Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand yourself and the world around you.

The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoyed, Etc.) The weird thing is that if you look deeply at the feeling of feeling bad, its feeling bad that you feel good about something that someone else things you should feel bad about. How twisted is that? If you can change 'feeling bad' to feeling empathy for the person who doesn't understand how cool this thing is that you enjoy so much, you both don't lose your happiness, and you have a way to contextualize the other persons opinions that don't put your happiness at risk.

That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are. But I read a great article in Reader's Digest about a guy who was being rushed to the emergency room for a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Along the way a nurse was taking a medical history and she asked 'Allergies?'. His response was "Lead apparently, I got some in my shoulder and it hurts like hell!" Here is a guy going into emergency surgery cracking jokes, he has chosen not to be negative or angry, he has chosen to be happy. That really struck me, I don't think I could be so charitable after being shot.

Well there's stoicism or buddhism and the realisation that you can control your reaction to events.

And then there's clinical depression, where you realise this but the effort to think about trying is enough to make you want to cry.

I don't want to undercut the self-governance model because it can make someone a better person. But it has boundaries.

No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are not bad.

When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends.

We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

Our natural emotional reactions to our circumstances are there to provide a corrective feedback system.

The fact that this type of perspective is still so popular just means that civilization has a long way to go towards making daily life more tolerable for average people.

I believe the main point was to isolate your emotional state from impacts, and not to "be happy about bad things."

You have to maintain your well-being in the long term by being friend to good people and, well, not being shot, but in the short-term reinforcing positive thinking might just save you from a worse situation.

I had a similar thought recently, that it is a good thing to accept my emotional reactions, but that I did not have to embrace them.

(further explanation would involve rambling about the reaction being part of who I am but the embracing making it a bigger part of who I am)

It's interesting, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi specifically calls out this idea of listening to your "natural emotional reactions to our circumstances" in his book Flow.

> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view).

Ok, so now that I know that I suck at metaphors and to put it more directly, all I want to say it's that maybe the last 50-80 years of relative prosperity that the West has experienced were an exception, not the norm, the same as Pax Augusta around the times of the early Roman Empire and Seneca was also an exception of sorts. So, as a guy who grew up in a post-Communist European country in the '90s, with inflation averaging 100% each year for over a decade, and who has seen his parents go from respectable middle class to subsistence agriculture in the same timeframe (and my story is not at all singular in that part of Europe), you cannot just magically hope that things will get better. In most of the cases they go from bad to worse, and in that case you really have to adapt to the new conditions (like making jokes when being shot at), because it doesn't get any better than that.

I think the appropriate metaphor here is a callus, they can be handy when someone rubs you the wrong way.

Thanks for that perspective. You're probably right, this relative prosperity is more of an exception.

I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

> I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

Something is always going to go relatively wrong, so being able to deal with it seems like a good idea.

No one is saying "Be happy when bad things happen to you". Rather, let it roll off you, like water on the back of a duck.

I for one find serious injuries much easier to cope with when I crack jokes about them. If you're around me when I've hurt myself, I'm not grinning and laughing awkwardly for your benefit.

Everyone is different, but for me it's crack jokes, mock myself, and wear a stupid grin OR let the fear bubbling in my stomach take control. Maybe you feel I should "be human" and "give in", but when I'm half an hour from the nearest ER and on my own, screw that.

That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are.

Emotions do seem to have a life of their own. They seem like the results of deep and unknown mechanisms that I unfortunately have no control on. The best I can do is know myself better and manage that. For example, stress is an issue, and the only way I seem to be able to decrease my stress is to avoid stressful situations (for example avoiding too much work/responsibilities), instead of being able to deal with them. This means limitations with work load/pressure or certain social situations, where I get exhausted quickly.

That said, I've never studied buddhism or meditation. Could these help me control those deep inner workings?

I would say yes. You may discover that emotions have their roots in our attachments to things.

For example, decide that a venture or relationship is going to turn out a certain way, and you are beginning to form an attachment to that outcome. And you increase the chances you may be disappointed.

But, let things develop into whatever they will develop into and you are open to and can thus recognize many good things.

And you are more likely to experience things (this is called life) instead of fixating on some future dubious outcome, which probably is the best outcome for you anyway. Because you can't imagine the best outcome.

Anyway, I'd check out The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Its a bit too religious for my taste but his insights into how this stuff works and mediation are very useful.

Ronald Reagan made similar remarks in the hospital after he was shot. It's always impressed me how he could retain control of his emotions at such a horrible time:

"...when his wife arrived in the emergency room, Reagan remarked to her, 'Honey, I forgot to duck'... While intubated, he scribbled to a nurse, "All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_assassination_attempt

and according to a news article I read at the time, when speaking to the doctors who were to operate on him, he said, "I hope you guys are Republicans".

While we're trading kinda-irrelevant things about the Reagan shooting ...

The secret service agent who took care of Reagan immediately after he was shot and probably saved his life was a chap called Jerry Parr. Parr was originally inspired to pursue a career in the secret service by watching a film called "The Code of the Secret Service". The secret agent who's the protagonist of that film was played by ... Ronald Reagan.

Your point about kids made me think of this story (Found out about it through The Talent Code) > http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html

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