Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

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The best changes I’ve made in my life are 1. Completely removing alcohol. 2. Removing highly processed foods and refined sugars. 3. Accepting myself for who I am, faults and all. I can’t change certain things about myself, so I just need to accept that and focus on the things I can change. Maybe I can’t change them today or tomorrow, but I can always work towards future change.

And the most important for me of all - gratitude. I’m finding that if I apply gratitude to thoughts and actions throughout the day, very little if anything can shake me now. It feels like a superhuman power. Motorist cuts me up… meh.. at least I’m not in a hurry like that guy. Grumpy because I had a bad night sleep… I’m thankful I had a warm bed and roof over my head and warm shower to jump in. Injured myself running… at least I have legs to run. The effect of the above on my life has been profound. My happiness levels are through the roof and I’m achieving and doing things I never thought possible as I’m not allowing negative emotions and thoughts any space in my life.

Not saying this will work for anyone else, but it does for me.

I'm curious where you picked up the insight about gratitude. It reminds me a lot of insights found in stoicism, which I've long enjoyed reading about.

But recently I have been perusing "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", and finding that a huge amount of it also strikes me as being just mass-market stoicism.

So it has made me curious whether it's a direct influence, or whether it's just a case of multiple people or philosophies coming to basically the same conclusions independently.

So I'm curious whether your philosophy of grateful contentment for what you have comes via a direct influence, or was arrived at independently.

In any case, it's an excellent practice, but one I nonetheless often have trouble executing myself :)

> I'm curious where you picked up the insight about gratitude.

It’s a common idea (which isn’t to say it’s invalid or wrong). If you’re interested in studies on happiness or living a “good” life you’re bound to bump into it more than once. Quick example: do a web search for “TED talk gratitude” and you’ll find more links than you know what to do with.

Yeah, but I'm always curious where specific people specifically came across it!

It really is the ultimate "life hack". Free happiness: learn to enjoy what you already have.

It’s not a trick. More like deliberate training like learning to read or basic math. Not coincidentally, a young age is the best time to learn it as it pays dividends throughout your entire life.

The best parents are the ones that instill that into their kids. Some will scoff and say that it’s teaching to accept mediocrity. Not at all, it’s about making the most of what you have, nothing to do with striving for more.

Ingraining the ‘parable of the workers at the vineyard’ has been phenomenal at engraining gratitude for my kids. American’s default view of ‘fairness’ can be incredibly corrosive.

>‘parable of the workers at the vineyard’

Hearing that parable at Sunday mass multiple times as a youngster is one of the reasons why I stopped going to church at age 14 and have never been back.

>American’s default view of ‘fairness’ can be incredibly corrosive.

Can you elaborate on what this default view is? For example, Americans seem to have no problem with someone becoming a near-billionaire overnight from winning a multi-state lottery (Powerball, Mega Millions).

One level of the parable is around eternal gratitude. Probably the idea of gratitude didn’t cause you to stop, but catechesis in the US post WW2 was poor (to say it charitably), so your response wasn’t out of the ordinary.

American’s view of fairness breeds envy. Across every income level a vast majority want 10% more to be ‘happier.’ Once you have this ego death of sorts, it lets you easily step off the hedonistic treadmill, thus improving one’s life :)

We are motivated/concerned about lack more than what we have. So if you constantly criticize someone/others for imperfect, suboptimal behaviour, you are likely to criticize yourself too. Just paint the world with broad brush once a while, so that you calibrate away from cynicism and fault finding.

I found 1 really helped 3. I know longer had an excuse of alcohol creating a version of me. I just have said traits.

And then I got to work more on those.

Have you read ‘The Way of the Peaceful Warrior’ by any chance?

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