HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Optimize it by learning about happiness via Positive Psychology, a direction of inquiry about what makes people happy (above baseline).

One gem from the field: If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right [0].

Great books from the field: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert [1] and The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky [2]

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-mon...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Happiness-Approach-Getting-Life/d...

⬐ yboris

As for career-specific advice, keep Self-determination theory in mind. The three foundational components are CAR:

- Competence (work on something that demands skill and attention from you)

- Autonomy (be able to determine what you'll be working on next)

- Relatedness (feel like your work is contributing to a greater whole - helping others)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory

⬐ the_only_law

Those all sound pretty difficult to fine with 1 being the easiest and 2 being the hard.

Studying Positive Psychology feels like a good benefit-for-time-spent. A great book on it is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It's a great overview of how error-prone our predictions about what will make us happy are; along with, if I remember right, good advice for how to maximize happiness (alternatively, read The How of Happiness for more-direct advice).

https://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp...

https://www.amazon.com/How-Happiness-Approach-Getting-Life/d...

> I know what most people’s heuristics is when they face this uncertainty: think about ten years from now and figure out where you want to be. And do the thing now that gives you more options to get there. I wish it was as simple as most people claim. Looking back to the twenty-year-old me and the person I’ve now become, I see almost no similarities, interests, or passion. I was a completely different person back then and the only thing that has stuck with me after all these years is my love of soccer. How do people predict the future? Clearly, I’m no good at it.

This is actually the primary focus of a book I just read [1]. The author's primary thesis in this book is that that there are some very interesting reasons why we completely suck at imagining what a future life will be like.

This isn't really a book recommendation - the author took a single idea and chewed it in 20 different ways to make a larger book. However, if this is something you are struggling with right now, you might benefit from it a little.

[1] Stumbling on happiness - https://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp...

In, "Stumbling on Happiness" [0] Gilbert's explanation of conditioned actions we just perform without it registering in our "awareness" hit home with me and may provide a model for understanding how animals (humans included) can do something that looks like it requires this invented empathy, awareness, etc. but can in fact be done without any "awareness" of what you're doing. Exploring consciousness isn't the point of the book at all, but the one section where he touched on it seemed to speak to your question some.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

Maybe the closest writing to fit your view is Daniel Gilbert[1]. Basically, humans have a biological "set point" for happiness and it's different for everyone. It is not affected by winning the lottery, or getting paralyzed from a car accident, or doing meta-analysis on what happiness is (such as reading self-help books about achieving happiness.) Those events may affect happiness in the short term but not in the long term. People will eventually gravitate back to their predisposed set point of happiness.

If I agree with the above, I can set aside the quest for ultimate measurement of absolute happiness (e.g. Solon's "Count no man happy until he be dead."[2]) . However, I can still do things that affect relative happiness. When I stopped consulting for boring ERP software, my quality-of-life definitely improved. Again, I won't know if I'm ultimately "happy" until I'm lying on my deathbed. Nevertheless, it feels like I got a little victory from changes like that.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon

⬐ pkorzeniewski

I agree you can do things that affect your relative happiness, but the key here is that it's YOU who must know what the things are - everyone have different needs and you can't fit all in one model. Some prefer to have interesting, but lower paying job, some doesn't care as long as it pays for their hobbies - and both can be happy, but switch their lives and both will be miserable. So if one would give advice to the other on how to be happy, it wouldn't help a bit, because they've different perspective on life.

Almost by definition this is shaky science at best, but Daniel Gilbert seems to be one of the best.

His book on the topic is here -> http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

The impatient can look at his TED talk here -> http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.h...

>It's also possible that I'm missing the point by comparing how I think I feel against EffectCheck's results. Maybe we're unreliable observers of how a text emotionally affects us, and EffectCheck more accurately predicts what's really going on deep in our brains. In which case, forgive my unwarranted naysaying.

Bingo. Our algorithm focuses on the lingering, subliminal emotions that you aren't necessarily aware you're feeling. Though not related to the emotions we measure, one commonly-referenced study shows that if you're walking down the street and you see a big sign with the word "ELDERLY" written on it, you'll actually walk slower without realizing it [1]. Lots of words have these subconscious impacts and you simply cannot accurately poll your own brain to determine how you feel.

[1] See "Stumbling on Happiness" for a great overview of this study: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077427/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

⬐ jarrett

That seems very believable in a general sense, and I have vague memories of other studies that suggest similar things.

The remaining question for me is whether and how EffectCheck's results have been compared against actual measurements of these subliminal effects.

⬐ scott_s

How can we falsify your claims? That is, what is a test we can perform that if it went a certain way, would show that your claims are false?

I would argue everybody does it (besides maybe Buddha :)

This book covers many of the fallacies people fall for http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400077427/randohouse... Stumbling on Happiness

"Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward."

neilc, I personally agree with your intuition, but Daniel Kahneman's point seems to be that, on average, you would be as happy making $60k as you would be making $1 million a year.

This concurs with a lot of other research that suggests that human beings are terrible at estimating what makes them happy. I enjoyed this book on that exact topic: http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

⬐ neilc

Sure; my point is that people are perhaps misspending their income anyway. That is, the guy making $1 million per year could just as easily decide to earn $200,000/year and have a lot more freedom.

(In any case, $60k/year is meaningless without some reference to cost of living. $60k/year is an ample relative salary in the Dakotas, but much less so in San Francisco.)

I see that Daniel Gilbert is one of the authors of this study, author of http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/... .

If you have yet to read it and have any interest in the psychology of happiness (and I can't imagine a sentient human who wouldn't have such an interest), do so post-haste.