Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

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I got a PhD myself. And I think it's definitely at least partially true: I was told flat-out that I should stick to big-business style research (i.e. research areas with large, complex and directed research plans) and forget following my own curiosity. Of course, once you get tenure in places where it exists or you make it, you can deviate from that.

It's even worse in industry, where I worked after academia. I felt like I was using 5% of my brain to do things I was bored to death with. This isn't just me either: many of the people I've worked with feel the same, including virtually all my fellow PhD students.

I feel like the only thing keeping it going is the novelty of working in new places, meeting new people, and getting new projects. It's almost as if we have a basal attraction to novelty because it's a survival instinct, but we have distilled life so that novelty is the only thing left, stripped of substance long ago when we traded thought for automation.

Of course, it's even harder to see it because we have "propagandists" (i.e. then 1% of people who have carved out a protective bubble for themselves due to a combination of luck, ingenuity, and gaming the system) that say that amazing things are happening.

If you think:

- only 1% of people are happy

- they are happy because they are lucky

- every happy person is a propagandist

You need immediate recalibration of your worldview. You only live once, and you ought to be happy.

People managed to be happy throughout human history because it’s a skill.

EDIT:

I wanted to add that I meant the above in good faith and not as an attack. I used to be unhappy too. But I learnt:

- every moment doesn't need to be hedonic bliss

- life doesn't have to be easy

- one's work doesn't need to meet all of one's needs

... and you can still be happy. Human beings are extremely tough and adaptable, but that is a capability that has to be exercised.

I think a lot of people aren't necessarily happy because they're highly skilled at it, but because its a default state of being. If it was purely a skill then environmental or biological factors wouldn't play any role.

If anything, we learn to be unhappy. It's no secret how toxic academia can be - I would say the original commenter's personal observation that only 1% of people are happy is probably because many people around them are deeply unhappy.

I know I felt this way when I was in a different career. Once I moved out of that field, I was astounded to find out that people are actually not depressed most of the time. I won't lie, the improved financial situation that followed was a big factor - it's definitely easier to be happy when you're not poor!

So, I agree, a recalibration is in order. But that might involve removing yourself from certain social groups as much as it requires a thought pattern adjustment.

I never claimed that only 1% of people are happy. You are reading my comment far too literally. People can find meaning in their lives independent of their work, even if they hate their job. Nor do I think that people are happy because they are lucky, or that people who are happy are true propagandists.

I only meant that not many people can find true meaning in their work only, and that this phenomenon is far from a theoretical optimum. Of course, people that find meaning in their work aren't literal propagandists. Only, their efforts and enthusiasm is promoted as propaganda as an emergent property of the system that needs their efforts in order to support a pathological system.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy".

There is a bit of a problem with the Internet tending to amplify negative views, giving you the impression that everyone is unhappy - no, it's just that all the unhappy people are on the Internet all the time.

Well, there are also the polls and official stats putting depression, unhappiness, and loneliness, at record levels...

Here's major depression - and that's as diagnosed and treated:

"An estimated 21.0 million adults in the United States had at least one major depressive episode. This number represented 8.3% of all U.S. adults"

Maybe people are depressed because of the ideas that:

- happiness comes from outside yourself

- the world is fucked (people who think this tend to blame the economy, the environment, the threat of nuclear war)

- humans are weak and ineffectual, so we can't change the environment or ourselves

Why do these ideas exist? Because people trying to sell us on voting this way or that (illegal immigrants are ruining the country! big bad corporates are ruining the environment!) or spending our money a certain way first have to convince us that the status quo is unacceptable and that they alone can effect change.

Get rid of these ideas and watch your well-being skyrocket.

>Why do these ideas exist?

Because people are not blind.

And while happiness needs the "inside yourself", it also needs the outside. Especially the outside that affects the inside, like reduce socialization and spaces to meet causing loneliness, social media and "personal highlight reels" posts from thousands that one sees causing feeling of inadequacy and missing out, an economic climate that brings precarity and uncertainty, etc.

Of course if you e.g. make $200+ plus stock bonuses and such a year in a cushy IT job you might dispute the latter is a thing, and if you're an introverted "hacker" type, you might dispute the former is a thing as well. It's like billionaires saying "everybody can succeed, just look at my and my unicorn 1 in 1000000 company".

And while we can be happy even with bad external conditions (e.g. third world poverty) it's very possible that we cannot be happy with all kinds of bad external conditions, e.g. a damaged social fabric, widespread atomization of society, meaningless work, status and income uncertainty in a consumerist (not a third world, where everybody is poor anyway) society, and so on.

I don't think they made the claim that only 1% of people are happy, but 1% are "propagandists" as defined by having carved out protections for themselves. Which sort of carries weight if looking at wealth distribution of the global economy and discounting the likelihood of people having a fulfilling life below the top 1% wealth level. But it's silly to discount that 99% of the population in my opinion.

What we struggle with is emotions and removing them from who we are.

It is very, very subtle but oh so simple (but not easy)

>If you think: -only 1% of people are happy, they are happy because they are lucky, every happy person is a propagandist, you need immediate recalibration of your worldview. You only live once, and you ought to be happy.*

The universe doesn't give a fuck, and having one life is not a guarantee or a contract to anything, much less "hapiness" (itself ill-defined).

The fact that the universe isn't capable of giving a fuck one way or the other is immensely invigorating to me. It means it's all up to me. There's no god or gods with their thumbs on the scale one way or the other.

(Life doesn't have to be fair for your outcomes to be all up to you, by the way. You're dealt a hand of cards, and you can play them well or you can play them poorly.)

That only helps if playing your cards well is enough to be successful. For many people it isn't.

Well, the configuration of thumbs on the scale is set when you’re born. You could be born in a poor/rich family, healthy/disfunctional family/country, you are inheriting some generic material that may play well or not in the environment where you grow up and so on. Yes, some of it is up to you later on in life but getting there in the first place is not a given.

That's exactly what I said.

How you play your cards is up to you, and how you feel about it is also up to you.

this was so me.

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