It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.
As one of those young kids who've seen a lot of articles (and even HN's comments) in similar vein of this one, I'd love to see a rebuttal for those types of articles.
I know that everyone is supposed to have their own reasons, but not all of us is eloquent enough to put it into words. And some great writing to set our mind straight (in one way or another) would be great :-)
I don't know any great writing on this topic, but:
> It seems quite obvious that if you're aiming to optimize your happiness, putting yourself into a stressful situation is never a good idea, even when you disregard the financial aspect.
I disagree. For many people, to find your global optimum you have to first traverse several local minima.
In this thread there are going to be stories about people who worked a Normal Job (TM) for years and started a successful business with the savings, stories about people who bootstrapped a startup before puberty and kept it small, stories about people countering the other people with their amazing story, and stories following all kinds of patterns. And unless you're extremely fortunate, all of these stories have one thing in common: they are most likely nothing like your life and ultimately you won't be able to completely integrate them into your life story. Otherwise you'd be the one writing the story and not asking the questions ;)
While you can, and should, learn from others, at the end of the day you really do have to find your own reason to do the more difficult thing each day. If you're waiting for some magic words that are going to unlock your full potential and turn you into Time's next Person of the Year, you'll wait forever. I find it better, as I plan my day, to just think of laying on my deathbed someday, and asking myself if I'll respect the decisions I make today. (And no, the answer is not always "yes". That's life.)
Just to clarify my stance first: I don't think of "optimizing happiness" should be a life goal. I think happiness should be a byproduct that you got when achieving your life goal.
And I agree with everything you said. For the sentence that you quote, my point was, for certain people who try to always feel content (in other words, aiming for local maxima) in their life, without explicitly having any other life goal of unlocking their potential or making X million dollars or starting a big company, putting themselves through a local minima for a long stretch of time would be hard to pay off. That was just meant to be an observation of an extreme case (optimizing happiness/your feeling of happiness at expense of everything else, as opposed to striving for a goal at expense of your own feeling). Since most of us would be somewhere in between rather than either extremes, we would have to go through local minima at varying degrees.
I'm not waiting for some magic words to start my marathon - but I just thought that there would be some magic words that will help me justify the run to others, and to myself (also serve as enhancement to make you run faster!).
As one of those young kids who've seen a lot of articles (and even HN's comments) in similar vein of this one, I'd love to see a rebuttal for those types of articles.
I know that everyone is supposed to have their own reasons, but not all of us is eloquent enough to put it into words. And some great writing to set our mind straight (in one way or another) would be great :-)