I'm not surprised. I'm reaching an age where I feel like I've seen it all in terms of what can happen to me as a person (births/deaths/big life events), as well as what can happen in terms of historical events that affect people's lives (Changes of leadership, wars, stuff in the news).
But the thing that seems most important is relationships. Being able to maintain them with various people is paramount. I'm a bit younger than the people in the study, and fortunate to have a very international network, so maybe I rely more on technology to talk to people, but I've found it's key to write to people to stay in touch. In terms of day-to-day I also make an effort to do a gathering now and again. It's pretty easy, I just ping some people I know from various contexts and pick a place. Also in terms of close relations I don't find you need to be close in terms of frequent contact. Writing to someone I've known for a long time without constantly connection is as familiar as having the occasional meal with local friends.
I've also developed a kind of understanding for various relationships that are a kind of "kindred spirit" relation: people who exemplify some sort of archetype with whom I identify, but with whom I have not spent much time. It's a sort of immediate familiarity that is quite satisfying, eg when you meet another programmer and you have similar experiences, or another person who went to your university or comes from the same country. These are often useful seeds for deeper relationships, but are also good in and of themselves.
Relationships are important, but this importance varies from person to person. What would break one (long absence of such) is a negligible detail for another. Its true that most folks are wired for some form of them, but some actually thrive in their absence and focus their energy easier towards their goals.
I personally am somewhere in between. I can handle loneliness remarkably well, way better than most if not all people I know closely (and this allowed me to do hard very positive actions in life), but that doesn't prevent me from enjoying occasional family or friends reunion. But I don't thrive on them and I am not sad/depressed when lacking them. I love my family just to be clear and especially my parents, very little to complain about.
For example serious adventures can fill this hole more than nicely. But now my kids are doing their best and the hole is overflowing a bit.
This sounds like your personal anecdotal experience at a specific stage in your life, whereas the study covered many people over a decades long time frame.
Many wealthy, elite white men predominantly from the northeast United States. (Yes I know 40 years in they expanded the study to some local inner city subjects.)
Still, it's probably the best study of its kind ever performed.
Will be interesting to see if there are differences for other demographics as they continue to expand the scope of the subjects. But will need to wait decades for those results.
I'm definitely not in the "seen it all" phase but I recently, on a whim, got out a pen and paper and started what I thought would be a quick one page letter. 8 pages later I realized the act of writing was as important as the content itself. And the receiving side seems to have shared the sentiment; the interaction, slow and async as it was, had a depth of meaning I wouldn't have anticipated. Kinda hippie dippie and all but true nonetheless. :)
1. To the title: I'm confident there are good genes that cause joy. I'm certain there are bad genes that cause anti-joy.
2. The actual article talks about relationships with people, and not about happiness per se. (For example, what about a hermit who constantly derives joy from listening to classical music?) Bad title.
3. Most of what is stated is a correlation, and it seems there are obvious alternative explanations, such as the opposite-direction causality: if your health problems get bad enough, that may interfere with your relationships. For example: "Part of a study found that people who had happy marriages in their 80s reported that their moods didn’t suffer even on the days when they had more physical pain. Those who had unhappy marriages felt both more emotional and physical pain." Maybe those who feel worse physical pain are more likely to snap at their spouse, and/or less likely to do the things that make their spouse feel loved.
I mean, it's plausible that the thesis is correct, but the article seems to overstate the certainty of the evidence.
Yes, it is blindingly obvious that people are born with different happiness set-points, and this is primarily genetic, if you look at families.
Circumstances and life adjust this up and down... but some people are just innately happy and other people are innately unhappy, and adjust to their set-point quickly after a life change.
Are we sure that is "blindingly obvious"? I think the whole point of studies like this to try to tease out hints at what parts of it are genetic vs circumstance vs choices.
FWIW I think that the genetic component of 'innately happy' is quite small, as I've known relatively few dirt poor people who were happy anyway, and relatively more carefree upper class folks. Though of course it's possible it's still genetic and just caused economic sorting higher up the tree, I suppose.
I think he means the inverse: for people able to find joy despite adverse circumstances.
More importantly, I would say, it's likely innate to us that we are unhappy without adverse circumstances. I.e. for there to be brightness there needs to be darkness.
There's plenty of research counter to that, showing that regardless of negative or positive events happening in one's life, people tend back towards the same happiness they were at after a few years.
I wouldn't say it "counters" it, rather it very much depends on the events and/or circumstances. Winning the lottery won't make you happy. Losing your job and failing to get another one will probably make you sad. Traumatic events can be very hard to get over.
Funny enough the only example I've found of an "event" having a long term positive effect is cosmetic surgery
Any links? It isn't clear whether you are talking about cosmetic surgery to mitigate an obvious issue (for example, correcting a hair lip or removing a disfiguring facial birthmark), as compared to cosmetic beauty enhancements (nose job or tummy tuck). I would guess "enhancements" have a very strong sampling bias, because of a strong correlations with disposable income, belonging to certain social groups, and the type of person that prioritises surgery over other expenses. Adjusting to remove bias would be problematic?
I also suspect that there would be an inherent bias in reported studies, because the cosmetic surgery industry will fund and publish results that benefit the industry?
"Other researchers have investigated the effects of life events which can cause medium term and perhaps permanent change in set points. These events include the unexpected death of a child (Wortman & Silver, 1987), repeated spells of unemployment which have a ‘scarring effect’ (Clark et al, 2004), becoming widowed and perhaps getting married (Lucas et al, 2003). Amusingly, the only favourable or positive ‘event’ unambiguously shown to enhance long term subjective well being seems to be cosmetic surgery (Wengle, 1986; Loewenstein & Frederick, 1999)"
Copy-pasted from a 2006 paper by Bruce Headey I had lying around. I haven't looked into this in a few years but you might be able chase those refs down if you're interested
I think it's astounding that people take happiness-set-point theory so literally. Has everyone here been uniformly happy/miserable throughout their life? I certainly haven't - when things have been bad I've been miserable, when things have been good I've been happy
If a person does not revise their core beliefs based on acute events, then, given time, their chronic happiness level will revert to what it was (speaking very generally).
I don't agree with the implication that genetics are to blame, but rather I believe it is incredibly difficult for a person to change their core beliefs, even when reality is at odds with those beliefs.
Fine, how about someone who has little or no social life but derives joy from playing video games and other solitary pursuits, and also gets enough exercise (or at least as much as the average person who has good relationships)? I suspect there are some people on this forum who are like that, and more people who might become that if they thought it was the right idea.
Edit: The point is that the title implies that you'd get the significant health benefits just by experiencing joy, but the article says that you need good social relationships, so, if we believed the article, the title would misdirect people.
Most of my gamer friends, game with real people. Not sure if there are statistics on this or not.
For what it's worth this is a correlation study and not causal. I'm sure there are some loners out there that are very happy, but when I've had turbulent times in my life, it was my friends who helped me.
Do you have a long term longitudinal study of many individuals backing up your claims, like this study does for claims about the importance of relationships to long term health?
What claims am I making? The article is the one that's claiming causation. I've merely said that its evidence is insufficient, and also that the title misstates the claims made in the article. The point of mentioning "those who get solitary joy with no social life" is that the title says this is good, but the article says it's not good—and therefore, even if we believed the conclusions the article tries to draw, the title gives bad advice.
Social needs vary among people. It's easy to see the benefits of good social relationships. However, I think people with lower social needs, smaller to non-existent social relationships aren't suffering.
Even more obvious: Good relationships provide for a higher level of care and support. When health trouble arises, a devoted partner's presence (to identify issues and encourage action), care (when self-care isn't possible), and advocacy (within our challenging healthcare system) can make all the difference in the world.
There is reason to expect that with today's educational practices; the effect, funnily enough, does manifest partly through social relationships: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf
> A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above. Significant differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and direction, life satisfaction, social relationships, and self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence.
> The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated [skipped 3+ years of K-12], or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization.
> I believe that all the young people in this study would have benefited greatly, both academically and socially, from grade advancement, while the considerable majority would have benefited from radical acceleration. Sadly, only 17 were radically accelerated, and indeed, the majority (33 of the 60) were retained with age peers for the duration of their schooling.
> Several of the nonaccelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships. Six have had counseling. Of these, two have been treated for severe depression.
Mind sharing? I've seen this before but they recruited high QI individuals from organizations like MENSA, which can lead to some selection bias issues.
Makes sense. The people I've seen with problem relationships have more emotional issues and that's often when things like drug use and bad decisions go hand in hand.
The good news is I have a wonderful wife who I get along with really well. However, the further into my 30s I go the fewer friends I seem to have. Moving to a new country and the pandemic definitely didn't help. Where do people approaching middle age meet friends these days? Everyone always seems to in their own bubble and wants to fight about politics or other wedge issues instead of just chilling for lack of a better word.
> Where do people approaching middle age meet friends these days?
For me it was parents of my kids' friends, often via sports or other group activities that the kids were all involved in.
Those friendships fade quickly once the kids grow up, by the way, as there is no longer the common connection. I've made some attempts to maintain these, but they generally are not reciprocated and at some point you just stop with the one-sided effort.
I have not discovered the secret to long-lasting friendships, if there is one. They all seem to rely on common proximity (school, work, gym, etc.) and they don't really hold up if and when those things change. I have not had any friendships that ever lasted very long past graduations, job changes, moves, retirements, etc. I think that's basically natural, and that friendships really depend on some outside set of factors that keep people coming together for the same things.
Thanks for the response. That's been kind of my experience too (hard to keep them when not close / with something in common). I suppose I'll need to find a new hobby at some point here and meet people that way.
>wants to fight about politics or other wedge issues
It's always so funny that this is brought up on HN as a reason for lack of socialization or problem so often. One of the biggest and most durable parts of my social life is being a member of a political party, which I have been in since I was 16 years old.
Being involved in civic/political life means you have connections with people from all walks of life across all generations and backgrounds. just wanting to chill is the actual problem because I don't think these suburban soccermom type social circles sustain meaningful relationships. Participating in public life is the most straightforward way to build social relationships that matter.
There was another great post here a few weeks ago from someone explaining why he continues to serve in the British Yeomanry. https://chrisseaton.com/army/
Right. It seems a bit odd that our goal in friendships is often to find someone who will “just sit and chill.” If you want any diversity in your friendships, they’ll likely need to be made “shoulder to shoulder,” ie when working toward a common cause.
Agreed, and it also seems to me that most adults, at least the ones leading something like meaningful lives, don't have a lot of time to "just sit and chill." When my kids were young I rarely did, there was always something going on. Now that they are older and out of the house, I have more time for myself but I'm using that time, not just sitting around (mostly not, anyway).
I didn't say _sit_ and chill, I just said chill and don't want politics to be the cornerstone of the friendship or something that comes up often. Partisan politics is extremely prominent here and I have no end of places to discuss them if I wanted. I don't think it's outrageous to want a hobby other than discussing politics being the main thing I connect to people on.
To clarify I meant chill as in not getting into heated politics or religious debates. If the claim is people can't find meaningful friendships without wedge issues being a cornerstone, then I respectfully disagree. I've had these before, but as mentioned the issue was moving and getting older when people drift apart.
Similar story for me.
It changed once i moved out of the city with kids to a residential area. Since then 3 years have passed and the quality of my social life increased dramatically. Of course this didn't just came around. I did put a lot of effort in getting new friends. But it's certainly easier in an environment where people live similar lifes.
The article implies causation, but I'm not sure in which direction it goes. I can imagine that someone who is chronically ill will have less energy to maintain relationships. In other words, if you are healthy, you are more likely to be active in life in general, including relationships.
There was some study that looked at this isolated community that did not have the greatest diet, yet they lived very long lives and disease was nearly non-existent. What they had was community.
This community had unusually low rates of heart disease despite a large range of traditional risk factors. The general consensus was that this was due to the community-oriented nature of the town. Later they did follow-ups and found that as the town became more stereotypically "American" the mortality rates due to heart disease increased, especially among younger men.
I wish they would include these types of studies in Harvard's curriculum and community life, where there is an outsized emphasis on pedigree, test scores, and unlocking career achievements.
There used to a dating website that advertised heavily on Boston-area public radio stations called "GoodGenes" that specifically restricted participation to Ivy League graduates. Facebook followed a similar pattern (at first) limiting participation to elite schools.
It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
There is a sweet naivete to a study like this, it invites compassion.
Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd, it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives. "Is it genes?" the cold, analytical mind ponders. It is kind of funny, yet it is tragic, and so it invites a response.
Yes, love makes life worth living. Not just relationships, but love, in its many varied forms. If you are reading this, I love you. To Ivy League scientists and their objects of study, I love you as well. You see, God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture. Surround yourself in love at all times, and you will lead a life that is satisfying and resplendent in joy.
> It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
It does not intends to be a revelation. A study can prove what everyone always believed all along. People believe all kind of things, some are true some are false. A properly designed study shines a dispassionate light at facts in a way which can show if the common belief was false or not.
> Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd,
You are entitled to think that. The history of humankind is full of people being dead sure of themselves while also being wrong. This is why it's worth to check our assumptions in a dispassionate way. Especially the things we are sure about.
> it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives.
That is your projection. One can be full of joy, happiness, and love while still applying logic and dispassionate reasoning to study a question.
> Yes, love makes life worth living. Not just relationships, but love, in its many varied forms. If you are reading this, I love you. To Ivy League scientists and their objects of study, I love you as well.
Well, the point is, not all love is equal and some love is greater than others. At that point, it's up to you to prioritize accordingly since love requires energy and we all have finite energy.
>You see, God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture
I have read my fair share of traditional religious scripture and I haven't concluded this at all from the text. I've found what they call "God" to be at times a very spiteful, cruel, and unloving entity. If this is what "love" means in these texts, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
> It is really a revelation that love is what makes life meaningful?
Yes. The original researchers considered all kinds of things that might correlate to long term health and happiness. They did not consider quality of relationships as one of them.
“Love” is not a singular concept, the word refers to a whole lot of different things, and it’s also different from happiness and longevity (what the study measured). The article also doesn’t mention meaningfulness. What you wrote therefore seems like a non sequitur.
You see, I don't believe in God at all. And I think religion is generally more harmful than helpful. And yet... while the study was kind of boring, and most of the comments here too, there is something in your comment that touched me very much. You put a smile on my face after another difficult day. Thank you.
> God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture
I'm not sure which scripture you are talking about. If you are talking about the Abrahamic line of scripture, you can find anything you want, as Shakespeare famously said. Because you are apparently a good person, you focus on the positive aspects of the message, and that is great.
But there are people who focus on different parts of the scripture, or interpret the same passages in a different way, that lead to injustice and suffering. The fact that there are so many religious denominations reading the same documents but coming to different understandings shows that this message is anything but simple.
Famously, the Torah describes God's special relationship with his chosen people. Many people love to take excerpts from this as God's universal truths, but in fact these were only for the Jewish people. God had no problem commanding them to commit rape and genocide against out-groups. The claim that "God is love" is true only if you erase large parts of that document, or redefine "love" to be whatever God has commanded there.
I'm not one to memorize Bible passages, but I believe there are a few places where the Israelite were told to lay waste to other tribes, though they could keep the virgins for themselves.
This is the first I found via google, I'm sure you can find more:
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
Remember when Harvard was considered to be intellectually peerless. Yeah, the only thing going for it is its endowment. Like others growing up, I assumed that Harvard was only for the best and the brightest in the world. If you applied for Harvard and didn't get in, this is what you're missing. Even the most prestigious of institutions are not immune to the replication crisis and hand-waving research overall.
Just another attempt to downplay the roles of money, social status as it pertains to happiness. I am sure someone who is smart, wealthy and has high social status, like Bezos or Musk, is happier than the average person of their age group who has neither. Being happy at 80 or 90 does not matter. I want to be happy now. For for most people, that means having money and professional/career status and success. Yeah, the midlife crisis is a real thing, but for unsuccessful people who make no money, life is a daily crisis if you're poor.
You suppose a lot of things in your reasoning that you don't back up with any data or references and then you use this to discredit the institution based on a popular science article. It doesn't really make much sense.
I get so tired of seeing the same research pretending that causation is correlation. At some point I just don't want to trot out the same old comment. Maybe we should just accept that whole swathes of social science have given up on taking causality seriously.
Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.
If you have good relationships, you have people taking care of you in important ways probably every single day, whether you interact with them that day or not. Over time, this adds up.
If you don't have that, the cost may be invisible but will inevitably add up over time.
I am reminded of an Achewood comic [1] about a Harvard study regarding love: "So maybe the next time you Harvard guys decide to study some Harvard guys ... just remember that for most folks the Maslow hierarchy tops out at lookin' in the bathroom mirror without drawin' an X in the steam."
Apropos of nothing except the comment I am responding to, I just idly clicked the next comic and completely forgot that I had read it already, until the last immortal line: "I wonder where it will be when it dies." It's weird that
Charles Schulz had like 800 billion dollars and Chris Onstad is working in a greasy spoon or something.
>Some participants went on to become successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and others ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics, but not on inevitable tracks.
Why was this assumption made? If the goal of the study is to analyze the potential for biologically determined outcomes in people's lives, doesn't this sort of undermine that foundational question? Why wouldn't genetics play a role in determining personality, and make some people more outgoing and willing to embrace a community?
>Researchers who have pored through data, including vast medical records and hundreds of in-person interviews and questionnaires, found a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community.
This doesn't tell us why. Why is that the case?
>Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too.
Taking care of your relationships IS taking care of your body. Our mind is a physical organ like the heart or lungs. Our entire personalities, our thoughts, our dreams and everything that comprises consciousness is just a series of abstractions built on top of flesh.
IMO, the real lesson these researchers should've taken away from this is that the mind is not separate from the rest of the body.
I've always believed that Democritus(the laughing philosopher) was onto something with his work "On Cheerfulness" that inspired many stoics like Seneca to pass on the idea of enlightened hedonism.
While loneliness is a factor that is getting worse each year and the stats seem to also prove it, I do believe that the idea Democritus provides for "moderation of everything" is the key. This sense of relatedness and having a strong sense of community/relationships still needs to not fall to either extreme.
Seneca for example outlined a few things on-top of this work in "On the tranquility of the mind / on peace of mind" for living a good life:
1. Attitude is everything.
2. Don't compare yourself to others, only yourself.
3. Love and be loved.
4. Do not harm others.
5. Cherish the present.
That the right treatment is to follow nature, find the right balance between sociability and solitude, labour and leisure, sobriety and intoxication, and to "watch over our vacillating mind with intense and unremitting care".
I read the OP's "compare" as the judgement-filled comparison, where one measures their self-worth based on where others are at relative to themselves / relies on external yardsticks for definition of identity.
The compare you're talking about—seeking excellent people (internally defined) and wanting to learn from them (without judgement)—is an extremely important thing.
I think it's more along the lines of material goods or things like "success" or what have you.
It's an adage that's been repeated over and over in many ways: "Comparison is the thief of joy".
For some people, it's not enough that they have something good, they must have something better than someone else. "What good is my iPhone 12 if you have an iPhone 13? Why don't I have an iPhone 13?" And so on.
But. Last year, they didn't even have a phone. So they're better off, yeah?
But your opening sentence would be much more effective with a bit of rewording; "inspired many stoics like Seneca to pass on the idea" is hard to parse, and fatally ambiguous. Did Seneca "pass [the idea] on" (ie, propogate / endorse it), or did he "[take a] pass on it" (ie, reject it). Later context makes it clear you meant the former. Anyway thanks for the links, HTH!
We're used to thinking of our genes as being a bit like fate. They have a part in determining how our lives play out, but that's it, and other factors matter too.
This does a rapidly evolving field a tremendous disservice. Genetics is becoming an immensely practical field. e.g. Genetic sequencing is now cheap enough to be easily affordable. Certain genes can greatly increase your chance of cancer. However, this isn't just fate we must passively accept.
Armed with the knowledge revealed by sequencing, you can be regularly screened for the specific types of cancer you're most likely to get. Some genetic mutations, while making people more susceptible to cancer, also makes any cancer they develop susceptible to alternative treatments like gene therapy that are more effective and carry fewer negative side-effects than chemotherapy or radiation therapy. i.e. Cancer cells aren't some alien invader. They have our genes and our genetic defects too. These weaknesses can sometimes be exploited to kill cancer cells if we know about them.
Joy may play a huge part in our well-being, but discovering and acting on our poor genes can have a huge impact on our lives. We should stop viewing our genes as fate and instead view them more like the parts of an engine. We can address defects in those parts proactively, but only if we go to the trouble of looking under the hood.
> “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
My own visceral experience along these lines has been healing my relationship with my dad. I didn't have negative experiences with him, just a complete absence. He was not in the picture at all from my years 3 to 25. Short story long I eventually found and cold called him and we mended the relationship. There is no doubt in my mind that I probably added years of life by doing this. Not just for me but also for my brother and mom who also weren't talking with him. Heck, even for dad, too. He was diagnosed with cancer coincidentally right around the time I cold called him and healing our relationship very likely was a strong motivator for him to keep fighting and living.
Anybody in a similar situation is welcome to contact me and talk further 1 on 1.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadBut the thing that seems most important is relationships. Being able to maintain them with various people is paramount. I'm a bit younger than the people in the study, and fortunate to have a very international network, so maybe I rely more on technology to talk to people, but I've found it's key to write to people to stay in touch. In terms of day-to-day I also make an effort to do a gathering now and again. It's pretty easy, I just ping some people I know from various contexts and pick a place. Also in terms of close relations I don't find you need to be close in terms of frequent contact. Writing to someone I've known for a long time without constantly connection is as familiar as having the occasional meal with local friends.
I've also developed a kind of understanding for various relationships that are a kind of "kindred spirit" relation: people who exemplify some sort of archetype with whom I identify, but with whom I have not spent much time. It's a sort of immediate familiarity that is quite satisfying, eg when you meet another programmer and you have similar experiences, or another person who went to your university or comes from the same country. These are often useful seeds for deeper relationships, but are also good in and of themselves.
I personally am somewhere in between. I can handle loneliness remarkably well, way better than most if not all people I know closely (and this allowed me to do hard very positive actions in life), but that doesn't prevent me from enjoying occasional family or friends reunion. But I don't thrive on them and I am not sad/depressed when lacking them. I love my family just to be clear and especially my parents, very little to complain about.
For example serious adventures can fill this hole more than nicely. But now my kids are doing their best and the hole is overflowing a bit.
Will be interesting to see if there are differences for other demographics as they continue to expand the scope of the subjects. But will need to wait decades for those results.
1. To the title: I'm confident there are good genes that cause joy. I'm certain there are bad genes that cause anti-joy.
2. The actual article talks about relationships with people, and not about happiness per se. (For example, what about a hermit who constantly derives joy from listening to classical music?) Bad title.
3. Most of what is stated is a correlation, and it seems there are obvious alternative explanations, such as the opposite-direction causality: if your health problems get bad enough, that may interfere with your relationships. For example: "Part of a study found that people who had happy marriages in their 80s reported that their moods didn’t suffer even on the days when they had more physical pain. Those who had unhappy marriages felt both more emotional and physical pain." Maybe those who feel worse physical pain are more likely to snap at their spouse, and/or less likely to do the things that make their spouse feel loved.
I mean, it's plausible that the thesis is correct, but the article seems to overstate the certainty of the evidence.
Circumstances and life adjust this up and down... but some people are just innately happy and other people are innately unhappy, and adjust to their set-point quickly after a life change.
FWIW I think that the genetic component of 'innately happy' is quite small, as I've known relatively few dirt poor people who were happy anyway, and relatively more carefree upper class folks. Though of course it's possible it's still genetic and just caused economic sorting higher up the tree, I suppose.
More importantly, I would say, it's likely innate to us that we are unhappy without adverse circumstances. I.e. for there to be brightness there needs to be darkness.
Funny enough the only example I've found of an "event" having a long term positive effect is cosmetic surgery
Any links? It isn't clear whether you are talking about cosmetic surgery to mitigate an obvious issue (for example, correcting a hair lip or removing a disfiguring facial birthmark), as compared to cosmetic beauty enhancements (nose job or tummy tuck). I would guess "enhancements" have a very strong sampling bias, because of a strong correlations with disposable income, belonging to certain social groups, and the type of person that prioritises surgery over other expenses. Adjusting to remove bias would be problematic?
I also suspect that there would be an inherent bias in reported studies, because the cosmetic surgery industry will fund and publish results that benefit the industry?
Copy-pasted from a 2006 paper by Bruce Headey I had lying around. I haven't looked into this in a few years but you might be able chase those refs down if you're interested
I think it's astounding that people take happiness-set-point theory so literally. Has everyone here been uniformly happy/miserable throughout their life? I certainly haven't - when things have been bad I've been miserable, when things have been good I've been happy
I don't agree with the implication that genetics are to blame, but rather I believe it is incredibly difficult for a person to change their core beliefs, even when reality is at odds with those beliefs.
Something you just cooked up out of your imagination is not a real counter-example
Edit: The point is that the title implies that you'd get the significant health benefits just by experiencing joy, but the article says that you need good social relationships, so, if we believed the article, the title would misdirect people.
For what it's worth this is a correlation study and not causal. I'm sure there are some loners out there that are very happy, but when I've had turbulent times in my life, it was my friends who helped me.
Here's this survey as well: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1235068/online-gaming-so...
> A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above. Significant differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and direction, life satisfaction, social relationships, and self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence.
> The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated [skipped 3+ years of K-12], or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization.
> I believe that all the young people in this study would have benefited greatly, both academically and socially, from grade advancement, while the considerable majority would have benefited from radical acceleration. Sadly, only 17 were radically accelerated, and indeed, the majority (33 of the 60) were retained with age peers for the duration of their schooling.
> Several of the nonaccelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships. Six have had counseling. Of these, two have been treated for severe depression.
“And are you?”
“No. That’s where it all falls down of course.”
The good news is I have a wonderful wife who I get along with really well. However, the further into my 30s I go the fewer friends I seem to have. Moving to a new country and the pandemic definitely didn't help. Where do people approaching middle age meet friends these days? Everyone always seems to in their own bubble and wants to fight about politics or other wedge issues instead of just chilling for lack of a better word.
For me it was parents of my kids' friends, often via sports or other group activities that the kids were all involved in.
Those friendships fade quickly once the kids grow up, by the way, as there is no longer the common connection. I've made some attempts to maintain these, but they generally are not reciprocated and at some point you just stop with the one-sided effort.
I have not discovered the secret to long-lasting friendships, if there is one. They all seem to rely on common proximity (school, work, gym, etc.) and they don't really hold up if and when those things change. I have not had any friendships that ever lasted very long past graduations, job changes, moves, retirements, etc. I think that's basically natural, and that friendships really depend on some outside set of factors that keep people coming together for the same things.
It's always so funny that this is brought up on HN as a reason for lack of socialization or problem so often. One of the biggest and most durable parts of my social life is being a member of a political party, which I have been in since I was 16 years old.
Being involved in civic/political life means you have connections with people from all walks of life across all generations and backgrounds. just wanting to chill is the actual problem because I don't think these suburban soccermom type social circles sustain meaningful relationships. Participating in public life is the most straightforward way to build social relationships that matter.
There was another great post here a few weeks ago from someone explaining why he continues to serve in the British Yeomanry. https://chrisseaton.com/army/
This community had unusually low rates of heart disease despite a large range of traditional risk factors. The general consensus was that this was due to the community-oriented nature of the town. Later they did follow-ups and found that as the town became more stereotypically "American" the mortality rates due to heart disease increased, especially among younger men.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1695733/
There used to a dating website that advertised heavily on Boston-area public radio stations called "GoodGenes" that specifically restricted participation to Ivy League graduates. Facebook followed a similar pattern (at first) limiting participation to elite schools.
There is a sweet naivete to a study like this, it invites compassion.
Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd, it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives. "Is it genes?" the cold, analytical mind ponders. It is kind of funny, yet it is tragic, and so it invites a response.
Yes, love makes life worth living. Not just relationships, but love, in its many varied forms. If you are reading this, I love you. To Ivy League scientists and their objects of study, I love you as well. You see, God is love, this is a simple truth found in scripture. Surround yourself in love at all times, and you will lead a life that is satisfying and resplendent in joy.
It does not intends to be a revelation. A study can prove what everyone always believed all along. People believe all kind of things, some are true some are false. A properly designed study shines a dispassionate light at facts in a way which can show if the common belief was false or not.
> Analyzing happiness with this cold academic rigor is just absurd,
You are entitled to think that. The history of humankind is full of people being dead sure of themselves while also being wrong. This is why it's worth to check our assumptions in a dispassionate way. Especially the things we are sure about.
> it is like a depressed species of alien studying our planet to figure out why people have happy lives.
That is your projection. One can be full of joy, happiness, and love while still applying logic and dispassionate reasoning to study a question.
Well, the point is, not all love is equal and some love is greater than others. At that point, it's up to you to prioritize accordingly since love requires energy and we all have finite energy.
I have read my fair share of traditional religious scripture and I haven't concluded this at all from the text. I've found what they call "God" to be at times a very spiteful, cruel, and unloving entity. If this is what "love" means in these texts, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Yes. The original researchers considered all kinds of things that might correlate to long term health and happiness. They did not consider quality of relationships as one of them.
I'm not sure which scripture you are talking about. If you are talking about the Abrahamic line of scripture, you can find anything you want, as Shakespeare famously said. Because you are apparently a good person, you focus on the positive aspects of the message, and that is great.
But there are people who focus on different parts of the scripture, or interpret the same passages in a different way, that lead to injustice and suffering. The fact that there are so many religious denominations reading the same documents but coming to different understandings shows that this message is anything but simple.
Famously, the Torah describes God's special relationship with his chosen people. Many people love to take excerpts from this as God's universal truths, but in fact these were only for the Jewish people. God had no problem commanding them to commit rape and genocide against out-groups. The claim that "God is love" is true only if you erase large parts of that document, or redefine "love" to be whatever God has commanded there.
..and when exactly did God command Jewish people to rape? This comment is very strange
This is the first I found via google, I'm sure you can find more:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+31%3A7-...
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
Just another attempt to downplay the roles of money, social status as it pertains to happiness. I am sure someone who is smart, wealthy and has high social status, like Bezos or Musk, is happier than the average person of their age group who has neither. Being happy at 80 or 90 does not matter. I want to be happy now. For for most people, that means having money and professional/career status and success. Yeah, the midlife crisis is a real thing, but for unsuccessful people who make no money, life is a daily crisis if you're poor.
Trust is like Rome, we can't simply build it in 1 day, or simply buy it.
Trust is nessessary condition for any long term relationship.
Well I'm screwed. I don't take care of my body either.
If you have good relationships, you have people taking care of you in important ways probably every single day, whether you interact with them that day or not. Over time, this adds up.
If you don't have that, the cost may be invisible but will inevitably add up over time.
1: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04152016
Why was this assumption made? If the goal of the study is to analyze the potential for biologically determined outcomes in people's lives, doesn't this sort of undermine that foundational question? Why wouldn't genetics play a role in determining personality, and make some people more outgoing and willing to embrace a community?
>Researchers who have pored through data, including vast medical records and hundreds of in-person interviews and questionnaires, found a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community.
This doesn't tell us why. Why is that the case?
>Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too.
Taking care of your relationships IS taking care of your body. Our mind is a physical organ like the heart or lungs. Our entire personalities, our thoughts, our dreams and everything that comprises consciousness is just a series of abstractions built on top of flesh.
IMO, the real lesson these researchers should've taken away from this is that the mind is not separate from the rest of the body.
While loneliness is a factor that is getting worse each year and the stats seem to also prove it, I do believe that the idea Democritus provides for "moderation of everything" is the key. This sense of relatedness and having a strong sense of community/relationships still needs to not fall to either extreme.
Seneca for example outlined a few things on-top of this work in "On the tranquility of the mind / on peace of mind" for living a good life:
1. Attitude is everything.
2. Don't compare yourself to others, only yourself.
3. Love and be loved.
4. Do not harm others.
5. Cherish the present.
That the right treatment is to follow nature, find the right balance between sociability and solitude, labour and leisure, sobriety and intoxication, and to "watch over our vacillating mind with intense and unremitting care".
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/
https://medium.com/@s.sekulins/a-guide-to-happiness-senecas-...
Can "stealing"/learning from other people be considered as a "comparing" to them?
Because before you apply their approach, then you have to
a) find that they're doing it
b) realize that you aren't
Thus you kinda indirectly compared yourself to them
The compare you're talking about—seeking excellent people (internally defined) and wanting to learn from them (without judgement)—is an extremely important thing.
It's an adage that's been repeated over and over in many ways: "Comparison is the thief of joy".
For some people, it's not enough that they have something good, they must have something better than someone else. "What good is my iPhone 12 if you have an iPhone 13? Why don't I have an iPhone 13?" And so on.
But. Last year, they didn't even have a phone. So they're better off, yeah?
But your opening sentence would be much more effective with a bit of rewording; "inspired many stoics like Seneca to pass on the idea" is hard to parse, and fatally ambiguous. Did Seneca "pass [the idea] on" (ie, propogate / endorse it), or did he "[take a] pass on it" (ie, reject it). Later context makes it clear you meant the former. Anyway thanks for the links, HTH!
Please add the year tag to the title.
Professor Scott Galloway also mentioned about this study in his book "The Algebra of Happiness".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMW6xgPgY4s
This does a rapidly evolving field a tremendous disservice. Genetics is becoming an immensely practical field. e.g. Genetic sequencing is now cheap enough to be easily affordable. Certain genes can greatly increase your chance of cancer. However, this isn't just fate we must passively accept.
Armed with the knowledge revealed by sequencing, you can be regularly screened for the specific types of cancer you're most likely to get. Some genetic mutations, while making people more susceptible to cancer, also makes any cancer they develop susceptible to alternative treatments like gene therapy that are more effective and carry fewer negative side-effects than chemotherapy or radiation therapy. i.e. Cancer cells aren't some alien invader. They have our genes and our genetic defects too. These weaknesses can sometimes be exploited to kill cancer cells if we know about them.
Joy may play a huge part in our well-being, but discovering and acting on our poor genes can have a huge impact on our lives. We should stop viewing our genes as fate and instead view them more like the parts of an engine. We can address defects in those parts proactively, but only if we go to the trouble of looking under the hood.
My own visceral experience along these lines has been healing my relationship with my dad. I didn't have negative experiences with him, just a complete absence. He was not in the picture at all from my years 3 to 25. Short story long I eventually found and cold called him and we mended the relationship. There is no doubt in my mind that I probably added years of life by doing this. Not just for me but also for my brother and mom who also weren't talking with him. Heck, even for dad, too. He was diagnosed with cancer coincidentally right around the time I cold called him and healing our relationship very likely was a strong motivator for him to keep fighting and living.
Anybody in a similar situation is welcome to contact me and talk further 1 on 1.
80-year Harvard study has been showing how to live a healthy and happy life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14814970 - July 2017 (166 comments)
I recall that the Harvard longitudinal study has had several HN threads over the years - anyone know where they are?
Edit - here's one:
What Makes Us Happy? (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10471344 - Oct 2015 (12 comments)