Friday, July 23, 2010

Our Time-Everything is Amazing & Nobody's Happy

12 comments:

james said...

This isn't exactly a trenchant (or even all that controversial) observation on my part, but I think Louis CK is the funniest stand-up comedian working.

Has anyone seen his new show on FX yet? It's supposed to be good.

Sean Harvey said...

Definitely a good way to put things into perspective. I can't imagine life without the internet to give me answers to life's tough questions.

Sean Harvey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Peter H of Lebo said...

I have watched some clips but will save the episodes of Louie for you to watch at the end of august.

Big Myk said...

Louis CK is a not anyone I was familiar with, but he's definitely funny.

One thing I have observed: things that are true are the funniest. It's called the “hedonic treadmill": people's expectations rise at the same pace as their incomes and acquisition of things, and happiness is persistently just out of reach.

Using any objective measure, a person today in good health in a Western liberal democracy is one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. Anyone from any other time looking at us today would regard our easy, long, riskless lives with an incredulous envy. And yet we still feel that we lack somethig.

james said...

It's fascinating how quickly we adapt and become bored with improvements, forever making happiness just out of reach. Jonah Lehrer just wrote about a sub-set of this idea: money and happiness.

"What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves."

james said...

Oh and Myk, you should check out both of Louis CK's stand-up specials, Shameless and Chewed Up.

I don't really know your taste in humor. so be warned- some of his material, though legitimately hilarious, can be what people in the biz call "blue".

James R said...

Unfortunately, no matter how many times we hear it or by whom (from Jesus Christ to James) we will never act as if money will not bring us happiness. Perhaps that should be a top ten idea—The failure to see that money is poor at making us happy.

Ted said...

I like it as one of the top ten ideas - but I think it should be more nuanced than simply "people continue to believe money will make us happy." May I suggest a world-wide study done on this very topic:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070100039.html

Of course we need a nice short summary sentence to really capture the essence of this study: Money will make you satisfied, but does not bring you positive feelings (i.e. happiness)

James R said...

Actually I thought "The failure to see that money is poor at making us happy." was considerably nuanced. (I'll leave it to the reader to explore the nuances.) But I think you are correct. I'd like to offer instead, "Comparing yourself to your friends and neighbors does not bring happiness."

James R said...

Hmm....I'm still not getting much happiness from those statements. The other side of it is that I think we are notoriously poor at understanding happiness, especially our own. Often when people look back at their lives they say that their happiest times were not considered happy at the moment—writers, musicians and artists going through creative but difficult periods, workers doing hard but productive work, businessman doing the same. There's a bit of "The Myth of Sisyphus" in us I believe. We can be happy with a good social environment, but we can also be happy when we strive.

Big Myk said...

Curiously enough, Jim has happened upon a truth that it took psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't ask me to pronounce this guy's name) some 30 years to figure out.

Money does buy happiness -- up to a point. Nations with per capita GDP's under $18,000 report being generally less less happy than those in countries with a higher per capita GDP. It's hard to be real happy if you're starving. But above that dividing line, the way people assess their own happiness has very little to do with how much poorer or richer they are. Multi-millionaires report being only infinitesimally happier than their poorer fellows, while people living in poverty are often quite happy.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, we are happiest when we are doing something that makes us forget about ourselves -- times of intense concentration, when the activity is everything. He suggests things like music, art, literature and sports. The activity must be one that is difficult enough to require total focus, but one in which we can meet the challenge and can achieve some success. The fact is, we are happiest when we are not thinking at all about being happy.