
A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness - jtaby
http://jtaby.com/2012/02/02/a-moment-of-clarity.html
======
ChuckMcM
This is something I tried very hard to teach my kids, basically that everyone
gets to choose how they are going to feel about something, and understanding
what set of conditions lead up to the choice you made can help you understand
yourself and the world around you.

The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they
are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoyed,
Etc.) The weird thing is that if you look deeply at the feeling of feeling
bad, its feeling bad that you feel good about something that someone else
things you should feel bad about. How twisted is that? If you can change
'feeling bad' to feeling empathy for the person who doesn't understand how
cool this thing is that you enjoy so much, you both don't lose your happiness,
and you have a way to contextualize the other persons opinions that don't put
your happiness at risk.

That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are. But I read a great
article in Reader's Digest about a guy who was being rushed to the emergency
room for a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Along the way a nurse was taking a
medical history and she asked 'Allergies?'. His response was "Lead apparently,
I got some in my shoulder and it hurts like hell!" Here is a guy going into
emergency surgery cracking jokes, he has chosen not to be negative or angry,
he has chosen to be happy. That really struck me, I don't think I could be so
charitable after being shot.

~~~
ilaksh
No. Bad things are bad, and no one should train themselves to pretend they are
not bad.

When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and
doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or
friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or
friend, but more likely you need better friends.

We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy.
We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

Our natural emotional reactions to our circumstances are there to provide a
corrective feedback system.

The fact that this type of perspective is still so popular just means that
civilization has a long way to go towards making daily life more tolerable for
average people.

~~~
paganel
> We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy.
> We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.

The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the
exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the
best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view).

Ok, so now that I know that I suck at metaphors and to put it more directly,
all I want to say it's that maybe the last 50-80 years of relative prosperity
that the West has experienced were an exception, not the norm, the same as Pax
Augusta around the times of the early Roman Empire and Seneca was also an
exception of sorts. So, as a guy who grew up in a post-Communist European
country in the '90s, with inflation averaging 100% each year for over a
decade, and who has seen his parents go from respectable middle class to
subsistence agriculture in the same timeframe (and my story is not at all
singular in that part of Europe), you cannot just magically hope that things
will get better. In most of the cases they go from bad to worse, and in that
case you really have to adapt to the new conditions (like making jokes when
being shot at), because it doesn't get any better than that.

~~~
ilaksh
Thanks for that perspective. You're probably right, this relative prosperity
is more of an exception.

I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to
make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.

~~~
anamax
> I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as
> to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less
> important.

Something is always going to go relatively wrong, so being able to deal with
it seems like a good idea.

------
ilaksh
Both the Jobs quote and the Csikszentmihalyi quote are stimulating and useful
perspectives on the same general topic, but Taby seems to be thinking rather
fuzzily by relating the quotes and ideas so closely.

Csikszentmihalyi is saying that happiness is an inner, private cultivation
that is not dependent on outside events.

However, Steve Jobs, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet
(while he was alive), says he has been having his own way every day for 30
years. Jobs literally had the means to do just what he wanted to do each day
for many years.

The first idea is about being happy regardless of your circumstances. The
second idea is about being happy because you figured out how to get what you
want out of other people and insisted on it.

And actually I don't see the other quote as being nearly as closely related as
he thinks either. That one sounded like dying people were just admitting that
they were depressed and wished they had tried harder to make more friends in
their senior years.

What I've heard is that genetic bio- and neuro- chemistry play a significant
role in happiness, so you have to realistically incorporate that. However,
obviously the core conception of the self's orientation towards the world must
be partially learned and so training can affect contentment also.

Studies have also shown that the higher one is on the social ladder, the less
stress one experiences. So climbing the social ladder will lead to less stress
and therefore greater happiness. And most people would agree that having
friends is key to happiness also.

~~~
jtaby
Csikszentmihalyi is saying that Happiness is a self-made choice. The quote
from the dying people supported and added context to the same idea.

The Steve Jobs quote is probably the most unrelated, you're right. I included
it because I felt that it gave a good practical example of what it means to
introspect, judge, and measure your own fulfillment. The overarching idea I'm
trying to get across is to drop the social pressure to "keep your head down,
don't make a lot of noise, and you'll get your paycheck every two weeks".

------
PabloOsinaga
I want to share something that really impacted me in a big way, related to
this notions being discussed here.

It was something I saw in a museum in New York state, about 1 hour north of
New York City - I cant remember the name of the museum or the artist or the
piece.

It was, literally, a matrix, where every point was a day in your life.

The shocking thing about it was that you could see it in its entirety pretty
well. To my surprise, it was not a HUGE matrix, but rather a pretty small one
- that you could see quite clearly both holistically, and every individual
cell.

I tried to reproduce it in this excel spreadsheet. It is very shocking to see
your life in such a way. It is scary. There are not that many cells!

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22472889/yourlife.xlsx>

~~~
splat
That sounds similar to this Abstruse Goose cartoon:

<http://abstrusegoose.com/51>

~~~
hartzler
After I saw that comic I made: <http://936months.appspot.com>

Really is amazing to see your life in dots.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
After I saw the comic and your site above, I made this:
<http://936months.staticloud.com/>

A months seems like a perfect unit of time to plan your life in.

~~~
hartzler
Very cool! The drop down for year/month is way better.

------
jhancock
Many years ago someone gave me a _self help_ tape..yeah a cassette ;). The
only thing I recall is the speaker telling a story about him being woken up
early in the morning by his father to go work on the family farm. As a boy, he
would sometimes wake up groggy and grumpy, unhappy about milking the cows pre-
dawn. His father would say to him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad
day?"

Now, I'm a father. My son has an easy life. No real responsibilities. But he
has his moments of wanting to express his profound unhappiness with what the
day holds for him. So I ask him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad
day?" He tells me he wants to have a good day. I tell him that we have things
to do and it may not be what he thinks he wants, but he can choose if he wants
to be happy. This works surprising well on a four year old. He is almost seven
now and I rarely have to remind him of this choice anymore.

------
jayferd
""" Spending 2 years doing something you don’t enjoy is a full 3.4% of your
life. What are you getting back for that investment? Money? What are you going
to do with that money that will be worth the non-refundable 3.4% of your life?
An extra room in your house?"""

This is beautiful. In a world where everything has to be justified by "the
bottom line", it's easy to forget _why_ we're making money.

Along those lines, I also found "The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" to be
very eye-opening.
([http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-
fears-of-the-super-rich/8419/))

~~~
mdoerneman
I was inspired and agree with most of this article but when I got to these
last few lines I thought, "Sure, I am getting money back for my investment,
but that money is supporting my family - putting food on the table, gas in the
car and a roof over our heads". That's not a bad investment. It's very hard to
drop everything and seek what it is that makes you happy when you have a
family depending on you.

~~~
jayferd
Well said. That's why I emphasized remembering _why_ we're making money.

If I'm bootstrapping a company, for example, I can do it because I want to
make a lot of money, or I can do it because I want to support my family. It's
just a difference of emphasis really, but an important one.

------
cookingrobot
I like the sentiment and intention of this post, but I don't agree with it.
Good for you for trying to look at the bigger patterns in your life and really
be deliberate about approaching things the right way.

But I don't believe the answer is to disconnect the inner and outer world and
be happy no matter what. The whole point of living is to be a part of things.
The right approach is to improve or change your environment until you can live
well inside it.

Since we're quoting books, I recently found a passage that says this well.
From The Timeless Way of Building by Alexander:

This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work,
in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own
problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching
has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are
caused by "others". But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also
maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient,
and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings. The fact is, a
person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends
entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

~~~
mluiten
I think this is entirely the point: How do you improve or change your
environment so that it 'fits' you?

What does fit you? I hear many people say a certain level of salary would make
them happy. Or that sportscar they always dreamt of. Just 5 more years of
climbing the corporate ladder and then it's all wonderful from there. However,
when you talk to them 5-10 years later, when some of them achieved those
goals, they still do not seem to 'fit'; they have bigger and better goals now.
Once they achieve those, they will be truly happy! It's a rat race.

My opinion, and since adopting it I see it everywhere, is that the outer does
not change the inner, but rather it is the inner that changes the outer. Take,
for example, this part of Jobs' famous Stanford Commencement Address: "[After
being fired from Apple] I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I
felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had
dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and
Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something
slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at
Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in
love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out
that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened
to me."

Notice what changes first; he did not start working on Pixar and NEXT from his
feeling of failure nor from a need to change his environment to get his
brainchild back. He changed his inner mental state first to accept reality,
figure what is truly important, and follow his heart. The environment changed
as a result. Once he saw the pure crushing failure of being fired from his own
creation, as an positive opportunity to pursue the things he loved to do, it
opened new paths unimagined by his negative self. The inner changed the outer.

Happy, for me, is a deep sense of belonging. It's about acceptance,
perspective, creativity and finding interest and passion. The inside and
outside will never disconnect; it's life, the one cannot exist without the
other.

------
sklipo
I've been through a process of changing my emotional reactions, and I think my
experiences are interesting enough to share. Just to situate you, I'm in
secondary 5 (I'm 16), and back when I was in elementary school, I was super
shy (I rarely ever said a word, and I hated talking because I would always
notice some imperfection in what I would say which would make me feel stupid),
and I was quite empathic (if another kid would cry, so would I). Also, I'm
much happier now than back in elementary school.

In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop
caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change.
The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6.
I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily
stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by
default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get
into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I
would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get
myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had
very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid
of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the
emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone
insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit
waterry, and it would make me gulp.

Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not
been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things,
like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you
can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for
example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that.

------
doctoboggan
I just read a chapter of a Csikszentmihalyi book for my sociology class on
creativity, I am currently reading "The Happiness Hypothesis" which just
referenced Csikszentmihalyi, and now I read this blog post who quotes
Csikszentmihalyi.

Csikszentmihalyi must have something important to say.

~~~
clyfe
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)>

------
yelsgib
I guess this comment is going to be pretty unpopular, given the comments that
most have left before it, but I find this post creepy in the extreme.

For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault"
is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For
instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most
exciting times/places ever.

For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust
anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea
creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration,
comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not
some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner.

Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the
ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative
feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time
- feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic.

I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when
they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness
begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes.

The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on
yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail.

PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out!
Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been
enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.

~~~
jtaby
Thanks a lot for your comment, disagreement males you question your
assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue.

Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to
read anything you can point me to.

~~~
yelsgib
WTF are you talking about? A body of research? Are you out of your mind? This
response actually sounds like a form response for when anyone disagrees with
you.

To answer your question by deconstructing it: which one of my claims could
possibly be supported by empirical research? The fact that I like gloom,
nostalgia, and complex forms of pleasure? Or perhaps the idea that it's
extremely hard to disambiguate the contribution of your circumstances to your
happiness from your own contribution? Or maybe my own personal observations
regarding the bay area?

Seriously, what type of research are you looking for?

"Scientists find that yelsgib likes gloomy feelings."

"Sociologists determine that the bay area concentrates on positive feelings to
the exclusion of negative ones."

"Cosmologists determine that we are a very small part of the universe."

Are you actually this obtuse? My good god. I seriously cannot believe your
response. It seriously blows my mind. I don't even know why I'm responding. It
bothers me that I'm even responding. Are you trolling me?

The first line of your response is that "disagreement males (sic) you question
your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." What
assumptions did I make you question? How was your understanding of "the issue"
strengthened by my response? Did you say these things because you meant them?
Or do you just say whatever pops into your head without regard to whether it
makes sense or you actually believe it? Did you even read what I wrote?

Holy christ on a cracker.

~~~
jtaby
I love the internet.

~~~
irritated_man
Ugh. Pleeeeeeeeease just stop for a second, get your head out of your own
head, and actually think for yourself about something. The way you say 'I love
the internet' is just such a smug way of brushing off real criticism. This is
not an example of 'Some crazy guy on the internet yelling at me for no
reason'. The commenter just really in his first claim stated some things,
though perhaps a little harsh(the post really was just about happiness, so its
a little strange to berate him for making a happiness-centric post when that
was the point), was just there to show how his personal opinion differed from
how you had(or had not...) actually thought about the quotes. However, there
is no excuse for your first reply. Honestly, can you go read what you wrote
and justify anything you said?

"Thanks a lot for your comment, disagreement males you question your
assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." - Why would you
write this? What is the point of writing this statement? No really,
pleeeeeeease, stop working on whatever you are doing, and for your own
benefit. Put down Flow. Put down your code. Read this, and figure out really
what you mean here. Why would you respond with such a condescending sentence
to someone who actually read what you said and wrote very really 'personal'
arguments against it?

Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to
read anything you can point me to - Same trick again here, go ahead and read
this line again, but there is a part 2 to this task. You now need to go read
the commenters post. I feel he makes it very very clear in his words and in
his tone that all his objections are his just his own thoughts and opinions on
the subject. To be honest, I feel like an idiot explaining this to you, but I
feel I need to because if I don't you may ask me if I have any 'evidence' to
back up my claims. Honestly, please go read that again and if you can justify
why you said those words, please reply with them. Please.

Finally, I'm sorry to say all this, and sorry to repeat some of the commeters
criticism, but I was just so irritated reading this. As naive and show offy as
your blog post was, the kind of behavior shown in your response is 10000X as
intolerable, and is just too common with people with that sense of false
intellectualism in Silicon Valley. The arrogance and condescension and just
lack of respect youve shown creates dividers in people that don't need to
exist, and really just decreases everyone's happiness.

------
scoofy
I'm sorry, but i find this 'solution' to happiness rather myopic. I'm not
saying it can't be helpful (it probably is), but doubt it's a cure.

Now, generally speaking, for those of us that are well educated, entirely
employable and rather wealthy in monetary terms and generally freedom, then
achieving success seems to be up to us. I'd contend that happiness is most
easily manifested in societally recognized success (thus, hard work + luck).
In other words i'd contend happiness is easily derived for 'being respected'.

If not achieved through work and good fortune, i'd say happiness can still be
achieved with constant vigilance against some shitty cultural norms we hold as
a society. Frankly, the illusion of control is astounding in wealthy
countries, and so is constant marketing, that buying shit will make you happy
or attractive, or that some product will give you some idealized life that is
paraded in front of you every day on television (or the internet). I'd contend
that many people are affected by these fake, shitty messages.

Is it perfectly admirable to try and try and try and fail consistently
throughout your life? Absolutely. Why should we look to the successful for
advice on happiness? Probably the last place to look, survivorship bias will
ruin any results. We can't all be popular published authors or start apple
computers. I'm a Dvorak typist (*ducks), so i like to reference August Dvorak
on the subject of failure. This guy dedicated his life to improving society,
for both regular typists and notably, amputees, yet was stymied at every turn
by something as simple as a coordination problem. I think it would be very
difficult for someone with a life like his to not be entirely jaded at such
unprecedented failure, even when you know what you are doing makes sense.

Can you be jaded and happy? Well, maybe, this would cause a debate on what we
mean by 'happiness', which is de facto the entire argument here. I would
contend that it's difficult. Would ideas like Csikszentmihalyi's help?
Probably, but i'd be very skeptical to look at them as actual solutions.
Sometimes people fail, and it's okay to fail if you tried your best, and i
don't mean that in the 'keep failing until you (obviously eventually) succeed'
way. I mean really fail. Until that is mentally acceptable, which is really
freaking hard to maintain in our society, then i think some people are going
to be continuously frustrated and perpetually unhappy, and i don't think
'convince yourself to be happy' is an acceptable prescription. Again, while i
think it will help, it's a rough world out there, and it's hard to maintain
the mental composure suggested here in the face of real tragedy.

------
villagefool
When you have a new child on the way, an extra room in the house could be a
hell of a difference for more then 2 years of your life... is this advice
realistic for people who need to support a family?

------
Rickasaurus
Many are willing to suffer unhappiness so that their children might be more
successful. At 31 it's something of a pattern I've begun to see in my peers.

~~~
jtaby
I'm starting to realize that those who do what they love find more success
than those who do what they "need" to do in the long term. I'm fairly sure
that the children would also rather have parents who are having fun and are
happy than those that are sad and bored but bring in an extra $20,000 a year.

I don't have children though, so I can't really empathize on a deep level, I'm
just going by intuition.

~~~
redschell
It's a fair point, but you need to consider the fact that the extra $20,000 a
year could mean the difference between a big college loan and a smaller one
(or no loan at all!), and the size of your college loan, which will in time
become college debt, can have a profound psychological effect on what you want
to do with your life. I'm not sure I'd be confident in a start-up as opposed
to a stable job if I had $20,000 more in debt looming over me.

~~~
Rickasaurus
That's one reason I'm glad I did the community college -> public university
transfer route. My years in community college were about 5K each, and my
public university were more like 15K.

I was able to pay it all off in about three years after getting out by just
sticking with the college lifestyle while I worked.

------
rokhayakebe
When you stop worrying if you are happy or not, you are probably in the zone.

------
lhnz
There is a lot of good to be said about having a strong _internal_ locus of
control, yet a lot of what people were saying in this thread seems a little
like self-deception: you can't always be positive about everything. You can
try and be happy and you can help this by following stoic principles like
negative visualisation, reducing your desires and keeping internal goals
instead of externals ones.

But this doesn't seem right. Your life is a story and it will have troughs as
well as peaks. It's more honest to accept this and learn to experience
everything that it offers fully. If somebody you love dies you should feel
sad, and maybe you'll cry. There's nothing wrong with this.

I think there is great strength in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and
accepting things as they happen. Do whatever you can to make life enjoyable
for yourself but you're going to have to give a little!

------
SteveJS
This is one of the founding ideas behind Positive psychology.

Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The
Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and
Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a
framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to
hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is
actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great
background.)

Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most
any common day issues into stark perspective.

------
joelrunyon
Left my job 6 months after coming in, because of this mindset. Couldn't
imagine, spending any more time working in an environment I didn't want to be
in.

------
adrianscott
Great sentiments. I would question this part though: "A final thought: On
average, you have 78 years total to live." That is based on questionable
assumptions imho, that there are not going to be dramatic increases in life
expectancy within one's lifetime.

Perhaps we should be thinking more long-term than we are... ;)

------
simon_weber
"My identity and my thoughts are my own to have, control, and share. Happiness
is a mindset for me to create."

This concept reminds me of Feeling Good by Burns. He said that our thoughts
control our emotions, and if we control our thoughts, we control our emotions.

------
nodata
A very positive article - but.

I know people who pursue happiness above everything else. They are in debt and
in denial. Somebody will come and bail them out, hopefully. Cover your costs
first. With the rest of your time, pursue happiness.

------
chubs
What a weird coincidence. This morning I was feeling inspired and wrote a blog
on the exact same topic. Would it be spammy to put a link here?

Anyway i love this kind of thinking, it really has helped my marriage a lot.

------
chandana
I've read 'Finding Flow' By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Its the one book one must
read to develop an attitude of not complaining about circumstances and of
finding happiness no matter what.

------
arocks
So the concept of selfless Karma has been rediscovered?

------
kenrik
This reminds me of "Think and Grow Rich" - Best book ever written. I cant even
remember how many times I have read it.

If I could I would purchase a million copies and give them away for free. It's
that good.

~~~
phreanix
It's actually free in the itunes bookstore.

~~~
MetaMan
can you provide a link. I found 2 books with the same title and neither is
free.

Thanks

~~~
phreanix
Apparently the free one is the one for Entrepreneur/Small Biz Owner edition.

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-
rich/id412247...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-
rich/id412247490?mt=11)

Same author tho.

