meany

One thing I wonder is that - assuming no extreme personal calamity - I would be just as happy/sad/depressed no matter what life I had led. How much of our inner sense of well being is determined by outward life circumstances. Living in the first world and working in the tech industry, I live better than 99% of the people that ever lived, including all my ancestors. What’s really crazy is that I’m not insanely happy all the time with my incredible good fortune. It seems that no matter what I got from life - I’d calibrate back to where I am now.

meany

vorig jaardiscuss

I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this.

Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch.

The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.

meany

vorig jaardiscuss

One thing I think that can help in this is trying your identity to being someone who strives to be as open minded and introspective as possible. You can turn changing your mind into a psychological reward, rather than an ego loss.

meany

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Doesn’t that assume that the production isn’t for export. For instance, if the EU and US export their industries to low wage, high population countries you would see their per capita numbers drop and overall leveling out. However, the damage to the climate would be equal. Essentially, you need to look at a lot of factors and think holistically about the problem.

meany

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Not sure how I understand how it’s possible for the majority of people if they can’t keep up with the things that make it possible.

meany

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I don’t think the data supports that it is possible for the majority of people. On traditional diets, Between 80 and 85 percent of those who lose a large amount of weight regain it. Source: https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/healthy-li....

meany

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I think equating censorship and intellectual property is not a good comparison. Copyright laws do not restrict sharing of ideas or opinions just specific textual instances of those opinions. Under copyright, you are free to paraphrase or quote the text to share the core idea. Political censorship prevents you from communicating specific political views, which limits dissent. I don’t see how copyright does that.

meany

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I think the challenge is that no matter the circumstances our minds are designed to adapt to the situation. This is often called the hedonic adaption. If you live in a modern western country, your life is likely significantly better than the wealthiest and most powerful people from the 14th century. Most likely if you're prone to depression, you will reset to a negative viewpoint even if societal issues are addressed. Below is an excerpt from article discussing research into lottery winners and paraplegics.

"In 1978, a trio of researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts attempted to answer this by asking two very disparate groups about the happiness in their lives: recent winners of the Illinois State Lottery — whose prizes ranged from $50,000 to $1 million — and recent victims of catastrophic accidents, who were now paraplegic or quadriplegic. In interviews with the experimenters, the two groups were asked, among other things, to rate the amount of pleasure they got from everyday activities: small but enjoyable things like chatting with a friend, watching TV, eating breakfast, laughing at a joke, or receiving a compliment. When the researchers analyzed their results, they found that the recent accident victims reported gaining more happiness from these everyday pleasures than the lottery winners.

This is how the study is usually written about, in a “gee whiz, ain’t that counterintuitive?” kind of tone. But what’s really striking when you look at the results reported by the researchers is how close their answers actually are: On average, the winners’ ratings of everyday happiness were 3.33 out of 5, and the accident victims’ averaged answers were 3.48. The lottery winners did report more present happiness than the accident victims (an average of 4 out of 5, as compared to the victims’ 2.96), but as the authors note, “the paraplegic rating of present happiness is still above the midpoint of the scale and … the accident victims did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected.”

This is partially because of what’s become known as the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, that annoying tendency humans have to get used to the things that once made them happy. I particularly love how the authors of this 1970s paper phrased it:

    Eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off. If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are judged. Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness."

From the following article: https://www.thecut.com/2016/01/classic-study-on-happiness-an...

meany

5 jaar geledendiscuss

I can appreciate your passion and ideas, but continued rule under a modern western democracy would not be equivalent to the race based colonialism of the past. I think there is nuance to this, and I don't think any of us can speak for all residents of all former colonies. It doesn't seem unreasonable that a situation could get so bad that an individual would prefer continued colony status (which is nothing like it would have been in 1936) under a liberal western democracy over some of the alternatives. For instance, my understanding is that there are some people in Hong Kong, who would prefer British rule to Chinese.

From a WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-hong-kongers-want-to-be-br...):

"On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the British consulate in Hong Kong for a rally urging London to take immediate action to protect British nationals in the city and grant them full citizenship.

“We’re too British to be Chinese,” said Eric Cheung, a 25-year-old Hong Kong resident at the rally who is a British National (Overseas), or BNO. “We share the same ideology with the U.K. We support democracy, we support freedom, we support the rule of law and of course we support the U.K. government,” he said.

“ Boris Johnson, fight for us,” he added, appealing to the British prime minister.

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