Hacker News Reader

Very insightful.

I have to point out one little oversight though:

> Seriously, we need depressed folks, autistic folks, OCD folks, and all these other kinds of people in our world in order for progress to happen. Happy people won't fix what they don't think is broken!

It almost sounds like you're implying that people are either happy, or have one of n classifiable psychological disorders. The reality is that the disorders are statistical classifications that fit an infinite number of shades of the human condition. Umbrellas.

Personally I consider myself hapilly-awake? I guess I know we live in a very suboptimal world but I am happy to exist and do my best to change what I can about it.

Thanks for catching that oversight, I didn't intend to imply that people with currently acknowledged mental disorders are unhappy. Hey, I'm an aspie and I'm not terribly unhappy about it, either. But I sure am dissatisfied (i.e. unhappy) with the way the world around me is.

The kind of happiness that "higher ups" want to propagate, on the other hand, often involves accepting the status quo and just trying to fit in.

I think you accidentally highlighted a problem our society, at least our media, tries to portray in that "depression is a mental disorder". You only have to see the commercials for anti-depressants to see this.

The world becomes very easy for government when you can lump every unhappy or disgruntled citizen as having a mental disorder, so you can medicate and silence them.

Governments are in the very uneasy position of being who the peasantry get angry at. Feudal lords understood this danger very well. The middle-eastern and north-african dictators have been learning this. How long before our own politicians have to learn this lesson before we get our fair and responsible government back?

It won't take guns to topple our government. It will take people protesting. If you can unite a fraction of a populace, you can topple industries and topple governments simply by orchestrating where your dollars go. Want an end to walmart and their policies? Get 10% of their shoppers to start buying from Target or whomever who treat their workers better, or support local communities better. If it happens country wide, walmart has too much equity sunk into brick and mortar that they can't rapidly restructure. 10% less income from stores across the board mean stores taking losses, means stores breaking even. Lay off staff and you lose more customers. Close stores, and you lose more customers. Even if you close stores, it's going to be 6 months to a year to get the equity back into working capital.

If 10% of the population with held taxes. That's 230 billion dollars in unpaid taxes. Governments will change quickly when you can't do anything to penalize these people. Fine them? They wont pay, and there's way too many to effectively jail, and if you do you lose even more taxes from what they would spend on food and goods.

Exactly. Given some of the things that happen in our world depression is a perfectly normal human state. Get meds if you want them, but don't feel like you're not normal just because you're not smiling.

I thought something similar myself, but what I don't understand is this:

If the powers that be just want to keep us happy to paper over the shittiness that their regime brings, why are they so adamant about banning drug use? If I were in charge, I'd see that as a cheap way to buy the population happiness of the kind that makes them not want to rebel.

In fact, in the Brave New World world, that's exactly what they do -- give everyone drugs so they're happy enough not to challenge the SQ.

So what gives?

In Brave New World, everyone uses drugs to get happy, the drug itself is relatively safe and doesn't hurt productivity, and everyone thinks it's perfectly normal to use drugs.

In the actual world, only a subset of the population uses drugs frequently, only a subset of available drugs can be used without serious side effects (we haven't invented the perfect Soma yet), and there is a lot of moralizing about drug use. Under these circumstances, nothing the government does will make everyone happy, so the government optimizes for the happiness of the voters who matter the most: conservative parents who get all worried about their kids doing ecstasy.

Although some geniuses have mental disorders, don't make the mistake of thinking that all people with mental disorders are geniuses or have special insights - we're just run-of-the-mill people that run the gamut of abilities and personalities. And "happy" is not the right word to use for depression. As Peter Kramer said in his book, AGAINST DEPRESSION, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but resilience. If you suffer from true clinical depression, you can appreciate this distinction.

Agreed. Depression isn't about happiness versus sadness. Depression is about feeling so overwhelmed by everything in life, about every problem and issue being the same "volume" in your head and being unable to prioritize. This leads to a feeling of helplessness and impairment and withdrawal from decision making - a cycle that perpetuates itself.

Reminds me of how Lincoln dealt with depression: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/10/lincoln-...

If everyone is happy, then nothing is broken.