You would, for a time, and then you would get used to it. People in the past used to struggle to find food. Today almost everyone in the first world countries can eat as much as they'd like, but do we wake up happy and grateful because we have food? I do agree that not all of our happiness comes from moving towards goals in the future, but a lot of it does.

> Personally I'd rather pursue goals that can be achieved within my lifetime and aren't some crazy improper integral over the lifetime of the universe...

Me too, but I don't think that you have to choose. Even if you have some less realistic goals, it's still better to focus on the immediate problems.

While I very much agree with your advice on thinking of how you'll feel on your deathbed, I would be careful in your phrasing. People often make poor decisions about the future because they are overly concerned with whether they will regret a decision or not. You will find many who believe that focusing on regret will get in the way of life satisfaction, and it is a perspective worth considering.

For me, it makes sense to make some achievable goals (relationship, career, hobbies/activities, etc). Then start paring and prioritizing. Without the latter, I will always have more things I would like to achieve than is possible, and will always have regrets - it's rather pointless.

“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.

I find making decisions that end up along lines of this really, really difficult. The rational part of my brain knows very well which one should I choose, but it has really, really hard time arguing with that more... I don't know, primal? part of me.

I think it's really fascinating, how relatively weak our conscious self is in arguments with our short term desires.

I'm pretty much there. And having got there, I'm not convinced (yet) that it's the right goal at all. Hard to divest from it, however, since enjoyment is hard to walk away from.

This is true. I don't think you have to go to the extreme of living a nomadic life to address it, but I definitely feel where the author is coming from.

The first time I realized this, in conjunction with how much of what my expectation of happiness comes from media, it was a really jarring experience.

I'm beginning to think the complete opposite (at least to some degree). I'm terrible at making choices that make me happy whilst I'm pretty good at finding value in serendipity. Generally nowadays I'm trying to make meta-choices if that makes sense - committing to things that remove the number of options I face whilst having a reasonable chance of providing fruitful activity.

It is a factual statement, I agree, but in the US it is not true. Peoples' lives are the sum of their choices, large and small. One can choose to learn how to make better choices.

I spent a significant portion of every day learning to make better choices and doing things that will improve my life. Such as exercising. Improving my diet. Trying to eliminate unproductive behaviors. Etc.

Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.

It's very similar, but rather than optimizing for happiness, I prefer Terence McKenna's advice to optimize for beauty...

The Good , The True and The Beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-J09gk0mJk

To me this seems superior in that it seems to be more all-encompassing, and can be more easily applied to others and the greater world, for me. But then happiness could very well do the same for you - I think it's the style of thinking (the means by which one evaluates options when choosing a course of action) involved that is the main point.

Have you considered that this is the mentality that people take issue with? It's the root of many of today's ills.

Most human suffering isn't just solved by smart people thinking hard about solving some problems. Most human suffering is caused by missing compassion for people.

> I've chosen a career geared toward maximizing my benefit to others, not my own happiness.

Sorry, but I don't think that's the case. You're doing what you do, because it feels right for you, so in a way you can't get happier by doing something else.

You might not follow the hedonistic path, but you're still doing what makes you most happy.

This kind of self-centered thinking, at scale, is what lowers the baseline quality of life for everyone.

This is key, I think. You need to have some acceptance that you actually have very little control over your life. Plan for and manage the parts of your life that you do have control over, and keep an open mind about the rest. Some of the unhappiest people I know are those with lofty goals that they either fail to meet, or have unrealistic expectations about what they will get for meeting them.

IMHO, this is a mistake, if not _the_ mistake.

I feel like i've been in your shoes, in a past life. I've come to believe that happiness is like the horizon, or the sunset. It's a fuzzy concept, which disappears if you go too close to it.

The horizon is not a place, and the sunset is not a moment. They are aggregate phenomena. You can't set them as targets, because they don't exist physically. You can observe them as composite entities, emerging in the right context.

Such is happiness. You can't set it as an objective, because it doesn't exist. And chasing it directly will only cause you suffering. Instead, try to set smaller goals, and let it emerge on its own.

Take care of your physical health. Take care of your relationships. Allocate time, not much, but regularly, for activities that you like (hobbies). Widen your intellectual horizons, e.g. by reading or listening to diverse people. Get better at what you do professionally. Try to find some form of meditation that works for you. Occasionally, try writing long, thoughtful comments on forums :)

Try to do these without looking too far into it; just trust the process. And at some point, you'll have the revelation "man, it's been quite some time since i felt unhappy!"

I see this as a call to mindfulness. A lot of adult life is spent sacrificing the current self for the benefit of the future self. For a lot of everyday activities like brushing teeth or walking to work we never really think about it, we just use it to think about what's going to happen later on.

Sorry for being wishy-washy, but we have to confront that we are living right now, and we ought to enjoy what we are doing right now! Not in the sense that we should live like there's no tomorrow -- but that we should enjoy the today we are getting.

Ouch, this resonated. I've been walking this path with you.

Sometimes I make my own food. Or grow it. Or pickle it. It would be more "efficient" to buy such food in many cases. But if it gives me pleasure, I trade my time to do it.

My opinion: the point of life is not to acquire so much money that you can avoid doing any difficult things and wrap yourself in a cocoon of comfort. The point of life is to find your own good life and live it. That will entail some difficulties (at a minimum the difficulty of seeking your own definition of the good life, which is hard!). You may find that in your work (lucky you!) or you may have to work to support yourself and find this good life in other areas.

At 43, having achieved a few things that even most people at this relatively high level have not, I wonder if I have not accepted too many times that the delay of gratification, was, in and of itself, evidence that the action would take me further toward my goals. Unfortunately, I don't know any way to learn how to recognize suffering-for-the-sake-of-suffering except by getting caught in those traps now and again. I have read philosophy, law, psychology. It doesn't really seem to have made a difference. Maybe it has and I simply can't perceive the mountain for all the gravel.

Through the magic of principles? Life should not be about getting ahead, but about doing what's right.