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Re:Building a vision of life without work (2015) by munificent on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @12:55PM (#27823290)
I think it's important to understand that "what makes you happy" is much more contextual than we realize. If you're sitting outside in the freezing cold, you might think that what makes you happy is "wearing big heavy coats and drinking cocoa". That's true right now because you're fucking cold. But get out of the cold and your happiness goals may change.

Often, happiness is simply "what addresses the imbalances in my life right now?"

Today, you're probably busy working a 9-5 (or longer). You spend much of your time overwhelmed by the complexity of your job, delaying gratification and doing things you don't want to do. You're stuck inside all day and working through the nicest months of the year.

In that context, of course all you want to do is sit outside at a beach, play some leisurely videogames, and eat good meals. But that's because your life right now has a distinct absence of downtime, nature, and leisure.

When you are retired, the entire context is different and thus what makes you happy will shift too. Once you no longer have a job, you'll likely find videogames boring and understimulating. When you start taking a walk every day in the woods, you might not crave moving to Hawaii quite as much. And when you have the time to cook and savor meals every evening, eating out loses some of its lustre.

Whenever the situation of your life changes, expect your happiness goals to shift too.

Re:Building a vision of life without work (2015) by caddemon on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @01:13PM (#27823494)
What you're saying is true, but people don't always do what actually makes them happy - see addiction. There are teams of people out there building social media sites, games, etc. that are designed to keep you on there as long as possible. Not for you to get entertainment out of it.

I think that's dangerous. Maybe in a world without work the incentives would change and these platforms might not exist in the same way. But as it stands now >50% of the people I know with too much time on their hands end up self-admittedly pissing most days away. A few of them have already decided to return to work even though they don't need to.

Re:Building a vision of life without work (2015) by el_benhameen on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @12:58AM (#27829865)
I’ve always felt pretty in touch with what I want and why, but I’d never thought about it like this. Thanks for the interesting thought.
Re:Building a vision of life without work (2015) by munificent on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @11:52AM (#27834492)
I think our culture teaches us the wrong mental model for happiness. We think of it like wealth: a quantity to try to maximize. If 1 happiness is good, then 2 is better, 10 is really good, and 100000 is amazing.

But that's not how our emotions work at all. Thanks to the hedonic treadmill, it's not possible to experience long-term joy over any consistent period. Active joyful enthusiasm is by nature an ephemeral experience.

Instead of happiness, what we want long term is something more akin to peace, satisfaction, or tranquility. A sense that all is right with where we are in the world.

And the model for that is much more like hunger and satiety. No one thinks that if eating one steak is good then eating a hundred steaks is great and a million is amazing. Hunger exists to address an imbalance. The goal of it is to get you back to a comfortable neutral point where you are satieted but not unpleasantly stuffed.

Unhappiness works in a similar fashion. It tells us something is off balance in our emotional life. So when you find yourself craving some experience or activity and thinking "this will make me happy", it means "this will fix a thing making me unhappy". It doesn't mean that scaling that craving up will make you extra super happy.