

Ask HN: Staying Happy - fidz

I really remember it, back to the time when i was in college, i have so much tasks. I needed to attend campus club. Lots of assignment. But the fact i was happy still surprises me.<p>It has been ~1.5 years since i graduated from my college and got to work as a software engineer. I got decent job with decent salary (at least pretty good in my area). The workplace itself considered as a &quot;fun&quot; environment: sleeping pod, ping pong table, coffee machine and no cubicles. Also, workload is lighter than class assignments. But it seems like i am not happy anymore -- i don&#x27;t know why. (Btw, yes, i do love coding. I do some of my pet projects in weekend)<p>I tried to do so much things (to try) making myself happier: Cycling around the city, playing some game with friends; but none of them seems to be working.<p>After all, i want to create happiness, not to &quot;do something&quot; or &quot;buy something&quot; to make myself happy. I know happiness is intrinsic and subjective. Two persons doing a same thing may perceive that thing differently.
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raooll
[http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness...](http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness?language=en)

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informatimago
You might be missing a sense of purpose.

This is often the case in the capitalist corporate environment, where you
should align your motives along the direction set by the CEO. If you can't do
that (whatever the reason), you won't feel happy at work.

Now of course, in a capitalist corporate setting there are a lot of reasons
why you may not be able to align your motives to that of the CEO, for obvious
and less obvious reasons. Books are written about that.

See for example:

\- Capitalisme, désir et servitude (2010) Frédéric Lordon

\- L'être contre l'avoir (2012) Francis Cousin

Essentially, corporations are there to make money for the C*O and for the
shareholders. Anything else is purely accidental and out of their real scope.
This can indeed leave a sense of void.

You may try to find a corporation that has a real purpose, like, put a colony
on Mars, or develop fusion energy. But as soon as they start to show sign of
success, they're eaten by capitalists that then change their purpose. A very
good example of that is Apple, which started to become successful with the
Macintosh, and then the capitalists took over, fired Steve Jobs, and lead
Apple to the catastroph with eventually a capitalization of -400M, when
NeXTcomputer Inc took it back. But since then nothing happened at Apple, but
the accumulation of capital: all you're sold today has been developped at the
early Apply Computer Inc. from Xerox PARC stuff and at NeXTcomputer Inc from
stuff invented at various other places (Avi Tevanian invented Mach at Carnegie
Mellon University, Brad Cox and Tom Love invented Objective C at their company
Stepstone Inc, and Bernard Hulo invented Interface Builder (written in
ExpertLisp) while at the INRIA).

There are almost no capitalist corporation where you can have a real purpose,
and invent or develop new stuff, by necessity, because use of money as final
decision maker. Cf. "law of averages" in Ainsi marchait l'humanité, Jean-
François Geneste.

And the situation is rather hopeless, given the current state of academia and
academic research too.

You might think that you can just work for the money, and then create
happiness at home working on your own projects. But you would subestimate the
soulsuckingness of corporations. Realize that you are much poorer than your
grand parents or great grand parents: they had a land to cultivate and to live
on. You probably don't. Before the industrial "revolution" and before the
capitalists forbid people to use the communal terrains for their food
production, people lived well working much less than now. We've been robben of
our means of survival, and forced to work as slave in corporations. You need
to find a way to free yourself from this system, and this means, you need to
re-acquire the autonomous means to your survival; land, culture, livestock.
Buy some cheap place with a garden to grow your own food. Add some solar
panels and an Internet connection, and you'll be ready to work freely on your
own projects.

[http://www.amazon.fr/Capitalisme-d%C3%A9sir-servitude-
Fr%C3%...](http://www.amazon.fr/Capitalisme-d%C3%A9sir-servitude-
Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric-Lordon/dp/2358720135)

[http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-
Cousin...](http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-
Cousin/dp/2355120471)

[http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2756311030/ref=oss_product](http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2756311030/ref=oss_product)

(And sorry for the French book references, I know no English translations for
them, and I know of no equivalent in English).

