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Comment by drewcoo | Hacker News Reader

Happy people don't change the world. They maintain the status quo.

"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...

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I think you are conflating “unreasonable” with “unhappy”.

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.

With everything I've learned so far, this perfectly describes the core struggle of success and entrepreneurship.

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 like Shaw's quote, and it probably summarises much of his life experience at the time.

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.

Really? I haven’t seen it very often.

Fighting for change profits from desperation at the state of the world, which tends to be incompatible with happiness. It can work out, of course.

On the contary, it's people that have a purpose who are the happiest - and can shrug off almost anything that comes their way...

I disagree. Obviously there’s no single rule, and we can argue about what causes what and what is just a correlation, but I think a lot of unhappy people are cynical, and cynical people are less likely to try and change the world, whereas a lot of optimistic people are happier people, and optimistic people might be more likely to be crazy enough to think they can change the world.

This hasn’t been my experience. I’m like the ‘happy map guy’ in the discussion above. My happiness helps me be incredibly patient and optimistic about possible improvements to things. Have submitted over 100 global patent filings (in materials science, not software) and some of my inventions are being deployed globally :)

I'd argue lazy people don't often change the world and probably not people who are drunk/high all the time.

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.

I'd argue lazy people don't often change the world...

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.

Lincoln was born in poverty. The founding fathers were all rich. I get your point, it’s just a bad example.

Lincoln is also a famous example of someone who struggled heavily with depression.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106591.Lincoln_s_Melanch...

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=497612...

Benjamin Franklin was his father's 10th son, and his family only had enough money to send him to school for 2 years. He started working as an apprentice at age 12. At 17, he ran away from home and supported himself doing menial labor in Philadelphia print shops.

He ended up very rich, but he didn't start that way.

Lazy people change the world all the time. Not the universally lazy ones, just the lazy ones that are still responsible.

This little debate is a good example of how difficult it can be to communicate meaningfully about huge topics. Everything said in this topic has a certain amount of ‘truth’ to it.

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