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> Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so.

-- Jonathan Haidt, page 43 in The Happiness Hypothesis (recommended!)

http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-An...

Csikszentmihalyi must have something important to say.

However, don't underestimate Yes Man. It's by a comedian, but it's still a very powerful and interesting read.

I have been recently doing a lot of reading on social psychology, any other book you (or anyone else) would recommend?

Escape from Freedom (also known as Fear of Freedom) is great, as are a lot of Fromm's books. He's my favourite psychologist, and by a long way favourite Frankfurt School writer. I also love Man for Himself, The Sane Society, To Have or To Be, The Art of Loving. He's wonderfully BS-free, combining insights into psychology, society, work, politics etc.

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis

the chapter on Self in Lakoff/Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh

and The Gospel of Ramana Maharshi.

for 3 totally different angles on what is 'self', true self, real self, etc. They're all amazing books too.

The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt

Alamut - Vladimir Bartol

Non Stop - Brian Aldiss

A fortune teller told me - Tiziano Terzani

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402387

I'd also recommend people feeling this way to read The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. It helped me.

But, out of all that (which I had to go look up on my Goodreads), HPMOR is what came to mind, both an engaging story, thought provoking ideas, and a lot of pages to work with :).

But clearly your mileage may vary and others don't quite appreciate is like I do.

Just read Happiness Hypothesis.

I don't really know what to say. You're asking a lot of deep and important questions. Keep reading, keep writing. Broaden the scope of your reading. One thing that helped me a lot was to have somebody more experienced than me to talk about these things with in person, in a kind of student-teacher relationship.

Actually, Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness and Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis both point to the idea that social connections and finding meaning one's relationships are the key to being happy—much more so than material possessions.

That being said, it does appear that many if not most Americans spend too much on things they think will make them happy but don't—see Spend by Geoffrey Miller for more on this idea. It's as if we're hanging ourselves through our own failures to understand ourselves.

The idea is that you have stimulus->response, and while it's impossible to know root causes, you can identify stimuluses and change the response.

Analogous to ML engineering, versus Chomsky for AI. Not as pretty, but (currently) more effective.

edit to add - there are good books for CBT and other Positive Psychology approaches. Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis is accessible and interesting; I got good value from that.

[0] Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics et al.

[1] Author of many books including Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - one of the most outstanding, horrifying, memorable books I've ever read.

[2] Author of The Happiness Hypothesis (I can't recommend it more highly), The Coddling of the American Mind etc.

A great "how to" book is: The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky (a Ph.D. researcher in the field of study) http://thehowofhappiness.com -- this book shares the specific advice you share in your comment.

A lot of great books I can recommend as well, e.g. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt.

I, similar to codegeek, always envisioned something simpler. Just three emoticons:

:( :| :)

Numbers may be more accurate, more quantitative, or what have you, but I think this is about being honest with yourself and not allowing yourself off the hook, "well, at least today was an 8". No. I want every day to be a 10!

Personally, I think trying to account for every emotion or mood possible would defeat the goal.

There was a guy in the warehouse (3rd shift) that worked with me before all the re-invention. He was +20 years my senior, working two jobs. He gave me a talk similar to above and it was a wake-up for me. That helped me. Nowadays, my peers help me by being supportive and inspiring.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

Hey by the way, i always thought CBT was rubbish, until the intersection with that, Stoicism, and Meditation was made clear in the book Happiness Hypothesis. How dumb / arrogant was I to write off stuff that seemed to help millions of others ... Another thing I had to learn the hard way.

I am doing fairly well too and I have hit this exact same problem. My plan of attack is 5 prong, feel free to use any of them.

1. Minimize visual stimulation outside of work hours. No computers, no reading, no tv.

2. Pick up hobbies that require you to socialize or be active. My personal ones are; golf, tennis, basketball, yoga, running a marathon.

3. Dog! I just put a deposit on my own labradoodle, I think it will help me get out more.

4. Study happiness. Just the act of reading self-help books actually makes you more happy. I'm almost done with the Happiness Hypothesis and I'm about to start Feeling Good.

5. I just started dating a girl, and that has been nice too. Just stray from the dinner and a movie dates.

The most successful, happy people are those who can manage themselves properly.

And as for the basics of happiness, it's very simple:

- have some autonomy over what you work on
- have a social group of friends you spend time with
- exercise
- eat well
- meditate or do cognitive therapy
- spend time in nature

I try to do something from every piece every day. Finding a balance and forcing myself to do a piece from each has helped me prevent burnout for over 9 months now, and has made me happier than ever.

There's much to do for AGI, but I believe that motivation-engineering will be the hardest part. Morality is intrinsically connected to our role as sorta-hive-minded monkeys.

Caveat: All the above is poorly presented opinion from the following resources:

- Learning how to learn on coursera

- Buddhism and modern psychology on coursera

- Righteous Mind by Haidt.

- Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt

- Bullshit as an honest indicator of intelligence

Building a machine using our evolutionary history as a prior design is the only way we know how to produce general intelligence, but all the strange, varied, "Emotional" baggage that goes with it means we never would. Why would a computer be afraid of snakes? If what you want is a computer that can come up with solutions you wouldn't have imagined, then you need clever search, problem specification, and significant computation, not general intelligence. If you want to automate something, you may need learning, but don't need intelligence.

Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great background.)

Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most any common day issues into stark perspective.

One example from his book: if someone gets in an accident and becomes paralyzed, they'll suffer great sadness, but that first sip of orange juice through a straw through, man, what a joy.

So essentially humans will adapt to find sources of happiness as circumstances change.

Re parenting: it's not like you suddenly discover a hidden passion for changing diapers, rather, your body will adapt to find a way to derive happiness. And the interesting thing is, it will be totally genuine!

Yes Man ( http://www.amazon.com/Yes-Man-Danny-Wallace/dp/1416918345 )

This book made me realize that I was defaulting to "no" in many aspects of my life. After this book I changed many things in my life, and ended up meeting and dating my future (now present) wife. Overall my life has been much improved by defaulting to "yes".

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work ( http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Sorrows-Work-Alain-Botton/dp... )

Gave me insight into how there is a huge invisible fabric of society that we take for granted, and how I consistently underrated many categories of jobs. One change I made after reading this book is to respect the jobs that I took for granted, like the clerk at the checkout counter. I now give attention and respect to people that I used to treat like furniture before.

Books that would have changed my life had I read them sooner (and not have to learn their lessons the long/hard way.)

The Happiness Hypothesis ( http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-An... )

The notion this book puts forward of the subconscious as a powerful but stubborn elephant and the conscious as its well-meaning but often impotent handler provides much insight into why people act against their own interests, and why they tell lies about themselves and their own actions. One of the things I had realized beforehand (through many years of struggling with social interaction) that the book also covers is how we all tell a story of our life in which we are the hero, and how we rationalize our actions to fit the story instead of adapting the story to fit the facts.

Peopleware ( http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S... )

The book covers why building software is primarily a people problem, not a technical problem. Again, I had already realized this, but it would have been nice to learn it sooner. Some stuff is outdated, but it's still one of the top books on building software in my opinion.

Meditation does. As does therapy. And drugs.

These can move our "normal range" of happiness. Most other things, Haidt argues, will temporarily bump our happiness up or down, but we quickly revert to our normal range.

Some things that generally don't affect our happiness in the long term according to Haidt: The amount of time we work or spend on leisure activities. Major health problems that are not degenerative (heart attack, losing your legs). Winning the lottery. Getting that big raise at work.

The reason, it seems, is that we adapt very quickly. Winning the lottery will make us very happy for a short while, but without a lot of discipline we've shortly adapted to our new-found wealth and the needle goes back down to our "normal range". Losing your legs will make you depressed for a while, but soon we adapt and the needle springs back up. Getting a raise is great for a month or three, but then we're used to it and looking forward to the next one.

As long as things are steadily getting better, we are mostly happy. If they are steadily getting worse, we are mostly unhappy. Even seemingly earth-shattering events that totally changes our lives only tends to affect most people for a while.

This does explain some of the obsession with GDP: It is a proxy for growth, and ongoing growth is associated with happiness. But as point out, optimizing for GDP can happen at the cost of negatively affecting other things that are also associated with happiness, and the net result is not necessarily all that great.

An interesting aspect of Haidt's claims is that we should not aim for a too rapid improvement if they make further improvements harder. That is, it's better to get a steady 3% increase in salary, than 50% now, and then nothing for many years. If you do get that 50% raise (or a huge exit), it is better not just for your finances but for your happiness to invest most of it, and slowly increase your spending over time.

(Incidentally, the book The Happiness Hypothesis covers this subject as well as how to actually become happier.)

The book was suggested to me by a CBT practitioner. It languished on my shelf for several years because it sat adjacent to a bit of new age fluff, and I thought the subtitle sounded like it was another bunch of lost-wisdom-of-the-ancients drivel. I thought wrong: one should not judge a book by its cover.

The book is serious -- Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School -- yet eminently readable. It pulls in relevant aspects of the "ancient wisdom," evaluates them in the context of contemporary research, and shows where they can help us today and where they are outright plain wrong.

I can't say it has changed my life yet, but it has helped settle the inchoate bits that I have taken from the Enchiridon, Meditations, etc., into a useful way of thinking about the world and my place in it.

Now on to William Braxton Irvine...

You hear 'ancient wisdom' on how to lead the good life all the time. These ancient aphorisms came from a time before the scientific method and the idea of testing your hypotheses. Tradition has acted a sort of pre-conscious filter on the advice we get, so we can expect it to hold some value. But now, we can do better.

Haidt is a psychologist who read a large collection of the ancient texts of Western and Eastern religion and philosophy, highlighting all the 'psychological' statements. He organized a list of 'happiness hypotheses' from the ancients and then looked at the modern scientific literature to see if they hold water.

What he finds is they were often partially right, but that we know more. By the end of the book, you have some concrete suggestions on how to lead a happier life and you'll know to the studies that will convince you they work.

Haidt writes with that pop science long windedness that these books always have. Within that structure, he's an entertaining writer so I didn't mind.

To quote wikipedia -

In it, Haidt poses several "Great Ideas" on happiness espoused by thinkers of the past – Plato, Buddha, Jesus and others – and examines them in the light of contemporary psychological research, extracting from them any lessons that still apply to our modern lives. Central to the book are the concepts of virtue, happiness, fulfillment, and meaning.

I have been following some of the suggestions in there - more vacations and holidays, meditation, helping people etc which has surely helped me become happier.

- Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan

- The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

I read the Happiness Hypothesis quite late in my development regarding "how to be come happier?" I already knew a lot of the ideas in there, but it presented its ideas a bit more clearly than whatever I read from Martin Seligman (many books) and Suzanne Segerstrom (Optimism).

This is why I'd still recommend that book.

I also recommend to read the concept on self-learned helplessness (Seligman researched it) if you haven't already.

One book that I actively disrecommend nowadays is Man's Search for Meaning. I didn't look too deep into it, but there's a lot of controversy on the truth of his claims (e.g. some claim he was in the concentration camps for a few days, not months or years like he implicitly depicts).

Disclaimer: it's these types of books that motivated me to do an entire undergraduate degree in psychology back 6 years ago. Only to realize most of it is nonsense. Yet, at the same time, not all of it is nonsense. Plus it gave me the skills to see what was and what wasn't nonsense.

A long commute is something he identifies as always a negative. Humans don't seem to adjust to a long commute -- it will always negatively impact the typical person's outlook/affect/happiness.

Haidt argues there's two kinds of diversity: demographic and moral.

People who want demographic diversity are arguing for he inclusion of previously excluded groups.

Moral diversity is a lack of consensus on normal norms and values, and Haidt argues no one can coherently want moral diversity (e.g., if you are pro-life, how can you want there to be a diversity of views on abortion with none dominating?)

In his article Patrick touches on this I think. Some people want Silicon Valley to be more demographically diverse for reasons of justice; but they would not feel comfortable if that diversity led to moral diversity. People want to associate with others who think and believe like themselves.

(Though the rider can, slowly over time, train the elephant in certain things. But that's not in-the-moment control.)

IIRC - it's been a while since I read it - part of the book's point is that the whole system of elephant + rider is "us", even though the conscious POV is just the rider.

https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-A...

Maybe, but is that a good thing?

To simply "expire out of existence" is a big issue for "humanity". It's the main reason why there's no proper answer to "what's the meaning of life" - whatever you do during your 50/70/120/.. years of life you'll eventually end up just as dead as the guy right next to you. Congratulations!

Being immortal would allow us to get rid of crutches like religion and allow us to implement proper moral systems, since there would be tangible rewards to being "good" simply for "goodness' sake", since being good and being selfish would be identical - if you'll (eventually but reiably) suffer overpoputlation, pollution and even unemployment just as much as the next guy, you'll (eventually but, again, reiably) think twice about elbow tactics.

> Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.

20? Maybe. but How about being in the body of a 30- or 40-year old again? I can't imagine any 70-year olds not wanting to have a more "hassle-free" body, all other things being equal.

> makes live unworthy

Talking about live being "unworthy" is a slippery slope, but there nevertheless is an argument to be made about quality vs quantity of life .

I don't have the reference (and the exact numbers) at hand, but in "Happiness Hypothesis" (the Book) the author mentions a survey where people got to express their preference between "living x years of life and then dying to some tragic accident" and "x+y years of life, but y years spent in a wheelchair, because of some tragic accident". The results were rather mixed with the shorter life being more popular choice.

And, by the end of the day, a chance at higher-quality life in exchange for possibly less total life is also why things like armed robberies exist (even if not every robber things of it like that beforehand). I'd also argue the same is true of people opting for high-risk jobs, but there's also a sense-of-duty aspect to them, so it's not quite as clear-cut there.

1. The Art of Learning - I'll never think about practice the same way.

2. Getting Things Done - Enough has been said about this elsewhere, but the whole concept of "what's the next action" has really worked for me.

3. E-Myth Revisited - This was my MBA in one book. It came at the right time for me and really changed the way I think about creating businesses as assets. I wasn't a fan the cheesy example of the pie shop, but the advice has been invaluable.

Others that I found interesting, and that changed the way I think were:

4-hour Work Week. Yes, there is a ton of hype around this book, but I'd be surprised if anyone read it with an open mind and didn't learn anything or come away motivated to experiment with their lifestyle.

Outliers. This one probably stands out to me since I read it so recently. Gladwell gets a lot of hype as well, but I think he deserves at least some of it.

The Culture Code drastically changed the way I think about marketing.

And, a few random notes on the others I've read:

I found Predictably Irrational, Brain Rules and The 48 Laws of Power to be mostly garbage.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Made to Stick are decent essays in book form.

Stumbling on Happiness is not nearly as good as Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis which would be in the first list I made above if it were on Siver's list.

Seth Godin's books are good for motivation and for changing the way you think about marketing, especially if you've been doing it for a long time (I haven't). They're quick and fun, I think they're worth reading.

Fooled By Randomness is worth reading if nothing else because Taleb is such an entertaining writer.

One commenter on HN once wrote, that meditation helps him more than the stimulants. The ten stages of meditation (https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) depicts the mind as an elephant too. It gets distracted by the ape mind (look! shiny!) in the beginning. If you want to start meditation, get the book that has been recommended here before: Mind Illuminated by John Yates