You should have asked her why she came to the US
She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 more vacation days each year as compared to their American counterparts.
Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do.
Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given nothing else changed. Only somebody who found happiness through suffering would ask for less, and be more happy with less.
Money means even less.
>Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
Yes, people have been conditioned to be working.
Money is a way to transfer resources. Resources make people happy. Somebody with no food for 3 days is happy when they finally get food. Money buys food, therefor money can buy happiness. People like to say the opposite, but they forget money can also buy unhappiness, or when talking bout the extreme cases where somebody has 20 billion, would 1 more billion have any affect on their happiness? Oh shit, we are back to WTF is even happiness. For all we know 1B more to the 20B guy might make them more happy because they are now richer than their enemy or some other happiness driven from the count of money.
We can break this down in other ways too. Some people say family is what makes them happy. I can tell you that a family of 12 with no money is less happy than a family of 12 with enough money. Its the difference between having shoes, or eating in may cases. Its clear that happiness is a compactor, and money can change the outcome.
Not really. "1 money" is just a promise to deliver 1 unit of value in the future. But what characterizes the unit? What is the difference between one unit of value and two units of value?
In reality, we don't really know. It's a continual quest to try and figure that out and it changes on a whim.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Not to mention the unrelenting psychic toll of working low wage jobs in a country with a weak social safety net.
Which may suggest that the "American way" is to work fewer hours per day, and then try to cram in some fun after work, whereas the Greeks allow themselves to delve into more fun over the span of entire days instead of short spurts. It is possible that more happiness is derived when one is able to enjoy themselves in larger blocks of time, even if the total quantity on a time-unit basis ends up being the same as anyone else. That would support both scenarios in the comments, even if they seem contradictory on the surface.
But, as with earlier comments, this is all based on hypotheticals for the sake of illustration. There is no indication of what the speaker from the greater thread was actually talking about.
People sometimes have rose-colored glasses about emigrating to the US.
Eventually, they were rotated to Germany. As soon as they arrived, she was off to England. 6 weeks later, she was back, and did not complain about the US again.
Plenty of Greeks have no interest in going back because they want the "American" life, but there's no question you ate better in the village, had more community, or had a sense of history - what you didn't have was more than ~35k euros a year, if you were lucky.
Maybe the relative poverty fosters that kind of culture, and a high earning society necessarily becomes atomized, or perhaps atomized societies fosters high earning.
Everyone knows everyone in a ghetto. Gated communities often don't know their next door neighbors.
BTW there must be some interesting story that your Greek teacher had to move to US and deprioritize happiness.
Both are more or less factual statements.
I'd bet that she was wealthy relative to the average Greek, but was perceived as "regular" because they are middle class relative to the rest of the west. The wealthy in the the US can prioritize happiness above all else. On average, Greeks works the longest hours in Europe, which is more than the average American.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/world/europe/greece-six-d...
can you share your version please?
Like all history, it’s tricky to pick a starting point, but an easy one is the end of 400 years of Ottoman Turk occupation leading into the 20th century with the Balkan Wars, WWI, and then WWII.
Greece successfully fought off Italy in WWII but then was quickly occupied by Nazi Germany for four years. During this time, the Nazis successfully exterminated every Greek Jew. This period created extremely radical political parties that persist to this day. Following WWII, Greece then transitioned into a dictatorship lasting until 1974. Greece presently has the youngest democracy in the EU (50 years old).
The past 500 years have been hard on Greece, and the past century was no exception. Modern Greece is a young country with tons of recent scars that have led to corruption and bribery that a healthier nation may not have developed as intensely. My grandfather fled the region with his father in the early twentieth century when the Italian army began regularly hanging people in their town square. It really traumatized him.
Anyway, 2008 wasn’t some event that happened in a vacuum. There were many events that shaped the country leading up to it. To simply claim it happened because the Greeks were lazy is itself a lazy take.
A very good book on the topic is Inside Hitler’s Greece[0].
This argument of
Conclusion: $RichPerson doesn't get to do what they want.
Premise: They're under constant obligation to $MoneyMachine
The premise is wrong: at that levels of wealth, the obligation is not real, it's opt-in and you can opt-out at any time.
The conclusion is wrong too: At that levels of wealth, the person can do everything anyone else can do in their off-time, and they have much more off-time than the person making the argument anyway.
It's a poor argument and should not be made.
A random billionaire nobody knows might walk around the Colosseum undetected, but try doing that with a profile like Zuckerberg's.
Also, there is the personal security concern. If you are rich, you have a lot of ability to pay kidnappers of you and your family.
There is the story that shortly after Pichai became Google CEO, he walked around a conference and he barely got recognized, but if you stay in the limelight for long enough, people recognize you.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/searching-for-...
I strongly disagree[1]; I think it is incorrect to equivocate a non-living thing that needs no care from a particular person to a child's objective need for their parent.
If we reduce all arguments to "well, of course that person cares about $FOO, because parents care about their kids", then any $FOO is then as equally valid to kill oneself over[2].
You created a well-loved piece of art? Well then it's okay to jump in front of a n oncoming train to save it because that's what parents do for their kids!
You wrote a research paper on good UI guidelines? Well then it's okay to jump into a burning building to get the only copy because that's what a parent would do for a child.
I guess I'm just trying to demonstrate that there are few, maybe even none, "I created this thing" comparisons with the parent->child and child->parent relationships.
[1] But I see your point, so upvoted you anyway. I just think that your point is not at all comparable to a parent/child relationship.
[2] Parents will not hesitate to put their life in danger to save their child.
Having money helps a lot in making yourself comfortable when life makes you uncomfortable.
That's cool, if you have a family nearby or you're a in a good relationship with yours. Sucks for those who do not, which is why social safety nets are more important. You pay taxes but in case you fall down, the safety net should catch you make sure you don't end up on the streets if you don't have a family nearby.
Not it isn't, I'm European from a European centric thinking. What you're talking about applies if young people choose to continue living in the same village where they were born and their family still lives, but that hasn't been the case in a long time. Young people (in Europe) move to big metro areas for university or jobs, and often, especially in Greece, they move to other EU countries.
Your family from some Greek village, won't be able to come take care of you in Amsterdam, and most likely they won't have the money to support your NL living expenses from their Greek pensions to help you out, nor will you moving from Amsterdam back to some Greek village help you out too much since there's no jobs in your niche there, or maybe even no jobs at all so now you're broke in Greece instead of broke in Amsterdam but with less job options.
Your PoV scenario is just unrealistic in the world of today and only applies in the traditionalistic tribal village lifestyle that's more or less dead nowadays and few live it. Sure, some lucked out and were born in afluent big metro areas with universities and jobs meaning they always have their family close by, but that's more the exception rather than the rule. If you look at international cities like Munich or Berlin, most people living there weren't actually born there or have family there, they just moved there for study/work. How can family help them then?
I know plenty of people who emigrated to the Netherlands, I don't know anyone who was poor and emigrated there (they don't speak enough foreign languages to have a hope) or that lived there for more than a few months while unable to get a job
Who are these people who go be unemployed in a high CoL country?
Anyway, that's my opinion, and trying to correct people from other cultures that tell me my opinions on my culture cannot be right is tiring, so I'll leave it here.
I wasn't lecturing, I was using Greece as an example that would be familiar to you, but feel free to use any other country where people emigrate from to go to a high CoL country: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.
>I don't know anyone who was poor and emigrated there (they don't speak enough foreign languages to have a hope) or that lived there for more than a few months while unable to get a job
I do. Plenty of Eastern Europeans moved to high CoL countries without knowing the language or having credentials and many found jobs, not the best jobs, but being on minimum wage in Sweden or Austria is better than being broke in Romania or Bulgaria (again, assuming you don't have a well off family to help you out and many who are in the situation of taking minimum wage jobs abroad don't, since they also come from poor or broken families unable to support them, which is why social safety nets are important to catch and help such people and prevent them from perpetuating this cycle).
>Who are these people who go be unemployed in a high CoL country?
You don't "go to be unemployed in a high CoL country", I never said that, but unemployment can find you there when you get laid off, which is why safety nets are more important than a far away family from a low CoL country who has no way of helping you out.
>Anyway, that's my opinion, and trying to correct people from other cultures that tell me my opinions on my culture cannot be right is tiring, so I'll leave it here.
Regardless of your "culture", people not having parents to help out (orphans do exist you know) or family too poor to help out, is not really something that goes against the "culture" you keep harping here. Not everyone's family, Greek culture or not, will be able to help out, hence my point of tax funded welfare social nets being important. None of what you wrote so far is an argument against that.
People in Greece certainly don't prioritize happiness instead of making money. There was a clear shift where Greeks became more and more unhappy after the (still ongoing) crisis. No1 problem is financial insecurity; as a resident (MD) I work 70-80hrs/week, for less than 7€/hour. Prices are comparable with rich EU countries.
In general, what an individual is doing with his free time, is no one's business.
Source ?
I highly, highly doubt that this is true.
I am talking very about small nukes, cheap, minimal and for personal use as a self defense. Two grams of gold cheap, 1 km evaporation range and 5 km blast.
Very minimal, but as soon as millions of people have one, gather a lot of them in one place and you do some serious damage.
This lady seriously suggests that millions of Thai's will have their personal nukes, millions of Mongolians or Brazilians will have small nuclear weapons each, but Greeks will not, because Greeks are lazy somehow. I don't know where she reads that stuff, probably some comic series.
You haven't thought through any of this.
Either they were a liar or an idiot.
Greece is the worst example as it is highly optimised for money and not social happiness/success. There is a reason that fraud is rampant and no one pays taxes unless they have to.
I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money.
I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty seat at a taverna in her village on the weekends. They barely had any money, and few around her were employed, but they had certain priorities.
Meanwhile in the US, I had a teacher condescendingly tell me that the Greeks were lazy (ignorant of the history that led to 2008). It can be hard to see through certain cultural biases. Particularly when the primary goals are so different.