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Comment by numbers_guy | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is because happy people do not consume the news? Happy people tend to have full lives and are therefore too busy to waste time ingesting news about events that are not going to personally affect them. Whereas, I can only speak for myself, but when I am down (like right now), I spend lots of time doing nothing but browsing news aggregator websites and leaving comments like this one.

And of course, negative news would resonate more with a person who is in a bad mood.

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Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.

"Like a snow day for your whole life." Thank you, that gave me a hearty laugh.

This is a problem to fix, which society has not itself figured out yet.

Hope, being good enough, your time is your time and desire mitigation is a solution.

Productize and scale happiness

What if fixes exist but everyone is only able to laugh at them due to their conditioning?

What does this empty platitude mean?

Thank you, that's a great way to describe why I always check the news the moment I wake up.

I figure if that were to happen, the first clue would be the Internet being out. So, might as well load something better than the news.

Always hard to tell if the world is ending or if Amazon East is down.

My parents. Never as excited as when they're watching disaster on TV.

Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event. It's a very bitter and passive attitude. Something to hold on to for the ones who don't have the power to do things themselves. I guess News just mirror that attitude. In a less dramatic way negative News distract you from your own problems for a while.

Of course everyone loses to an extent in a collapse but power is relative. And short of a meteor collapses are usually partial (e.g. the roman empire fell but the church remained and consolidated power).

You can only paint with a broad brush but it's not exactly hard to pick out groups that will be net recipients of relative power and wealth in various collapse scenarios.

If the financial system collapses people who own capital in whole (e.g. some tradesman with his van full of tools) and people who own "promises" of things (the contents of your 401k, bank account, etc) lose. If high level government collapses people who are associated with alternate sources of organization and administration (local government, the church) win. If local government collapses people who depended a lot on those services lose and people who already went without win.

Remember, money and political capital are convertible to each other to an extent so that complicates things as well.

So it's perfectly rational for people to root for the kind of specific tumultuous change that would benefit them.

In my experience, it's not those that are likely to be better off after a catastrophe who are looking for it. They are already pretty well off, they have a lot to lose in chaos.

Those who don't have a lot to lose are more interested in a chaotic phase that rolls the dice and will quickly reshuffle the social order. The rich are moving into gated communities, they're not looking forward to living in a mad max world -- they're trying to keep that world out.

In fairness, there's no such thing as a mad max world. At least not one without the rich. A mad max world is predicated on companies like Halliburton continuing to keep the fossil fuel deliveries coming. Which, in turn, is predicated on keeping refineries maintained and running. Keeping pipelines secure. And keeping roads repaired. All of which imply a very large number of wealthy people. (Assuming even state or regional scale energy logistics.)

To get mad max, we have to have alternative energy production and storage be cheap enough for broke people to afford. Even then, they'd need to be able to afford enough of that energy that they can spend huge amounts of it riding around looking for other people to steal from rather than spending the energy on farming and heating their homes. Raiding might work for post apocalyptic populations in Florida or South Carolina. I imagine the climate might be conducive to that sort of thing. But in a world with no energy deliveries, spending what little energy you have so frivolously would quickly doom you and your family if you live in Minnesota, Illinois, or Wisconsin for instance.

> Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event

Wait until you see those who want to create a nuclear war somewhere to make an apocalypse happen so that Jesus of Nazareth can come back. Then there are also ones who believe that the nuclear apocalypse must be global for Jesus to return. Have your next shock when you discover that these people actually have politicians among them. Then another one when you discover that the last US Sect. of State himself publicly admitted to be one of those...

While other people project.

"Oh thank god, society collapsed, now I don't owe that $5k of credit card debt, win win"

“now if you’ll excuse me I need to check my squirrel trap for breakfast, hopefully the dogs didn’t get it to it yet”

That's kinda how the pandemic felt to a degree. A happier than average time in my personal life, despite (or perhaps due in part to?!) all the carnage and pandemonium throughout the world. Feels wrong to say, but I will look back on my experience of the pandemic fondly.

Agree, the pandemic didn't hit the way I expected and I've heard many with similar experiences. This type of response (generally speaking, not necessarily you) may for some be driven by hypervigilance, as one of the ways it manifests is a level of calm in emergencies when others are freaking out. Rather paradoxical on the surface, but has to do with adaptation to certain stress levels and threat/friend response. The pandemic made a lot of friends into threats, if you were trying to avoid covid. Safety came from a greater level of suspicion and alertness to surroundings; an unhealthy response in everyday life but rather suitable for a pandemic. Another example is soldiers who come back from war can feel really out of place in civilian life, but in wartime can feel like they're 'home'.

Yeah that is consistent with my experience for sure. Probably true for lots of others too. I'm pretty neurotic about dumb shit on a day-to-day basis, but the few times something actually extremely serious has gone wrong in/around my life, it's rarely felt particularly scary or panic-inducing -- maybe even less so than the usual "oh my god I probably left the stove on and the building will burn to the ground and it'll be all my fault!"

This is a pretty common behavior for folks with anxiety related disorders, obviously closely tied with neurotic behavior. For me, there's nothing like the clarity of an all-out disaster to focus and sober me up.

We had that. It was called Covid. Two years later we are still dealing with the first phase of the completely predictable results rolling lock downs caused. In another 5 we will start dealing with the unpredictable ones.

Here's hoping that we're wise enough to not let reddit admits dictate world health policy again.

I'm in this comment and I don't like it.

Is is a snow day from their life or is it that their life hasn't or isn't going the way they expected but they perceive everyone else to be living fulfilling lives... and they would like to see that end?

It works the other way, too. You're happier when you don't consume the news. That is also scientifically proven, although I have no linkage to support that claim.

It is a valid question, but anecdotally, I am a happy camper, who typically does not really worry too much, but events over the past few years forced to cut down on checking news, because the more I understand it, the more depressed I get over state of affairs I have zero control over. This weird level of inability to make any kind of difference puts a damper on things.

I set acceptable times for when I review stuff and even then I try hard to curate it as much as possible to avoid mindless scrolling. It is not easy and you get psychological jitters ( and you try to channel it some other ways ) and you can feel your hard trying to reach for that mouse.

But overall the results were/are worth it. Sure, we are facing eventual extinction of human race, but one could argue that has been the case for several decades now so I sleep much better.

"Don't worry about the things you can't change"

More specifically the things you don't have control over.

Trolls troll because they enjoy the stimulus that it provides. Perhaps there is some overlap with that and posting negative news? Prison Experiment meets Social Media (which weaponizes and amplifies).

https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-trolls-dont-j... (New research shows trolls don’t just enjoy hurting others, they also feel good about themselves)

> Trolls troll because they enjoy the stimulus that it provides.

And normal people love self-serving, simplistic, "just so" stories.

Happy person speaking. I subscribe to the physical edition of several (paid) local news publications, mostly to keep tabs on local events, new businesses opening, and stuff that requires political engagement (votes, borough and city meetings, etc.) It makes me feel more connected to my community, and I never run out of fun stuff to do :)

I don't bother with online news; most of it is irrelevant to me. If a national story has some bearing on my life, it'll usually end up in the local Sunday paper anyway.

I suspect this isn’t the case. Even when I’m in a great mood, I find myself drawn more to negative headlines. I wonder if it’s related to our odd loss aversion behavior[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion

> happy people do not consume the news

Or consume different news. Ad-driven news is vastly more crisis-impending than subscription-driven news, which tends to be more contemplative as well as zoom out and explore regions and issues that aren't in spotlight. (I read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Economist, Information, Monde Diplomatique and Paris Review, in addition to a number of stacks.)

I can definitely recognise similar patterns in my own behaviour and how they relate to mood. Infamy is very effective at rallying what is essentially an ad-hoc community, and so is viscerally attractive when I feel lonely or have feelings adjacent thereof. But the company I find in misery ends up being especially unproductive and unconstructive and hostile to calls to action that are collaborative, or can't guarantee immediate ROI. And so, the payoff I need to feel better, collaborative edification and mutual restoration of hope, doesn't happen, and so I can find myself having spent hours hopping from outrage to outrage, getting progressively worse until exhaustion demands a rest that (hopefully) provides the respite and reset required to pursue a more productive alternative.

I cut out actively searching for news completely, I'm infinitely happier for it.

All reading the news ever did was make me upset about things I couldn't change.

I consider myself a happy person and love to stay on top of the news. It makes the day more interesting.

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