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Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't think happiness is very different from motivation. Happiness is the state of being motivated. Unhappiness is the state of having no motivation.

The 3 key ingredients to motivation are: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Nearly every time I've been unhappy writing software it has been because of a deprivation of autonomy, mastery, or purpose.

I've been ordered (deprivation of autonomy) to work on things I didn't think mattered (deprivation of purpose) with a language I wasn't familiar with in a context I wasn't familiar with, in a way I thought was wrong (deprivation of mastery and autonomy) for political rather than technical reasons (deprivation of purpose). I have never been unhappier and less motivated than that.

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I think there is a stark difference between motivation and happiness.

There exists negative motivation. If you have $50k in credit card debt, you are very motivated to pay off that debt, but you are neither happy to have the debt nor happy to pay. You just plan to be more happy when it's over.

This kind of motivation can also be present on the workplace, along with positive motivation (when you are happy about something and want more of it).

The post you’re replying to is talking about drivers of intrinsic motivation. Paying off a debt and getting paid money for your work are examples of extrinsic motivators. Intrinsic motivation is generally thought to have a larger impact on the quality of output, although the line can be blurry sometimes.

Y'all can't enjoy watching a sunset without being "motivated"?

You know, you say that in jest, but having experienced a fair amount of depression in my life, I can definitely say that I have been so unmotivated that sunsets do nothing. "why watch the sunset, I've got all this other stuff I have to do and even if I do it life will still suck and it's so much effort to drive somewhere just to watch something beautiful alone, life is so meaningless." (exaggeration, kinda)

Robert Sapolsky (Stanford Professor) has said:

> If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets."

Odd, I've felt the same but always attributed it to being "too motivated" by other stuff. I can't enjoy a sunset because I'd be thinking about something else I'd rather do.

yeah there's an emotional threshold where you just can contemplate existence with a comfy mat of joy, even if totally passive and idle

Autonomy for sure is my main source of development happiness. It means that my employer trusts me that I don’t burn their business to the ground

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