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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How the pursuit of happiness has led to profound despair

Lol. You can read this same article once a year since like the Gutenberg Press. Would highly recommend Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (c. 1930) for a primer on the history of people thinking that unhappiness is a Modern condition.





tacocat  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't really know what the fuck this guy is saying except a lot of people are unhappy and that's a problem, but I'm of the opinion that happiness is a modern condition and expecting that happiness is the natural state just leads to more misery. Instead of, "Awesome! I'm happy!" you get "I'm not happy and it's bad and so I'm going to be unhappy, miserable and cruel because any fleeting joy I have is a reminder of what I'm supposed to be like all the time." I think it goes further to explain drugs than everyone is miserable and broken, that is to say everyone wants to be happy but also feels entitled to that feeling constantly. I mean you have both examples, there are just miserable broken addicts who want to end the pain, but I think I've heard my argument like once from from a psychologist. It stuck with me because the counterargument seems to say the world is amazing and you're broken if you don't see that when in my mind the world is neutral at best and when it's good you should be appreciative instead of expecting that constantly.

I'm not popular at parties...

user-inactivated  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I might add that to my ever growing reading list.

b_b  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's an enjoyable read, but the big takeaway is just that people have felt this way for at least as long as people have been able to write about how they feel. I think certainly there's a waxing and waning of despair on a societal level, and we may be in the waxing phase at the moment, but despite its relative fluctuations the feeling is eternal. A deep sense of unhappiness is what drives us to strive for a better life. Despair may be eternal but so is hope, and so long as hope is even a little stronger than despair, we're going to come out ok.

I just finished reading a book called The Lost War which was written by a Japanese reporter in 1946. Japan in 1946 was one of the biggest pits of despair history has ever known, and even the Japanese people found reason for hope (the happy part of the book is reading about the kindness and humility of the US occupiers when the Japanese were basically all prepared to be starved and raped). If you can find hope after the sacrifice in vain of a whole generation of young men and the leveling of essentially all of your cities, then you can find hope anywhere. People are strong.