We are unhappy with our wants, because we are being overpromised on how much happiness those wants will deliver. Advertising and politicians are probably the worst offenders here.
We desire and pursue certain wants (big house, luxurious car, tropical vacation) only to later get disappointed with their quality and utility once we have them. Then we report in the form that we are unhappy because we don’t use the two extra bedrooms that cost extra to heat, that luxurious car costs fortune in insurance and fuel, and the tropical vacation turned out to be a nightmare with roaches, bedbugs and salmonella outbreak.
On the career front I know many people who want to be in management but I doubt they know that management is not just a bigger salary and bossing people around. You often find yourself caught between executives and your team. Some then cry fowl because they feel they not getting respect they deserve and happiness is elusive.
Ex manager here who now independently consults with no employees (although sometimes I manage a small pool of contractors when work gets a little hectic).
I thought I wanted to move up the chain, until I found myself with a team of ~10 people, some of them managing people below them.
Completely miserable. I didn’t have much control over salary policies or promotions so I basically played middle person. What I learned is that it was my job to extract as much possible work out of my team at their current salaries without them quitting. Twice being told, “they’ll get raises soon, don’t worry!”
Those raises never came, the company restructured, a bunch of us lost our jobs, and I never took on a direct manager role again.
Learned this shit when my parents and teachers always pushing me to be whatever a "leader" is when you're 8 years old. Fucking horrible shit. I'll never be a leader/manager again in my life. Having to deal with a million different opinions and when something goes wrong it's all your fault.
Yeah, in middle management here... it's pretty much playing Malcolm in the middle. Also totally true on the "shit goes wrong it's all your fault" point.
I think it boils down to the rate of diminishing returns. A new house, car, and even a great vacation make you feel good, but it fades after a while. What really brings people happiness is novelty and as that fades, so does the happiness. True happiness comes with contentment, but that’s easier said than done.
Find joy in what you have, but also in the experience of striving for more with the understanding that failure is always an option. Compare yourself only to who you were yesterday, no one else.
I once read a great comment on HN when a similar topic came up (I cannot find the comment). In short, a guy in Australia struck it rich. Turned his ranch into a tropical island like set up. After some time got fed up and went to live on a real tropical island. A couple of years later he was back in Australia tired of the island lifestyle. The point of the post was that variety is probably what keeps us happy. Too much of one thing and most of us get bored.
This makes me think: is sustained happiness even possible? I certainly haven't experienced it myself. Given limited resource and time, I find it really hard to meet that goal.
Humans are not made to be happy. That's the one and only 'disappointment' to tattoo onto your brain, so that you don't spend your life thinking a utopia aka engineering happiness is possible or a good idea.
People are 'unhappy' because they're not at the top of the social hierarchy. The people at the top are not happy because everyone wants a piece of them and they get no peace.
I think the social hierarchy thing is less about being on top and more about being a fundamentally important character in a larger story. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that theoretically there's some arrangement in which everyone could feel as though they're exactly where they should be, and are playing exactly the role they should within that story. Not a supporting role, or a subservient role, but a role which was really THEM. People don't want to be a pawn in somebody else's game in order to be respected.
How exactly you get there is totally beyond me, and I'm not entirely sure how to articulate what I mean by "story". But I think you lose something when you give up on trying to engineer stories with happy endings. I don't think you can really live your life fully unless you have some sort of hope for the future.
I have a different out take. I try to always be happy, choose it, it’s an attitude. Let the little things make you happy. A joke amount friends, a smile, A tasty ice cream cone, whatever, “live in the moment”
But never be satisfied, always strive for a little more. That’s human nature. The trick is to strive for growth, and it doesn’t have to be for material things. Strive to lean more, to grow your career, to save up or budget for that thing you want, or to travel to that place. Never stop exploring. That’s the key. You gotta channel that strive for something that won’t leave u empty when u get there, and realize that voice is always gonna be in the back of your head saying, “well now what do I want”
We didn’t become the dominant species on this planet because contentment was easy to find.
Humans are designed to always want more, even if they have more than anyone alive ever has.
Understanding this can lead to contentment because whenever you find yourself unhappy, it’s much easier to be ok with it if you realize that’s the natural state of being.
Yes. It is great to feel happy. But also great to be unhappy (in measure) The true purpose is simply to live and experience life to its fullest extent. Chasing or expecting happiness as normal is a direct path to misery.
Anyone interested in learning more about this idea should look up Saghguru.
Maybe this is a fundamental flaw that needs to be engineered out of a large percentage of the population if we are to survive? This seems dystopian to me and a better solution would be to embrace our desire to grow and expand out to the solar system/stars.
I don't think that's true. There was 100,000 years of human behavior before we started to do that (i.e. before civilization and expansion). It seems more like a cultural thing.
Most civilizations that were content with their way of life were more than likely exterminated at the hands of civilizations that skewed towards unhappiness. Or exterminated by their contentedness.
I don't think happiness is caused by (or diminished upon) on material goods. I also don't think material goods are objectively good or bad (although I have certainly bought things that actively make me happier).
Happiness is an eternal conflict between what we have, what we think we should have and what we see others having. Even if you're at the top of the totem pole, happiness isn't guaranteed - where's the joy of having everything, only to see others struggling?
I've always wondered whether we should pursue what we want or what we need. For a long time I had no definite answer, but then I realized pursuing what we need is more important.
In fact, this comes in part from this understanding that there's no good or bad, rather there are things that make us happy and things that make us sad. These are not always consistent though. For example, we might get sad at something which later we find out was - based on rational and logical considerations - actually a good thing, or become happy at something which is in fact a bad thing.
Our "wants" promise us "happiness", but the joy we get from that is most likely short-term. On the other hand, pursuing our "needs" brings about "good" things in our lives, the joy of which is more long-term. And while getting what we need doesn't necessarily makes us happy, not getting it does in fact make us sad.
Two problems exist though: (1) while we think we know what we want, we might in fact have no clue as to what we really want, thus always follow wrong leads; (2) we can only know what we need after we have achieved it. It takes a lot of self-knowledge to really figure out "where we are supposed to be", "what we are supposed to do", and "when". The answers to these questions tell us what we actually "need".
Example: a person with talents in music but interested in math (in which he/she is only mediocre) is better off pursuing music as that is what he/she needs to do. What he/she wants to do is however, math. You tell me: wouldn't pursuing a dead-end job in math bring about an interminable series of sadness where the person realizes he/she can never be among the top math geniuses?
You kind of touched on points of this video, although from a different direction. Daniel Khaneman talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self, which is in charge, and how that relates to happiness.
This is nothing new and it is not unique to modern advertising or politics. Important philosophical and theological texts going back to ancient times are very clear on how unfulfilling material desires ultimately are. To make it even worse, our own desires are terrible predictors of what will make us happy. Lessons from psychology abound. Winning the lottery often ruins peoples lives. Couples in arranged marriages report similar satisfaction to those with chosen partners. When presented with more choices, we are less happy with our final decision. The deeper you dig, the “worse” it gets.
> To understand the limitation of things, desire them. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
advertising is also ultra efficient at pulling all possible string to make you think "YOU" want something, even though it's barely pavlovian reflex and emotional traps to make you open your wallet.
I wonder what the default emotion is of most other creatures, specifically other mammals? To me, happiness is just a signal, just like sadness, anger, etc. It's your body telling you something is "good" or "bad" but isn't necessarily a natural feeling to be had 24/7.
If I look at my cat he seems happy having: Endless time to sleep/think, affection from his feline and human family, reasonably comfortable shelter, steady supply of food/water, sunshine, the freedom to go outside and explore. Seemingly little desire to turn on my computer/TV (outside of a brief fleeting curiosity), moving into my neighbors house, colonizing mars, listening to the news about starving cats in other parts of the world/city, or doing any "work" beyond directly helping him achieve the items on the first list. If I'm being honest that probably sums up the necessities for my own personal happiness.
General life satisfaction (which is the statistic mentioned in the article, in the context of happiness levels before and after the deletion of Facebook) is distinctly different from the acute joy one feels in the heat of victory (or more cynically, after taking stimulant drugs).
The default emotion could be relatively neutral, but the difference between happiness and sadness, in the "general life satisfaction" sense, is in the baseline.
A satisfied animal is not a competitive one in the game of survival and natural selection. We are cursed to forever be unsatisfied because that's what it takes to survive.
And then there’s the fact than any feeling that persists for longer than a certain period becomes normality. So you are no longer happy because you become desensitized to the endorphins in your brain (or produce less) and go back to neutral. That’s when you need more.
Since happiness can be traced back to chemicals in your brain you can see it just like any drug. You build up resistance and even if from the outside it looks like you have everything you might still be not happy.
I remember asking myself these questions years ago when I read an article about some physically impaired people being just as happy as able bodied ones, and one guy who left the Beatles before they became huge also being perfectly happy and content. Probably more so than the rest of the Beatles :).
I only have my anecdotal experience to draw from, but I've noticed that having a network of strong relationships is the one factor whose impact on my happiness hasn't seemed to dull over the years.
I think you are right. Might be because such a network is flexible, provides what you need, when you need it, and it only appreciates with time. Unlike say a car or a new phone which quickly depreciate and rarely adapt (can be adapted) to your future needs.
"Economists and other happiness researchers consistently find that longer commutes are associated with unhappiness. Yet people still pay quite a lot to live in far-flung exurbs."
This feels like an over simplification — the article makes it sound like the individuals don't weigh the benefits correctly.
Anecdotally know a few people in this position who do this because they have to get up earlier but their kids grow up beside woods & heaths rather than in suburbs/city. So you've people doing something which makes themselves unhappier because it makes their family happier (in theory) which they get happiness / satisfaction from.
If it's possible to desire things without happiness, what is the evolutionary rationale for happiness at all? Maybe what we call "happiness" is only one type of positive feedback among many of which we might be less aware.
Short-term boosts to wellbeing might make sense in a short-term world where everything is scarce. If you don't reset to become back to normal, what impetus is there to find another meal?
If a person embraces an intellectually wimpy evolutionistic metaphysics versus merely evolution as such as a means of explaining e.g. the diversity of life, then none of this really has an answer as there is truly no up, down, right, wrong, etc. Evolutionistic metaphysics begins with the presupposition that everything is purposeless and meaningless and so precludes the possibility of happiness as even a real thing.
However, if a person manages to finally free himself from that bogus, high school caliber metaphysics and recover telos, you will stand a chance of coming to understand happiness in at least eudaimonic terms, that is to say, as the same as completion.
I don't think economists really have such a narrow idea of utility. Usually it is applied in abstract models, where utility is predefined (like a lottery where you can win money, and the amount you win is used as the utility - no need to consider how happy it might make the theoretical player).
For the real world, I think evolutionary aspects have to be taken into account. A single actor may not act rational, but in the long term, the actors making the rational choice will prevail by the power of evolution. So rational choices will be made in the long run, even if it may not even be deliberation of the actors.
Also, don't forget that happiness research itself may also be wrong. I think the classic about people without children supposedly being less happy than people with children points in that direction. By the standard research methodology, watching Netflix on the couch all the time would probably make people the most happy.
> More egalitarian economists will tend to value the utility of the poor and disadvantaged more than the utility of the wealthy, but fundamentally it’s still about giving people what they desire.
That's not true, I think. What egalitarian economists would argue is that an extra dollar for the poor and disadvantaged buys a lot more utility than an extra dollar for the wealthy, and therefore (because said economist values their utility equally) extra dollars should go to the poor and disadvantaged.
(Though most economists shy away from interpersonal utility comparisons, which is what gives rise to the concept of pareto optimality.)
There's a passage from Existential Comics[0] that is relevant:
>Utilitarianism, as described by philosophers such as Bentham, Mill, and Singer, is roughly the idea that morality should be based purely on what causes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In his novel, Notes From the Underground, Dostoyevsky made a strong objection to this style of ethics, imploring us to imagine a world where Utilitarianism as a project was finished. The perfect world was created and it was known what would make us the most happy. He said at this point, the human would rebel, and reject the system. He claimed that if there was a single value that was held most high - human freedom, then no moral system could be perfect, because it would rob us of that freedom. He claimed that if happiness was indeed the ultimate goal of life, then all of human history has been a mistake. That is to say, if you observe individual humans in history, they have seldom sought out happiness for themselves. They have instead sought out only what they sought out. What they desired was merely what they desired, and often it had nothing to do with happiness, be it art, ambition, conquest, to have children, or merely spite - what they wanted to do was what they wanted to do, and the further explanation of their desire making them "happy" was superfluous, and unrelated to what their desire to be free.
Articles about this usually focus on frivolous wants, like Facebook likes. But it's also true of more worthwhile wants. If you want to cure cancer, and eventually succeed, you won't be any happier after an initial rush. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be driven by such wants.
If you cure cancer, that's a gift that keeps on giving. Imagine knowing day-in and day-out your work was all worth it and you continually save N lives YoY.
And yet, it is a common criticism that Silicon Valley is focused on building cat photo sharing apps, or on demand services, or whatever is the current defining stereotypical trend, than tackling the “big problems”, such as cancer. So certainly our economic structure incentivizes frivolous wants, which make investors happy and founders wealthy.
Mythical Man-Month and all that, but progress would probably be a little less slow if more people and organizations are incentivized to work on the same problem. See the progress on self-driving vehicles.
Self-driving vehicles are complete hype - so far from a reality it's ridiculous that people here still seem so bullish on them.
Please show me a single vehicle that is anywhere close to being able to drive unassisted in all weather conditions and on any roads that a human would drive.
> unassisted in all weather conditions and on any roads that a human would drive
If that's your goalpost for impact then of course it looks bleak. A mechanical loom doesn't have to be able to handle every type of thread and pattern a human can to change the nature of production, goods, and employment. Likewise a truck that can drive on freeways on 80% of days (and nights) would already be huge.
A mechanical loom can be made so it doesn't kill people when it makes a minor mistake, and doesn't have to dodge unpredictable humans and random wildlife or other obstacles while working.
That freedom to mess up is a luxury that self-driving cars don't have, and makes all the difference.
People on here seem to think that a self-driving car only has to be safer than a human in order to be viable (which is bar that isn't close to having been reached in itself), but in reality humans are held legally responsible when their driving kills people.
If a self-driving car kills someone, then the manufacturer is responsible, not the owner of the car who wasn't driving so can't possibly be responsible.
Otherwise we need to have a conversation as a society on what liability we will accept, because I know that I don't want to be the one paying for the deaths caused by these car companies playing fast and loose with people's safety in order to capture the "autopilot" market.
You seem to be bringing up the danger and uncertainty around liability as an obstacle for the adoption of self driving vehicles, thus making them "far from a reality" / "complete hype", right?
As sad as it is, I'm not so sure that the economic incentives around automating truck drivers won't win over a few lives in the end. I'd be curious what vegas odds would be on self driving cars. I wouldn't bet against it.
People are bullish on them because they don't need to get anywhere near that bar to be useful. A car that can drive itself only on well maintained freeways during the day in good weather is still incredibly useful.
All we've seen so far is tarted-up driver assist systems that sometimes suddenly decide they don't want to be in control anymore, killing the actual driver or whoever happens to be unlucky enough to be in front of the vehicle.
It's all hype.
The problem is too difficult to solve with current technology without drastically changing the roads and removing humans altogether.
Rio Tinto was able to get it working with a drastically limited scope on closed roads with infinite money.
>Autonomous haul trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. They use pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and to know actual locations, speeds and directions of other vehicles at all times.
Regardless of their product viability, doubtless an immense amount of advancement has occurred in the last five years because of interest- economically driven- in the field. Imagine if similar incentives existed for other hard problems.
I’ve pursued some worthwhile wants in the past, and I was surprised about how much they satisfied me. I think deep down it wasn’t the things that I acquired that made me happier, but the effort I took into taking care of myself that made me feel comforted.
Obviously, that’s likely not the case with every desire, but it’s something that has struck me in the past few years.
Research actually suggests that memorable experiences do yield sustained happiness, whereas transient ones or simply material goods do not. A handful of Facebook likes would probably not make you very happy in the longer run, but having your cure for cancer reach top spot on HN just might.
>Research actually suggests that memorable experiences do yield sustained happiness
I agree with this. I have pictures from our holidays as a screensaver, and I feel a small happiness bump when I see them and think about the experiences.
IRL if you cured cancer almost no one would believe you and it would take decades before the treatment gained enough anecdotal steam to get officially recognized and FDA approved.
This is probably somehow coded in human's mechanism. People's happiness and sadness are relative, and it's all dynamic. Most of those who won a really big lottery don't last happy as long as they thought. Most of those who lost their legs will accept the truth after a while and find it's bad but it's not all that bad.
This makes some people keep pursuing higher goals, while some other people find to get out of the loop is to enjoy their life right now.
Despite the fact that Bentham is the first name that comes into mind when speaking on utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill pushed the boundaries of it and actually addressed what utility is and how can it be measured. As article implies, the utility of a thing should be measured for each individual so that the person extract more happiness from it. I strongly suggest to read Mill’s utilitarianism if someone is looking more information about this topic.
“Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they’re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness.”
I'm out of years of mental, physical, joblessness issues. I just took a newb car mechanic position. It was exhausting, sometimes problematic (difficult to mesh programmer precision fetishism with mechanics regular brute force approach)... but there's a deep bliss in forgetting what I/you want and just do things. The balance is subtle.
"One of these things is Facebook, by far the world's largest social-networking site. In a recent paper, economists Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow investigated how much money they had to pay Facebook users in order to get them to deactivate the Facebook app for one or two months. They found that the median amount was $100, and the average was $180 (the latter being larger because a few users really loved Facebook).
This suggests that Facebook, which is free to use, generates a huge amount of utility — more than $370 billion a year in consumer surplus in the U.S. alone. This bolsters the argument of those who believe that free digital services have added a lot of unmeasured output to the global economy.
But Allcott et al. also found that the people who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant — equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.
Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they’re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness."
Another possibility is that your analysis is completely illogical and therefore wrong. People who quit facebook are self-selected. Their experiences doesn't necessarily reflect those who remain on the platform.
As I’ve gotten older I find that my wants are fewer, and the list of things I truly care about has gotten much shorter. I’m happy with what I have now and grateful for the basic things (family, health, work I enjoy).
Consider making as many good experiences as you can, rather than accumulating more things.
If you want the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, to the wrong degree, etc, then duh, of course you'll be unhappy. We are the heirs of thousands of years of thought on the subject and yet we walk around oblivious to millennia of wisdom. WE know better, of course, because we came later.
An obnoxious dogma of liberalism (as in Lockean philosophy, not as in liberal institutions -- a VERY important distinction as the latter does not require the former) seems to be that any desire is an axiomatically and unquestionable good always, with no reference to human nature and what human nature tells us is good. (I won't name the recent manifestations of the late stage liberal freak show.) Human nature is what allows us to determine whether a desire is disordered or not such a pica, pedophilia, or zoophilia, though as the full consequences of liberalism manifest, I would not be surprised if these will eventually be "discredited" as bigoted, narrow-minded, and hateful cultural and social constructions. Ideology, as always, is impervious and blind to reason, so I will no doubt be downvoted given how deeply the poison of Lockean thought has penetrated into our culture. When hedonism has possessed a man, there is not even the slightest willingness to consider the truth, and if he were to witness it, he would likely fail to recognize it because of how blinded he's become by the mindless pursuit of pleasure.
If you want to learn something about happiness, we have to look to insights of the classical tradition and not the lunacy that seized the world not 20 minutes ago. Pieper, for example, has written an excellent book on the four cardinal virtues. He's very lucid and speaks directly to the understanding. That's just the beginning.
You're probably going to be very unpopular with your opinion, but I think you're on to something. The Old Testament has the verse "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"(Jeremiah 17:9).
Basically the polar opposite of our modern society & every message we're sold. Christianity/ Atheism/ consumerism - whatever belief system you subscribe to has an arm that basically boils down to "do what makes you happy."
I'm not trying to get down on our current generation. If this truth was summed up in the Bible (regardless of your thoughts on the book), it's clearly a deeper reflection of human behavior. Happiness is hard.
Some things, very few things are genuinely wanted and we value them all along.
The rest that follows, not so much. Wanting to want is the fun, not getting what you want. Once you have it, you want something else, then the pursuit of wanting it.
The best you can do is inform people about known risks and benefits, as best as you can. For instance, I smoke, and I know that it’s bad, but I do it anyway because I know that I’ll enjoy life more than the years that I will lose.
I quit smoking several years ago and started putting in the work to repair my cardiovascular system. The overall improvement to my wellbeing and state of mind cannot be overstated. I gained far more than I lost. My only regret is not doing it a lot sooner.
you have no idea how shit your body and mind feels because of smoking. Your baseline when smoking is way lower than when you have a healthy cardiovascular system. Imagine climbing 10 flights of stairs without going out of breath. Running 10km daily without it showing. Living past 65 without carrying an oxygen tank.
I don't use social media, but I do sometimes wonder whether my iPhone has a net negative impact on my life. Has anyone tried downsizing to a flip phone for a few months to compare?
Company A makes a product that truly solves a need, as in, buying or consuming its cure, you have no further need to consume it ever again. There is true utility, but there is no further marginal utility to be gained from subsequent consumption. For example: a company selling cookwear that is so good that its pots and pans are handed down the generations. Once you hae a set you nor the one that inherits from you will ever have to buy cookwear again. Long term these companies fail because the eat their own market.
Company B makes a product that does not solve your need, but provides a mere temporary relief. If you want to keep your problem 'solved', you have to perpetually buy the relief. In the above cookwear example, sell pans that are 10 times cheaper than those of company A, but they only last for 2 years until they bend or crack, so you need to buy a new set of crappy pans every 2 years. Unlike A, company B does not usurp it's own market. They can in theory keep selling junk cookware forever. This is partly why we live in a world filled with crap that breaks all the time, but unfortunately there is even worse.
Company C is a more nefarious type of 'B' company. It's products increase the problem at the same time they provide the temporary relief, thus increasing their own demand or making escaping the downward spiral harder and harder. We recognize and regulate against a few of these types of products, often fast acting ones (crack cocaine), but the vast majority can keep dodging regulation for a very long time (tobacco, alcohol, sugar, ...)
Company D is the true champion of the neo-liberal market economy though. It provides a product with genuine utility, that doesn't necessarily have the slippery slope built into it, but creates it nevertheless through externalities. A typical example of this is a car. It provides undeniably great benefits to person buying the car (personal mobility), while at the same time impacting the lives of all in a slightly negative way (pollution, use of public space, noise, ...). Let's say in a small model world where everyone starts with a 'happiness score' of 0, that the car 'buyer' gets a solid +500 happiness points, while everyone gets a shared -1. Yes, we might feel a little worse at the start, but that -1 is easy to offset with a solid net +499 I get the moment I also buy that desirable car. It is not until much further down the line, when the cumulative unhappiness has reached levels that not even a +499 buy can rectify, that some enlightened soul can observe we might have been better of without cars altogether in terms of happiness, but even at the point where people would realize this, they individually only have the choice between buying and at least get a +499 added even though the overall happiness score will still be far under water and sinking, or personally forego the consumption and still be 499 happiness points worse off. Personal abstention doesn't solve anything, apart from maybe a slight moral feelgood, as it is the consumption of all others that creates the systemic misery. This is why 'vote with your wallet' is a pretty hollow, even cynical phrase, in these types of situations.
Economists like to portray 'the market' as a fight among type A companies one-upping better 'solutions'. In reality it is the type B,C, and D companies that are systemically selected for long term, and that explains why we are consuming ourselves into perpetual unhappiness.
