huge american corpo I contract for recently, where teams from all over the world had to grade their experience with other teams. Mostly we don't interact with other teams so we don't have any experiences, the matrix is sparse, but we had to put a percentage in every cell anyway. Anglosaxons graded everybody 90%+. Eastern Europeans graded everybody but the few teams we actually interacted with - 50% :) There was a huge meeting for "solving the problems" and people couldn't believe it's normal here :)
Some very important key factors to happiness that can be provided in a job environment are: .) self-determination \ .) a feeling of mastery/competency (or growth towards it) \ .) independence \ .) being treated fairly and equally
Managers expecting their workers to be happy and show (fake) happiness, actually goes against several of those points.
Older studies show, that small, mostly self-sufficient, self-organized teams with little managerial interference are both the happiest and most productive.
I would know because I work at one such place. The thing that a lot of people are not willing to accept however is that you generally have to give up other things. I work at a nonprofit. We start at 17 days PTO and after year one you bump to 25 days. You are strongly encouraged to take it. We're given nearly $5k per year, essentially no strings attached, to be used as we see fit for continuing education efforts. Everyone is extremely kind, empathetic, and flexible. You are strongly discouraged from ever working more than 37.5 hours in a week. It's as close to heaven in an employer as I've ever found by a mile.
Of course, because it's a nonprofit, I need to take a discount on pay, to the tune of somewhere around 20% below market in the region. Is it worth my happiness though? Completely. I have no regrets and continue to work here despite interest from places willing to pay me that extra 20% and more.
I see a lot of devs getting hung up on getting "what they're worth," as if they're selling a hunk of meat to the highest bidder. If that's how you treat yourself, that's how you'll be treated in return. After about a decade of professional work, I prefer to see myself as being entered into a mutually beneficial relationship where salary is merely one piece of the picture. I've long since realized that my expenses rise/shrink to meet my salary, mostly without me noticing any actual change in quality of life, so just maximizing that number feels pointless.
This is all not to say that I don't have ambition. My ambitions are just more multifaceted than "make XXXXXXXX/yr." Feeling fulfilled by the work -- that's an ambition. Having work that energizes me rather than drains me -- that's also an ambition. And I really do mean that, you have to strive for such things. They're not going to fall into your lap. It also requires you personally to understand what happiness means (contentment and inner peace rather than chemical euphoria) and pursue that instead of alternatives.
Personally I really don't see the point in living a life of toiling away at shit work just to make an extra 20%.
Oh, and by the way, we are no slouches. We create extremely high quality products at a fast tempo - because we all love what we're doing and are invested into the mission. We work for 7.5 hours and then we turn off and enjoy life, and come back rested and refreshed the next morning.
I think it's largely true. Interstingly enough there are parts of the world where faking unhappiness is the norm.
> It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet.
If happiness depends on externals than its indeed immpossible, since no one can control externals all of the time.
Stoicism was such an attempt to bring about happiness. By instructing its followers to dismiss any will for externals and focus on internals instead, it aimed to make them happy. It may have been seen like a bulletproof plan.
Unfortunately for stoics, though, you can't control internals either. Freewill is at best limited.