Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts on the matter:

- Happiness is fixed, perhaps. Short-term, it isn't (coke and hookers work!). Long-term, it is. People fall back to a baseline. So then, being smart doesn't help you.

- Dumb people might be misreporting their happiness. So smart people are making themselves happier, but all the studies are done on self-reported happiness, and the dumb people report that they are happier than they really are.

- There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom: if you're intelligent, you have good models. If you're wise, you make good decisions. You might think that you need to be intelligent to be wise, but you also need wisdom to navigate uncertainty, ie you need to exercise your decision making for when you don't have a good model. Dumb people have to do this a lot.

- It may just be that you can make yourself happier, but being intelligent doesn't give you differential access to the levers that you need. Eg to be happy maybe you need an active social life. Well, there's no particular reason having high IQ would help that. We generally have a tendency to think that IQ is a kind of magic substance that can do anything, but why would that be?

- Being smart could actively harm your happiness. I told my kid he needed to wait for his friends to grow up, they will stop only caring about football (luckily the prophesy came true and they are having a great time in their little nerd group). Another friend has the same problem with his kid, they just don't have the social ties available yet. BTW, I really do think there's something to this one, you need the social side to be happy. There's a few HN people who also give me that "finally found my tribe" vibe when they write. I met a guy on the train who saw me coding, and he had the same story.

It’s really not fixed; you can easily train your mind to be less neurotic and more joyful

It really is wild the degree to which you can simply dictate your own mood.

If I catch myself feeling grumpy or down, it is pretty easy to reframe and summon genuine happiness.

Even during intense suffering of various kinds. To a large extent you get to decide which universe you live in.

This is a bit surprising to hear.

So what should I have done when my parents died?

Ah come on that’s not what they’re talking about. Feeling a bit down — sure some upbeat music may nudge you out of it, but loss like losing people isn’t being fixed with a mixtape.

There is no "should". Everyone grieves differently. Whats right for GP commenter isn't necessarily right for you.

That said, what do you want to optimize for? Time spent grieving? Money spent on the funeral(s)? Money spent on therapy? Time spent in therapy? Lack of having to change as a person? Having to change as a person? Grieving "correctly"? (to reiterate from above there is no right way, but some people think if they're not doing it "right" there's something wrong with them.)

Just not killing yourself from the pain of it all in the next 5 years?

Honoring their lifes properly? Doing a good job of stepping into your new role in your family? Getting revenge for some transgression you can no longer tell them they did to you?

Maybe feeling less sad?

I'm sorry, grief is the worst.

To attack the sadness directly, which is a result of chemicals in your brain, there are specific other chemicals you can add that will raise serotonin and norepinephrine and also dopamine. It's not the most sustainable solution, however. Other ways of boosting those neurotransmitters include running real hard, getting a tattoo, having sex.

Processing the emotions, possibly with the help of a professional, is the recommended long term solution though. It won't bring them back, but it'll help understand the pain, and hopefully heal it.

> It really is wild the degree to which you can simply dictate your own mood.

This is not a universally true experience, and it's sometimes even hard for me to believe that there are people like you out there who are able to change their mood just by thinking differently. My own experience is that doing that is about as helpful as thinking differently about how hungry I am works to sate my hunger. I can ignore it to some extent, but it doesn't change in kind.

> To a large extent you get to decide which universe you live in.

It's a naïve view of the spectrum of human experience.

I'm a believer in the HSP theory. Some of us are wired to feel things more strongly at a low level. There's only so much the thinking part of the brain can do before getting completely exhausted and overwhelmed.

Not to mention the vast difference in life experiences. From the yuppie that has everything in life, to the person from a broken home who had to fight for everything. Or simply someone that has children vs the childless adult.

I have friends who are like what you describe. From my pov, they seem to lack much depth of emotion at all. And they don't even realise it. But I think it's also just how each of us are.

This sound like Barney from How I met your mother.

But are you sure it isn't your general mental state that is able to handle it? E.g. the chemicals in your brain allow you to reconfigure yourself like that?

I haven't been able to reframe anything, even though years of therapy, however I have been in different states, that I think are clearly introduced chemically.

E.g. I go running, I get a high for 20 minutes, I feel like I can handle anything and I'm on top of the World, however after 40 minutes I get a comedown and I despair everything. Unable to fight any of it.

Similar things with drugs. If I feel bad, I feel bad. If I feel good, I feel good. If somehow I am feeling bad and feeling like I could feel good again, it's probably because my chemical state changed to allow for that...

I feel like I'm slave to my chemical state, and my thoughts whether they are productive or not productive are coming after the fact, and I'm observer to all of it. When I try to reframe or fight the thoughts consciously it just causes unease and tension and will make it worse.

I think this is a little silly and stretching the language a bit.

I agree entirely with what you're saying about being able to reframe a mood. I feel relatively in control of my emotions, and am normally the person to try bring a positive spin on a bad situation.

However, the happiness I get from reframing something is exactly that. It's "happiness", relative to the immediate recent sadness.

If you accept that there's any nuance or scale to happiness, then I think it's incorrect to say that happiness relative to reframing something bad is equivalent to "genuine happiness" of e.g. the success of a loved one, or a major life celebration.

> It’s really not fixed; you can easily train your mind to be less neurotic and more joyful

How?

IDK if it's evidence based (or up to your standards), but i've heard gratitude practices, cardiovascular exercise, gut biome are 3 of many potential interventions?

CBT worked well for me.

The main thing is to start understanding your own neurotic patterns. We constantly move between wanting and avoiding things, from small attachments to our thoughts and habits, to strong dislikes. The more you understand this pattern, the more you can let go, and the less your daily feelings will disturb you. As that happens, a natural joy will start to appear. The truth is, 90% of what triggers your emotions today will be gone in hour, 98% within a day, and 99.9% won’t matter at all when you die.

The biggest step is realizing this pattern. Training it comes through awareness. Then, stepping outside yourself helps a lot. Doing things for others, like helping with food serving or similar directly useful things, takes you out of that self-focused mode where everything is about what you want or need. It feels like a hack, but doing things for others is natural for humans.

Something that's common in the west: an empty feeling, feels for people like the truth. But it's often a self oriented way of thinking with a subtle form of aversion. This is why often things like sports, friends or helping, can take people out of this way of thinking instantly.

Meditation can also help. I’d focus on less rational forms, with compassion and visualization, since they make it easier to connect with a sense of meaning. The issue here with the Western approach is that it's all goal oriented: less stress & more success. This goal oriented approach reinforces self-obsessed thinking; which is why lots of spiritual paths tend to focus on doing it for others to avoid this trap. In the beginning this is a bit of a trick; at some point it will be natural.

And lastly, understanding that life moves in waves, with ups and downs that always come and go, helps you stay less attached to your own thoughts & feelings in your reaction to life's events; and then life events will have less impact on your mood.

A few mindful experiences with psychedelics, used with the intention to see life’s patterns, can also offer insight. They can help you find meaning instead of falling into nihilism when you realise everything is impermanent (which most people already have).

The difference with such an approach vs western conventional therapy is that it's not focused on the content of your thoughts & feelings but starting to let go of the seriousness of them in general. They are not mutually exclusive.

This was a helpful reminder of a particular world view, thank you.

I think some intelligent people are intelligent because of a need for stimulation: they need more new information, so they learn lots and keep learning and the world throws more learnings at them because they get good at it.

Intelligence becomes an emergent property of dealing/distracting from that craving for more information - a beneficial addiction.

So when someone like that stops doing stuff, or that flow of new information and experiences slows with life, that craving/withdrawal becomes sadness.

One solution is to feed the addiction. Learn more. Do stuff. Don't have any stuff to do? Well other people do! Do their stuff for them!

Yeah intelligent people are good problem solvers & they naturally assume you can solve your way to happiness by a thought, plan, new goal, idea etc. Where it's mostly about letting go & living.

We often also get attached to ways of operating that brought success in certain fields of life. Often subtly tying their self-worth & safety to this identity. This is hardest to see often, these subtle identities we create to navigate life. They help in certain ways, but then also limit us in others. If we become more aware of these patterns, we can keep them when useful, and take them less serious when they are limiting.

What do you mean on baseline? Generally speaking, I’m definitely less happy post COVID, than before 2020. I met the first utterly broken, toxic person in my life, whom I allowed to hurt me. This is on top of all the bat shit crazy things happened with me that year, and not just because of COVID. I’m a different person since then. My baseline definitely moved, as I mean.

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