How To Be Happy Anywhere

I think it boils down to this: very rarely will you receive just plain vanilla information, if such a thing exists. Almost always the information will be wrapped in some kind of value system. As you absorb the information, you end up taking in the value system as well.

Let's use TV as an example. So yep, if you spend your time on one of those cable channels where you watch rich people all the time, pretty soon it's not that you'll understand how rich people live, it's that pretty soon you'll start believing that it is better to live like they do. Same goes for the other channels - military, cooking, whatever. These channels are purveyors of information, sure, but what they're really selling is indoctrination.

That's fine if you understand it. You should be able to compensate (without having fits about "the man" or "the system") After all, why would they spend time sharing information with you that they felt wasn't trendy and something you'd want to emulate? There might be a boring stuff nobody cares about channel, but I've never seen it.

Truly happy people can filter out the value system from the information. They can watch MSNBC, Fox, or CNN. They just compare sources and make their own value decisions.

It's like this guy got halfway to the actual state of things, then just gave up. Yes, if you have no information you have no external values being pimped out to you, but you also are missing a huge amount of learning about your fellow man and other ways of thinking about things. No information means no choices. You don't want that.

The ability to manage your emotions is different than the ability to process information, but it can be learned just as well, they just don't teach it in school.

Experience and research show that looking at examples of people with "more" (for some definition of "more") and comparing your own lifestyle to that of those people, is a recipe for resentment, envy, and frustration. These emotions tend to work against a person experiencing happiness and inner peace.

On the other hand, looking at what's good in your own life situation - regardless of how it compares to anyone else - and deliberately seeking out opportunities to feel gratitude for those things, this tends to increase subjective well-being.

This habit is simple, but not easy. The challenge is greater with so much media attention on those people who have more than others (Hollywood red carpet, MTV Cribs, Forbes 400, etc). The key to happiness and inner peace is to tune out the noise and focus on specific opportunities to feel grateful within your own life situation.

Whilst I've been to college, listen to NPR every day, keep up-to-date on the lastest news in my field via Hacker News and various blogs I can still be happy. I do this in the face of NPR telling me people are dying in Japan from radiation, my clients walking in and complaining all day about random x feature being broken when they simply don't know how to use it (even with clear warnings and arrows pointing to unfilled out fields).

It's a matter of what you choose to think about, I choose to focus heavily on what I love such as music, StarCraft 2 and creating beautiful software. If I decided to focus on suffering in the middle east, or how my programming language of choice simply doesn't perform as well as "x" programming language of course I'm going to be unhappy or unsatisfied with what I do. I know this information I just don't focus on it all the time. It's something for me to bring up in a conversation with people to discuss rationally and use in my job to better my work but not dwell on and make myself unhappy.

Apply this axiom to OP's observations. So he goes to some rural regions of the world, sees some kids being kids and concludes that because he doesn't see that same behavior in a modern region of China it must therefore be because of modernity or technology or whatever that these people aren't happy. But wait, how does he know they aren't happy? Who is he to say that because he "didn't see a smile" among them they must therefore be hopelessly depressed? Equally how do we know that because he saw some kids playing in the street these communities are "happy"? I could use some of my own anecdotes, experiences I've had in the barangay of the Philippines that would contradict his observations despite having the same hallmarks, but again, these are anecdotes and even if you have a large set of them they still aren't a supplement for evidence.

The crux of this article is weak. Based almost entirely on the touchy-feely reality of observational anecdotes. Again, I don't disagree with some of the broader points. But this article is not a good example of a case supporting them.

What he observes is that people who are connected to their communities are happier. People who are disconnected (or even dislocated) from their community and obsessed with "stuff" are less likely to be.

The idea that people living in a favela are uninformed demonstrates ignorance in the same way that shouting at people who don't speak English would. They are simply informed about a different set of facts - and in general that set of facts may make their lives richer because it is about people they know - i.e. who their cousin has a crush on rather than the Jonbenet Ramsey's of the world.

I've seen escalator's, but knowing how to find potable water that doesn't come with a monthly bill would make me better informed.

The only reason why they're not happy is that they make the (very common) mistake of delaying the happiness until the end result. With so much to learn and so much to achieve in this world, that end result never comes, that's why we need to learn to enjoy the process of getting there itself.

Enjoy the road, not the destination! Look back at what you've achieved - be proud! Look at what others have achieved - be happy for them! Set your eyes on the next thing you want and go ahead and try to get it - that's the best way to be happy, even in a first world country (that sounds weird :-)).

"this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called 'impostor syndrome.' The clinical definition is a 'psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.' It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing."

- Kleon, Austin (2012-02-28). Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

  To each his sufferings: all are men,    
  Condemned alike to groan;    
  The tender for another's pain,    
  The unfeeling for his own.    
  Yet ah! why should they know their fate?    
  Since sorrow never comes too late,    
  And happiness too swiftly flies.    
  Thought would destroy their paradise.    
  No more; where ignorance is bliss,    
  'Tis folly to be wise. 

Would you rather be Cypher happily eating his steak in a fictional world or the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar living in a real but wretched world? I would choose the latter but this is by no means an easy question.

This should have been his conclusion, not some made up theory about why the state of the world seems worse than it really is.

This isn't news. Rousseau called it amour propre.[1][2] It is the unhappiness and dissatisfaction peculiar to modern society, wherein constant comparisons with others give us new values, breed competition and the urge for power, and prevent happiness. It also leads to a sort of schadenfreude written about by others: you only enjoy what you have insofar as nobody else has similar enjoyments.

And Rousseau is mostly known as a political theorist; who knows how many others have noticed precisely this phenomenon. Yet nobody seems to know how to overcome this, despite this also being written about. (Sorry, I don't have any more sources off hand, ask me and I'll come up with them when I have time.)

The surest way: ego-death. The longer yet easier way: realize that others are not their belongings, accomplishments, or even their past or their future; these are effects, the person is the cause. Internalize this fact by acting in accordance with it: deliberately try to see others only as themselves, not as a collection of effects. Then realize the same is true of you and start acting like it.

[1] The wikipedia article is useful, but doesn't give a good understanding of amour propre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Inequality [2] The SparkNotes glossary puts it plainly: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/inequality/terms.html

I, also, have noticed a lot of the older generations growing up without the internet to have this idea that the world is going to shit.

But whenever you ask someone who's been used to this epic proliferation of any news since early childhood, the compounding bad news doesn't really seem to have an effect. We see a tsunami happening and an earthquake and a ship sinking and new riots rising and we don't think to ourselves "Wow, the world really sucks" instead the thought process seems more like "Oh cool, that's interesting. I wonder if there are any new lolcats"

You might say we've become less sensitive to people's suffering, but really we've just learned that not all news is our news.

But once I got older and saw first hand how clueless the "adults" were (in the financial sector, in the travel industry, in software development, in politics) - I began to long for the days when I thought everyone else had the right answer and all I had to worry about was to make sure the teams were fair for football at recess. When you're young(er) and not aware of how things really work and the problems that exist out in the real world, life is good.

"Contentedness" is a state you can choose to be in. You can recognise horrible events but you don't have to be unhappy over it.

I feel like thinking about how "the reality" is pretty good to convince yourself to feel better isn't the way to go. What if things aren't going well? What if there's war everywhere, does that means you must then be unhappy, that you can't be content?

Stake yourself not on fantasy, dreams, goals, people or events, but as it is. You still can have those things but having or not having them doesn't need to affect you.

The last sentence in particular resonated with me: “Happiness is not measured by the number of days you live but, rather, by the number of days you remember.” Every day I've spent consuming media is a day I can not remember.

It's easy to send warriors off to slaughter a village if you never have to witness death. The last century has seen an accelerating increase in the connectedness of the human race. When a single man's life is threatened on the other side of the globe, it's possible for millions of people, thousands of miles away, to learn about it. Our natural empathetic instincts kick in, and that simple knowledge causes a stirring discomfort within us.

Most people I've met don't really want to be uhnappy. So, once we have this knowledge, we have two choices. We either do what we can to stop the source of our unhappiness -- injustice, war, abuse, etc -- or we become apathetic. Because I am an optimist, I believe most people will chose the former, and I believe that is why our best days are ahead.

You can hear all day long about how much money other people make, but if you take it merely as a fact and do not construct a personal identity/story from it ("I am upset because others earn more than me", "Life is unfair" etc.), the information will not affect your happiness at all.

I believe the article is flawed as it seems to require of us to artificially restrict the amount of information we are exposed to, when the key is to manage one's perception of the information.

Seems that many Chinese have developed a strong "Keeping up with the Joneses" mentality lately; I would suspect that is the source of the unhappiness, rather than the wiring in their new homes.

Cause resentment because one is at the bottom of the pyramid

OR

Create guilt because one is at the top of the pyramid

Add to that the realization that very few people are "self-made" and timing, family, culture and conditioning play a huge role in success and you have a recipe for self-doubt/flagellation.

In my case, I just hit a wall when self-preservation kicked in and said "I WILL BE HAPPY, DAMMIT!". I still work at projects I think will make the world better, but don't let their success or failure cloud my feelings. I'm content most of the time.

Some cultures (usually found in developing nations) celebrate happiness more than others because they live in the moment. Some countries have amazing geography and lots of options to be in nature in a matter of minutes after leaving your house. This is why I live in Brazil and why I left the US.

But it's different than to being sucked into a 'lifestyle', the mass media throws at you as stated in the article for obvious reasons. I wished the author made this distinction.

What an obvious attempt at pulling at our heartstrings. Instead I just wanted to vomit.

http://pastebin.com/KnVgnjM3

(posted as a link since the text is kind of long)

The micro scale doesn't represent the macro scale. The relationship has not been proven. Long-term and short-term impact were not explored. Motivation models for happiness were not explored. Multiple repeatable cases where it was indeed information and not just "Bad stuff happens, here's a bunch of it at once" was not explored.

An underlying theme here is that knowing of less than favorable events in the world impacts your quality of happiness, and that people strive for happiness through greater consumerism and status. I flatly disagree with this whole premise. It's a lovely read, but it's (and I don't use this word often) total bunk.

May you never be satisfied, for the day when that happens is the day you cease living.

Kids are happy everywhere because they are carefree kids.