I noticed that a lot of people (including myself) condition happiness on something. For example "when I get my degree, I'll be happy" or "if I get in a relationship with this person, I'll be happy" or whatever their desire is. However, such events always lie in the future: You always postpone your happiness and never actualize it. And even when the desires are actually satisfied, they quickly stop being a source of happiness and new desires take their place.

Why not be happy right now? The right way to go about it is that you tell yourself "I am pursuing my goal and I am happy, right now, to do so." It is incredible how this changes the quality of life, plus you can detect problems with yourself and the environment early because if you can't be happy with your present situation at all, it's time to change something.

I think this has to do with a certain short-sightedness concerning achievements, purchases, general life decisions... Is there a particularly good reason why a degree would make you happy? It'll land you a good post at a high-paying company, I'm sure. But what will you do with your money? Or are you the type of person who takes pleasure in big, positive numbers as their account balance?

I often get on peoples' nerves by asking 'why?', until they realize something I've seen coming two hours earlier not because I'm a genius, but simply because I'm used to thinking ahead and exploring the possibilities. I've been doing that long enough (was raised that way) so that it happens automatically and very, very quickly.

I've found that a large percentage of people get annoyed when you ask them, "why?".

I don't mean to be harsh, but this is the only way I can describe it: I think it's because they actually don't have well thought out reasons for lots of the things they do, and they don't want that exposed because it could weaken their already shaky worldview because then they'd be standing on shifting sand, not a stable bedrock of unquestioned ideas.

So they just continue accumulating possessions like the happy people in the movies do, ignoring the mounting evidence that these things haven't made them happy in the past, but just one more possession, maybe that'll be the one before I happily drive off into the sunset with the end credits rolling.

Maybe I'm rambling, but I struggle to understand why some people keep doing the same things and expecting a different outcome, and asking them "why?" rarely seems to elicit a well thought out answer. The answer in the end just seems to come down to, "because that's what I do".

Some people are not introspective. As an introspective person myself, I always attempt to understand why I do what I do, admittedly that can be draining at times and doesn't always come up with meaningful answers, but I'd personally prefer to at least attempt than to wander around in wilful ignorance.

No its not harsh at all. I've had almost the same experience, to the T, with a lot of the people I see around me everyday. I suspect that most of society continues to live this way, content in its ignorance and confused as to why despite doing everything "according to the book" they still end up in rather unsatisfying lives. This is even the more dangerous in some cultures where honor is so important that people lead delusional lives; they act as if everything is perfect in their lives while they are actually very unhappy and yearn for something better.

Being introspective is intellectually challenging and rewarding but can also lead to a lot of frustration and dilemmas. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It is required though.

> You have found happiness when the idea "life is meaningless" seem obvious and irrelevant.

Precisely. To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots. There is no meaning behind the universe, it just kinda, is.

The realization that the only sense you can find in life is the one you create yourself, makes a lot of things clearer. This is also why it should be irrelevant that life is meaningless, since what do you care about the true meaning of life (which probably doesn't even exist) once you found something better, more satisfying, that you can cope with and develop in?

We are back to Ecclesiastes without the tacked on Epilogue but with a touch of Blade Runner.

I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true).

First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths.

First problem is not such a bad one as long as your own morale code more or less coincides with the society in which you reside.

Second problem is more personal. How do you choose what is meaningful given how truly short the life is?

At 40+ I realize that life can end with a whimper at any moment.

Barring some truly Kurzweilian breakthrough 40 more years of enjoyment is most I can hope for.

I truly enjoy the little pleasures of life parenthood, food, drink, chess, biking and so on. At the end of the day, you realize there is no hope of working on that unsolved math problem, that huge programming project, that great novel.

Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson).

So far the only solution is somehow to delude yourself that what you are doing is meaningful to you.

In my thinking, this has two answers.

1) First, an old parable:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

2) If I've learned one thing, its that without other people, life is largely meaningless, or at least, a very much great deal emptier. As such, I do not think it is a logical gap to say that therefore, a large component of the "meaning" of life, lies in one's interactions with other people.

Really? Because in my world, life is about doing what makes you happy, as long as you aren't negatively impacting others. If you want to write that great novel: do it. If you want to finish that huge programming project: do it.

It may mean sacrificing other things in life to accomplish, but if that's what makes you happy, the sacrifice shouldn't be a big deal. If making that sacrifice is too great, then it isn't what REALLY makes you happy, is it?

Now the "do whatever I want" thing works for a short period of time, but at some point you get to the end of the doing everything you want, and realize if you shit on everyone around you, you still aren't happy. And if you don't come to that realization... well... the rest of society is going to figure out how to deal with you and you probably aren't going to like that. not doing bad is just as much about self-preservation as anything else for those people who don't have a moral compass.

The problem in your 40s is that you acutely realize your limitations, you become risk averse, you choose what you are already good at.

So that great novel it is not going to happen unless you have written a fair share of good short stories in your twenties.

That huge programming project again unless you've mastered your chosen language and the domain space, you are just going to be dissapointed.

There are many things that make me happy, but there are no grand plans left.

Trivial example: I took 6 months of daily Duolingo practice in German to keep up with my daughter. I was making some progress but it was slower than hers. It became apparent that unless I dedicated myself fully to study I would not be able to read Grimm's fairy tales much less Kant.

It is as Stephenson wrote: "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

>Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson).

Well, there are several artists that started out of nowhere in their 30s or 40s or even 50+. Especially in novel writing, this has been quite common.

I'd love to hear more about great artists/makers/scientists etc who started in their 30s/40s.

Only one who comes to mind as far as writing goes is Chandler, but he must have done his own share of writing (oil business in 1920/30s must have required some writing)before that.

Joseph Conrad is another interesting case mastering English in his late 20s.

My premise: To be great you have to perspire early with some talent thrown in.

Early means in your teens, early 20s. After that it is near impossible to master the unconscious mastery of the basics of whatever craft you choose.

Again, I'd love to hear more counterexamples of old age mastery of something started in your 30s.

Bukowski published his first novel at 51. He had written a couple of stories and poems before his 30s, but spend most of the next 1.5 decade drunk and not writing.

Burroughs published his first noval at 39. He had just written a few articles until then.

Walt Whitman first published a poetry book at 36.

Toni Morrison wrote her first novel at 39.

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula around 50. He worked as a public servant before, and wrote theatre reviews.

Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame) first published at 39.

Raymond Chandler worked as a businessman (in the oil industry IIRC) and started writing novels at 51.

Wallace Stevens, celebrated poet, worked office jobs, and first published at 35, but his best work was done in his 50s. He went on to win the Pulitzer price at 75.

Beatrix Potter wrote her first book at 35.

Jules Verne, who went on to write tons of classics, started at 35.

Ian Flemming worked as a spy in Britain, and only started writing his books (James Bond) when he was 44.

In another genre, Martin Rev released his first album (with Suicide) at 39, Leonard Cohen started as a singer/songwriter at 33, and Vi Subversa (nee Frances Sokolov), started singing and performing as the vocalist of the influential Poison Girls punk band at the tender age of 44, and as a mother of two.

>Early means in your teens, early 20s. After that it is near impossible to master the unconscious mastery of the basics of whatever craft you choose.

That presupposes that you need to. Modern painters don't need to learn to learn to paint like Michalangelo to express themselves (and many don't know), modern musicians don't need to go into classical training or even know the scales (e.g. somebody like DJ Shadow and tons of others).

As for writing, it can be more about sensitivity to details and having an interesting story or viewpoint to express, than mastering some genre rules. One can learn most about writing from having read a lot (which is also what most writers advise young writers to do).

Kind of like how you don't need to study CS and study TAoCP to learn to program and write something useful. There are stories that picked up programming later in life and went on to write succesful apps and open source projects.

Your list is inspirational although I could argue that it is flawed because those late starters actually had early practice.

Jules Verne is one of my favorite childhood writers thus I knew he had an early start.

Wikipedia concurs: By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion.

Same deal with Bukowski, sure he had not written a novel but he knew he was a writer much earlier + plus he devoured the whole library ages 15-24.

Same deal with Fleming: His wartime service and his career as a journalist provided much of the background, detail and depth of the James Bond novels. Emphasis on being a journalist.

Still writing is indeed one of those fields where you can get by with not being fluent in your skill as long as you got a good editor.

Programming is the same thing, you can write a decently sized program without knowing the language and its idioms very well but it is oh so painful.

So yes you can achieve outside success in some craft without being really gifted/skilled but that's not the same thing as achieving proficiency and being in flow. Yeah you can fake being a modern painter but someone like Rothko or Pollack had the early classical training.

My lament is that past the age 40 you can not achieve proficiency in some new craft that you have taken up. There are no neurosurgeons who started at 40.

You have to settle for less, pick your battles very carefully and delude yourself with special prizes.

To an extent, I agree with your first point. Should a big mass of people suddenly 'come into the light' and realize they can do whatever the fuck they want, that could become a problem. No need to look far, capitalism is just the latest implementation of the very old concept of 'rich men exploit poor men'. However, we shouldn't forget that we're quite elaborate little things that can through discussion agree on a common set of rules by which to interact with one's environment. So while there may not be any sense in life, just as an individual can create meaning for himself, so can a larger group of people. Obviously, this gets harder the larger the group, which is why to this day nothing has really worked out. I try to be optimistic.

Your second point comes at an interesting point in time: if general robotization works out on the scale that's being talked about right now, jobs for humans will fall off a very big cliff. Meaning, current education systems, whose sole purpose is to pump out hard-working, quick-spending bureau apes, will become utterly useless. I was lucky enough to go to a very good school, and even there, we never learned to think. We learned more algebra or languages or what-have-you than the vast majority of other schools (which I could confirm in the first week of uni), but nobody ever told us what to do with all that. It's not in the program, because all you're wanted for is keeping the system running. No need to think outside the box, here.

Frankly, I don't see how humanity can not crumble into a fucktillion little pieces if we don't give the coming generations something to do. And I think thinking is something we lack hugely, so that would be a good thing. Now, the ablity to think doesn't pop up in your head one sunny afternoon. It has to be taught, by the parents, by the schools, by society. That means fuck adverts. Fuck legalese. Fuck politicians. Fuck expensive action movies. Fuck all the things that are meant to keep you from thinking.

Well this is one delusion I am glad I still have.

I can delude myself that I have Free Will by choosing to take a vacation next week. Then I could flip a coin to decide my destination between Singapore and Bangkok.

Sure it was all deterministic at some level but the illusion was good enough for me.

That all depends on how you define "choice", surely.

I'm curious as to why, when faced with unpredictable phenomenon, you chose to go with the hypothesis "everything is random" rather than "everything is choice" when you have an experience that appears to be choice, and would probably have a hard time naming a truly random phenomenon.

The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint.

To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.

Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.

At the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable.

Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist.

For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.

"To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots"

Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.

In my personal experience, I agree, it's a misunderstanding of what happiness is, that causes people to miss the mark when trying to find it. Happiness isn't something you find, it's something you make. The universe is meaningless, it exists, devoid of any reason of its own, and yet, it exists. Your job, when trying to become a happy person, is to find your own meaning, and work at that, until you master it.

I've always liked that last sentence. May I suggest an edit to the second sentence? I've always though, Happiness is something you make. But happiness is something that you don't make directly. Its something that naturally arises, by making life choices, that allow happiness to occur naturally.

This way lies hedonism.

In what way? Are you sure, based on what the parent wrote? Perhaps he was not clear about the difference between "finding meaning" and "finding your own meaning", but few people are clear about that. A search for meaning, personal or otherwise, does not necessarily lead to hedonism--to get there you have to throw out all kinds of useful things, and it doesn't really get you very far, and eventually life loses meaning and you go somewhere else.

In short, I don't think telling someone to find their own meaning would necessarily lead to hedonism.

No, he's right. If you abandon the notion that there's anything which possesses an intrinsic or higher meaning, it's almost inevitable you'll end up gratifying your most basic instincts first because they're the strongest. At least until they're sated.

The only thing I don't get is why more people don't do it. People walk around with all sorts of hangups and narratives about why they're denying themselves and they take these to the grave with them. I'd much rather overindulge until I'm bursting at the seams and then having learned where my limit is, dial it back from there. Much fewer regrets in the long run.

I think this issue arises from fundamentally western ideas about what it is that are our most basic human instincts. We have certain instinctual needs, which, I'll agree, would seem to imply a hedonistic lifestyle when considered alone. However, many of these things balance themselves out. As an example, we have an evolutionary need to be healthy, viable mates, but we also have an evolutionary need to consume delicious food. Overindulging one need would inherently cause the other need to not be met. I would also add that the need to express kindness and compassion, and the need for positive social interaction seem to also be instinctual, and do drive us to act in ways that would not necessarily fit with a hedonistic lifestyle.

But how much do you dial it back?

The problem for me personally is that hedonism, while fun for maybe a couple of hours, inevitably leads to more complications and suffering than happiness over the next day, the next week or the next year.

A more measured, but peaceful life with many smaller (not big enough to be disruptive) happy moments has been my solution and I've mostly been satisfied with that.

This doesn't sound like a problem to me at all - you found your sweet spot and dialed it back to a place that you're happy with, presumably with less regrets about it than if you had never gone a bit too far in the first place.

The answer to the "why" is mostly fear, real or imagined. Why don't most people talk to a another person they find insanely attractive? Why do they not take time to understand a religion or philosophy very different from their own? etc.

In Aristotle's view, there was a meaningful distinction between pleasure, which led to hedonism, and happiness, which is fairly abstract and depends on virtuous conduct performed with the right mindset. Edit: if I recall correctly. This is from The Nichomachean Ethics.

What if pain, in the traditional sense, makes you happy. I get pleasure from rebelling my hedonist parents in a way reminiscent of puritans. It has nothing to do with comparison to others - I just like denying myself pleasure (abstaining from alcohol, sugar, caffeine, drugs, sometimes sex, etc.). I get a lot of meaning from it.

Whatever floats your boat. As long as you don't force it upon others, I can't see why there should be any problem. The personal freedom for any individual to live as one finds the most happiness without harming others should be the goal of any fair/just society.

There's all kinds of ideas about the word the Greeks used for this, eudaimonia. The translation has shifted, and they tend to not even call it happiness anymore.

The new translations seem to mean something more like what you note here, rather than what we, westerners would call happiness.

And it's a much better goal in life, isn't it?

Theres no need for meaning...

Wonder how much of that can be blamed on consumerist marketing, and its drive to amp our desires.

I think a lot would be your answer. Not strictly new as a concept, kids get raised to hunt happiness. Every stupid action movie that ends with a big party, celebrities whose job it has become to look happy, every ad promoting x because it will make you a happier person...

Kids get raised being told they can buy stuff that'll make them happy, and it's only when you become an adult and get a bunch of real world thrown your way that you get the chance to realize how much crap that is actually worth. And yet the majority of the western population doesn't seem to understand that you can't buy happiness. Sure, it's nice to have central heating and a full fridge, but these would make less fortunate people extremely happy! For a while, until the pipes bust and you need to make the guy come 'round to fix them.

Still, heating and fridging have at least some intrinsic value. They keep you from freezing over during sleep and keep your food from rotting. But everything else, after the initial surge of serotonin or whatever other hormone, just becomes part of the annoyances that keep you going throughout the day. At best, it blends into the furniture, so that you forget you have it and buy it again.

There is something seriously wrong with our lifestyle, but it's not clear to me how it can be fixed peacefully. Or violently. Or at all. Because human nature led to this, and how are we supposed to overcome that?

I think that is a part of it, but also a lot the films we see and books we read have convinced us that we'll recognize happiness when we'll find it.

> [W]hen people talk about finding "happiness" they are actually talking about "winning at life". Which is impossible of course.

Winning at life is a process, not an event or a one-off result. It can be anything from really enjoying a hot chocolate while watching a sunrise, to nailing a product demo, to that first (or third) date with your crush.

Winning at life is not something you can be 'done with', except maybe by dwelling on and reliving past wins. But then isn't that a kind of winning, too?

I don't disagree with you that what you discribe sounds like a good way to live. But I meant that talking about 'winning at life' is problematic because it suggests there is a finish line. Which is wrong, because as you say, being happy is a process.

I think happiness is very well possible. But the problem is that, whether you want to blame social pressure, education, advertisement or something else, most people seem to think happiness means satisfaction of all desires and eternal feeling-good. That's not it. It's about finding satisfaction in and with yourself and not let circumstances tip your boat over. With or without kids, office job, park ranger or astronaut, married or celibate (or both), if you manage to derive meaning and satisfaction from the moment you'll be happy. You're probably somewhat right people confuse it with winning at life (my house has to be bigger than the neighbours, my job have shorter hours than my brother's and bring more income than my friend's, any my wife had to be the prettiest in town and our kids the smartest), but i think that just scratches the surface of the misconception. It's really about what happiness is and how to reach/keep being happy, and that the outside world or your possessions have surprisingly little to do with it.