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Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

I've read many articles and books on this subject and not a single one of them had any effect on my life. It's usually just a list of things that - according to the author (and every author of course has different opinion) - will make you happy. It's bullshit, there is no "golden solution" for everyone. Reading such articles will make you even more unhappy, because now you've the whole list of things and you feel like if you don't achieve them all, you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

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What can one do to a live happy life is a very hard question to answer for anyone. Life is fundamentally absurd, we are yet to find what this whole madness is all about. Most people choose ( or fall into) an ideology to give meaning and structure life. To cite an example of an ideology the family man - fulfillment in raising a child, having a family, bunch of friends to hang out with, a job to sponser all this. This is the default ideology of most people and societies built around this. There are many others , 'the religious man', 'the scholar/intellectual', 'social worker' , 'the rational man who votes' etc. You have to find an ideology that you find comfortable brainwashing yourself with, doesn't matter which one as long as the delusion is strong enough that you can convince yourself that you are living your life to reach a certain goal or a purpose.

Maybe the closest writing to fit your view is Daniel Gilbert[1]. Basically, humans have a biological "set point" for happiness and it's different for everyone. It is not affected by winning the lottery, or getting paralyzed from a car accident, or doing meta-analysis on what happiness is (such as reading self-help books about achieving happiness.) Those events may affect happiness in the short term but not in the long term. People will eventually gravitate back to their predisposed set point of happiness.

If I agree with the above, I can set aside the quest for ultimate measurement of absolute happiness (e.g. Solon's "Count no man happy until he be dead."[2]) . However, I can still do things that affect relative happiness. When I stopped consulting for boring ERP software, my quality-of-life definitely improved. Again, I won't know if I'm ultimately "happy" until I'm lying on my deathbed. Nevertheless, it feels like I got a little victory from changes like that.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon

I agree you can do things that affect your relative happiness, but the key here is that it's YOU who must know what the things are - everyone have different needs and you can't fit all in one model. Some prefer to have interesting, but lower paying job, some doesn't care as long as it pays for their hobbies - and both can be happy, but switch their lives and both will be miserable. So if one would give advice to the other on how to be happy, it wouldn't help a bit, because they've different perspective on life.

I'm not saying that the author is right or wrong, but your anecdotal evidence doesn't prove that reading about how to be happy will make you unhappy.

Science has consistently shown that good health and relationships correlate to happiness. It has even been shown that there is a causal effect (ie, if you start exercising you start feeling better).

Someone unaware of that fact may read a post like this and decide to exercise for 30 mins everyday.

> It's bullshit, there is no "golden solution" for everyone.

The science of happiness (not their philosophy) is new and it is in a prehistoric stage. Think about the history of chemistry and the alchemist adventures!

The post doesn't invalidate your opinion, just reading and article doesn't make you happy except for a few enlightened ones. But, knowing the correlation using a lot of data can help you in this search.

I've found that the main reason why so many of these articles and books don't have an effect on my life is that I read them and then forget to apply what they suggest.

Sure, it's possible that many of them suggest approaches to 'happiness' that do not apply to me, but I really don't know because I never took the time to actually spend, say, 30 days committing to their advice. And my impression is that this seems to be the case for most people who bother with 'self-improvement'.

(That said, I'm not disagreeing with you. Finding what makes specifically you happy is important.)

It's really not bullshit, I think. The stuff about fear rings totally true to me, it aligns perfectly with my experiences. But, I know that being on the other side of it, it can sound like a bunch of hokum. (That's part of the reason why people keep living that way - the logic is pretty watertight.)

I've read books about it too, and not been helped that much beyond perhaps gaining some insight, or setting expectations of what happiness is like. But that doesn't invalidate the information in the books, it tells you that merely reading about happiness does not make it so. You can read all the books about how to be a great basketball player, but you won't improve until you actually get on a court and shoot some shots.

The posted article acknowledges that happiness is in large part a genetic trait, and in other large part the result of life history (parenting, health, etc).

>The posted article acknowledges that happiness is in large part a genetic trait

Citation needed. Preferably not a citation that can be countered by another, opposite, citation.

Author himself identifies this problem in the concluding paragraph: seeking happiness as an end might be counterproductive

Did you merely read them or did you also apply what was said in those readings? Have you also consulted a specialist?

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