Not to sound ungrateful about the list, but isn’t there some dissonance between 3 and 14? Avoid consumerism, but buy lots of the expensive clothes in these mass-market consumerist guides?
Consumerism is buying in the vain hope that the act of purchase will bring happiness, or failing to see that many advertised items will bring you low value compared to their price. Being anti-consumerist doesn’t prevent you from buying useful tools after evaluating their price to be lower than their value to you.
Many geeks underestimate the value of good looking clothing as a social tool.
Now, you can argue that our society would be better if we didn’t judge people by their clothing, but you live in a society that does—and so for you, clothing is a tool to alter how you are judged. The ideal clothing may not be the most expensive or the most trendy, but most of us on this site probably buy clothing that is insufficiently trendy.
It is also worth note that you can often get nice clothes for about the same price as less fashionable clothing, if you look in second hand stores. (although this may require more time shopping, and be dependant on where you live)
Not to commit an act of terrorism or anything, but I have had similar experiences—some of what I get a lot of compliments about were “diamonds in the rough”.
The context you’re missing is that I have asked SilasBarta not to reply directly to my comments or PM me (summarized as “leave me alone”). Occasionally he does anyway, referring to it sarcastically as an “act of terrorism” or similar. Today I have chosen to delete the comment he replied to, because the thread didn’t seem like it needed my comment to make sense and that was a viable option. It wasn’t an interesting comment in itself; it boiled down to “yay thrift stores!”
The context you’re missing is that I have asked SilasBarta not to reply directly to my comments or PM me (summarized as “leave me alone”). Occasionally he does anyway
And up to here (and only up to here) this is entirely appropriate. I can think of half a dozen commenters that I would like to prevent from being able to reply to me (either because they are bad at thinking or tend to behave as social adversaries), but that is not a privilege that we have, and that is a good thing. Being able to influence the public discourse while picking and choosing which replies may be heard would be a mind killing disaster!
Replies to a comment aren’t like talking to the author of the parent. In this comment, for example, I am not addressing Alicorn at all. I am commenting to the blog about something that is prompted by what happens to be in a comment made by Alicorn. If this were a literal historic forum with Romans and togas I would not be facing Alicorn I would be directing my voice to whichever element of the crowd I was most interested in engaging with or influencing.
referring to it sarcastically as an “act of terrorism” or similar
But that part is foolish and impractical. All the worse because I know I personally have explained to Silas several times why buying into the villain frame and then getting sarcastic about it is shooting himself in both feet.
If we had a decently sophisticated comment system (trn!trn!), it would be feasible for people to choose to not see comments (and answers to those comments) from posters they wanted to avoid.
As far as I can tell, that sort of feature didn’t damage usenet, though killfiling trolls means that a newsgroup (forum) could be made tolerable for existing members while becoming increasingly unattractive to new members.
If we had a decently sophisticated comment system (trn! trn!), it would be feasible for people to choose to not see comments (and answers to those comments) from posters they wanted to avoid.
Yes, writing a greasemonkey script for that purpose is on my todo list. It wouldn’t even be that complicated. A few lines added to and remove from the old kibitzer script would do it. But I’ll probably not bother until the next obnoxious person gets on my nerves.
.… Wait.… did I just give anyone who wants that feature a motive to flame me? Bother.
Incidentally I would probably include an extra category for people whose comments I want to see except for when they are replying for me. In some cases people can be good at coming up with their own ideas but poor at understanding and replying to those of others. In those cases a coarse mechanism to pick the potentially best without expecting the frustration of predictable straw men would be handy.
I think that the one of the best meta-parts of LW is that we deal with differences in temper and disagreement in a way that always tries to take into account Rationality even when its unattainable. This tool would avoid disagreement for some but wouldn’t really limit much on a wide scale.
I know that Alicorn considers it harassment, and you observably know that. Given the subjective nature of the emotions at hand, that seems sufficient for me.
Compare: I have minor-to-moderate tactile sensitivity. Being touched, even gently and in socially normal ways, is often painful to me. If I tell you this, and you acknowledge that you understand it, and then you intentionally touch me in a way that you know is likely to cause me pain, claiming that your intention was not to cause pain does not excuse the action.
(Edit: I apparently misremembered Alicorn’s position on the issue.)
Given the subjective nature of ‘terror’, that seems sufficient for me.
Given some people’s willingness to abuse our deference to their subjective experiences, no, it’s not. My comment was not “use or threat of violence against non-combatants to induce fear as a means of pursuing political or social goals”. This isn’t even debatable.
People have criticized me for the extreme comparisons. I hope they can now see what I’m dealing with. If Alicorn really has such terror at seeing a general comment under her posts with my name on it, she should have thought about that before posting in “my” thread, not when her Machiavellian instincts kicked in and saw a chance to play victim.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of the reddit interface that you can’t join any conversational thread in which she is the last person to post, without your comment having to be a reply to her that shows up in her messages… even if you aren’t even trying to interact with her. I’m worried about the precedence of non-moderators on LW essentially having the power to ban people they’ve had conflict with out of interesting discussions. [Edit: realized that Alicorn is currently a moderator. My point was to discuss the potential problems from User A requiring that User B never reply to them on a Reddit-style interface, and how it can effectively become an unofficial thread-ban, not just a reply-ban, even when mod powers are not used.]
The ideal solution in my mind is if it’s OK by Alicorn for you to respond to anything that she posts (at least, when you don’t ask for a reply), and she has no obligation to reply to you. (Of course, you must limit these replies to be abstract, and resist any urge to make them personal or snide.) Given your past interactions with Alicorn, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to reply to her and attempt any discussions, but it seems a bit steep if you can’t reply to comments by her, even when you aren’t trying to have a discussion with her, because that potentially locks you out of threads that others are reading.
Failing that, the next best solution is probably to just take the high road and not respond directly to any comment by her, due to the conflict and status hits incurred to both you (and her) in the eyes of various observers every time this comes up, particularly when you make “terrorism” comments. If she posts something interesting, often other people will reply to it, and you can reply to them.
If you must respond to a comment by her simply out of interest in the topic, I suggest that you keep it impersonal and neutral, and she can simply ignore it.
As you know, I don’t think your punishment is proportional to what you’ve actually done. But sometimes people are going to be unfair to you, and often the best solution is to just move on and live your life.
absolutlly, I like to shop the $1 bin at the used shop. all kinds of nice stuff too big for a hipster. I keep fresh by cycling my cheap stuff to the DAV for the “gifting thrill”
I wasn’t disputing the importance of clothing (and a PUA was my guide for shopping in NYC), and I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that it would be better if people weren’t so judged as a reason not to wear better clothes!
I was disputing whether you need to spend at that level, buying from and heeding the very marketers lukeprog despises in 14. And the justification you gave, that “spending on lot in this area is different because it will really bring me happiness”, is not distinguishable from what people are thinking when they are consumerist.
At this point I think it might be productive to taboo “consumerist”; the connotations seem to be getting in the way.
What I’ve gotten out of the conversation so far is that (a) buying things based on an exaggerated estimate of their future value tends to make people less happy; (b) buying things based on an accurate estimation of their future value tends to make people happier, and (c) rationality techniques are helpful in deciding which is which. That seems entirely consistent to me, and using mass-market consumer guides to help estimate social capital while trying to ignore the actual marketing seems sane if a little risky.
I’d also be willing to entertain the possibility that a lot of people in the central LW demographic cluster are buying less than the optimum for their happiness. I’m almost certainly guilty of this; most of my net worth lies idle in my checking account, where it does no one any good.
Well, I’m not sure what concept—whatever the name—lukeprog is carving out when he warns about consumerism. His advice amounts to “don’t blow large amounts of money thinking that the stuff you buy will make you happy … unless I approve of it”. Whatever failure mode he was trying to encompass by talk of consumerism surely must cover buying straight out of a fashion magazine.
The fact that it “really works” is no defense—all acts of “blowing large amounts of money to be happy” seem like that!
Some people buy things just because they think buying things will make them happen, which is what the consumerism stuff is about. From your words I suspect you don’t quite grokk this, probably because it’s a very silly state to be in and you’re lucky enough not to be in it. (I’m having a bit of trouble with the concept myself, though it does happen to me too.)
The point about the clothing (“stuff he approves of”) would perhaps be more precisely expressed as “it’s a good idea to be dressed/accessorized/etc close to whatever silly thing society decides is ‘current fashion’ because this improves your interaction with other people”. The article expresses this as “buy fashionable clothing” because “buying” is the usual way of owning fashionable clothes. You can satisfy point 3 by making your own clothes or wearing (inconspicuously) cheap knock-offs or any other method; buying is not necessary, it’s just the usual method.
The apparent contradiction between 3 and 14 is a bit like the apparent contradiction in an (imaginary) article about digital photography that advises to pick a camera with at least 4 megapixels (i.e., worse than that is probably too low for good photos), but that you shouldn’t give in to the hype about megapixels (i.e., it’s not the only thing that’s important, and you hit diminishing returns way before whatever is “top of the line”).
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all. You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
That’s not very helpful (and warpforge should not have been modded down for his/her reply if it was by one of the participants in this subthread—that would be kind of petty). I’m pretty sure the research papers don’t specifically carve out an exception for expensive clothes shown on models in high-class fashion magazines. Feel free to use your deep knowledge of these articles that you did read to prove me wrong though!
Alternatively, you could just admit that this is an exception to your general warning against consumerism—that buying expensive clothes shown in the glamorous magazines in the hopes that it will bring you happiness actually works.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all.
Unless you’re planning on wearing the same $500 suit appearing in these magazines and can find hairstylists that make you look like them, yes, you do.
You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
Yes, but that truth could have been discerned from a dictionary, without any empirical research.
This post was a whirlwind tour of happiness research. Those who are interested can follow what I’ve been provided to learn more. It sounds like you’re not interested enough to do so, which is fine. It took me more than 15 hours to research and write this post, and not everyone has that kind of time.
But I do plan on doing more posts in the future to elaborate on some of the topics and methods I rushed over in this post. Perhaps I’ll eventually do one specifically on consumerism, so you won’t have to read the papers yourself.
Luke, if you actually read the articles you’re relying on, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain the relevant parts in this context. If you don’t have an answer, all you have to say is:
“I’m sorry—I didn’t notice the dissonance before. I’m sure there’s a way to follow expensive fashion advice without falling into the trap of consumerism, but I really only read the abstracts so I can’t quite explain how to walk the line.”
That’s it! That’s all you have to say. It’s not hard, and it avoids the need to get snappy and shift blame to others.
Okay, in brief: what the research seems to indicate is that materialistic goals (ends) may lead to unhappiness, especially if they lead to ever-growing desires for material goods (which they often do). Also, those focused on financial success tend to derive less satisfaction from other aspects of life (the Nickerson paper).
So that is why I recommend (at least) two things: Get nice clothes because it helps your social life, but also beware the threat of consumerism. Beware the pursuit of material goods for their own sake. Material goods are often of value, but don’t let them run away with you. And certainly don’t make money the focus of your efforts and passion.
But what if, e.g. you personally assign a large preference to avoiding conforming to modern fashion standards. For example, I think it is bad to vote for modern fashion with dollars because it is an unsustainable industry. I don’t have enough dollars to buy “sustainable” clothing. And I also don’t value the social opinions of others if they are based largely upon the way I dress. It would feel painful for me to take steps to be fashionable. If you told me today that my future self would adjust to being fashionable, would have no moral qualms with that, and would feel somewhat happier as a result, this would make me currently feel deeply unhappy about the person I would become.
Also, where can we find more specific instruction about how to “find a more fulfilling job”? I spend many hours thinking about this, talking to the career counselors for my grad program, writing LW posts about it, talking with campus representatives, friends, family, etc. I also scour the internet for job listing, the BLS descriptions of jobs (which are essentially the same as O*Net), etc. I feel that 2+ years of doing all this effort on an almost daily basis has not taught me a single thing about what a “fulfilling” career would be like. I truly feel like the preferences I have that I like are arranged in such a way that there are no existing modern jobs that could remotely approach the ability to make me feel fulfilled. I think rapidly increasing technology plays a drastic role in this, much like the Reeks and Wrecks from Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.
Also, I am a healthy, well-adjusted, reasonably social person. I have good speaking skills; I frequently go out to get a drink with groups of friends; I am very active and I exercise and play on a pick-up soccer team. Yet, I am also an INTJ and I actually enjoy being alone and very introverted. I am not “fluidly” extroverted, it’s more just that it’s really simple and easy to do extroverted behaviors while still feeling introverted inside the whole time, and I like this. But I am not very agreeable (I am a bit of a contrarian and I also believe this is justified). I am compassionate to an almost dopey degree. I have no symptoms of any mental illness other than that I am chronically unhappy. The only mental illness in my family is my dad’s PTSD.
At any rate, I basically feel like the advice you give does not actually explain anything. It’s a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. How do you find a more fulfilling job if you don’t even know how to begin to know how to start learning what ‘fulfilling’ means? I think I already outwardly exhibit almost all of the happiness indicator traits that you describe and I feel very miserable almost every day.
Also, I write research papers similar to this sort of thing. 15 hours is not a long time to tabulate this kind of paper. There’s no way someone could read and truly absorb the main points in 49 research articles, and then also write this post about it, in 15 hours. So either you had already read some of the posts and the total time was more than 15 hours, or else you did not read all of the 49 references. And even if someone could read and comprehend 49 research articles that quickly, I wouldn’t want them to. The paper that they write would suffer from being surface level, and while I really appreciate the fact that you’re willing to use your own time to write this post, I think it really is very surface level.
The reason this bothers me is that now, on other LessWrong posts, everyone just refers to this post whenever someone brings up a question about happiness. People seem to act like it’s ‘solved’ and just go read lukeprog’s post; it explains everything you have to do before you can ever query for more community advice. But it doesn’t. This post is potentially helpful to people just scratching the surface of even recognizing that they want to alter their own happiness. I think it’s targeted at the wrong community. I can see how some LWers might not make any effort to be social, but most of us are already thoughtful enough that the things in the post are the first things we tried and for any post about happiness to be helpful, it needs to dig much deeper on very narrow topics (like how to actually decide which career goals to set, and then practical steps to achieve them, and what to expect once they are achieved, etc.)
I’m sorry if this seems harsh; I don’t mean to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You clearly do. But I would rather see one post citing 4 references on the psychology of career factors, where in 15 hours you actually could make a deeply insightful synthesis of the 4 papers and include other web resources besides the trivial O*Net, for example. All these posts with 30+ references are too diffuse to be worthwhile. Focus on fewer references, but references that offer deeper insight and can be mapped into a practical set of instructions rather than vague notions that might govern the reader’s future search criteria.
“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
Not to sound ungrateful about the list, but isn’t there some dissonance between 3 and 14? Avoid consumerism, but buy lots of the expensive clothes in these mass-market consumerist guides?
Consumerism is buying in the vain hope that the act of purchase will bring happiness, or failing to see that many advertised items will bring you low value compared to their price. Being anti-consumerist doesn’t prevent you from buying useful tools after evaluating their price to be lower than their value to you. Many geeks underestimate the value of good looking clothing as a social tool.
Now, you can argue that our society would be better if we didn’t judge people by their clothing, but you live in a society that does—and so for you, clothing is a tool to alter how you are judged. The ideal clothing may not be the most expensive or the most trendy, but most of us on this site probably buy clothing that is insufficiently trendy.
It is also worth note that you can often get nice clothes for about the same price as less fashionable clothing, if you look in second hand stores. (although this may require more time shopping, and be dependant on where you live)
Thrift stores are awesome. I discovered this a little under a year ago and have since acquired some of my favorite clothes via thrifting. For cheap :D
Not to commit an act of terrorism or anything, but I have had similar experiences—some of what I get a lot of compliments about were “diamonds in the rough”.
The way to not do a thing is by not doing that thing, not by saying that you don’t want or intend to do the thing and then doing it anyway.
Comment deleted… What on earth did I just miss?
The context you’re missing is that I have asked SilasBarta not to reply directly to my comments or PM me (summarized as “leave me alone”). Occasionally he does anyway, referring to it sarcastically as an “act of terrorism” or similar. Today I have chosen to delete the comment he replied to, because the thread didn’t seem like it needed my comment to make sense and that was a viable option. It wasn’t an interesting comment in itself; it boiled down to “yay thrift stores!”
And up to here (and only up to here) this is entirely appropriate. I can think of half a dozen commenters that I would like to prevent from being able to reply to me (either because they are bad at thinking or tend to behave as social adversaries), but that is not a privilege that we have, and that is a good thing. Being able to influence the public discourse while picking and choosing which replies may be heard would be a mind killing disaster!
Replies to a comment aren’t like talking to the author of the parent. In this comment, for example, I am not addressing Alicorn at all. I am commenting to the blog about something that is prompted by what happens to be in a comment made by Alicorn. If this were a literal historic forum with Romans and togas I would not be facing Alicorn I would be directing my voice to whichever element of the crowd I was most interested in engaging with or influencing.
But that part is foolish and impractical. All the worse because I know I personally have explained to Silas several times why buying into the villain frame and then getting sarcastic about it is shooting himself in both feet.
If something doesn’t work don’t do it!
If we had a decently sophisticated comment system (trn! trn!), it would be feasible for people to choose to not see comments (and answers to those comments) from posters they wanted to avoid.
As far as I can tell, that sort of feature didn’t damage usenet, though killfiling trolls means that a newsgroup (forum) could be made tolerable for existing members while becoming increasingly unattractive to new members.
Yes, writing a greasemonkey script for that purpose is on my todo list. It wouldn’t even be that complicated. A few lines added to and remove from the old kibitzer script would do it. But I’ll probably not bother until the next obnoxious person gets on my nerves.
.… Wait.… did I just give anyone who wants that feature a motive to flame me? Bother.
Incidentally I would probably include an extra category for people whose comments I want to see except for when they are replying for me. In some cases people can be good at coming up with their own ideas but poor at understanding and replying to those of others. In those cases a coarse mechanism to pick the potentially best without expecting the frustration of predictable straw men would be handy.
I think that the one of the best meta-parts of LW is that we deal with differences in temper and disagreement in a way that always tries to take into account Rationality even when its unattainable. This tool would avoid disagreement for some but wouldn’t really limit much on a wide scale.
I cringed.
Spam filters aren’t intended to prevent spam from happening. They just keep it out of your inbox.
;)
The whole point was that it’s not an act of terrorism—and one should avoid blowing things out of proportion.
If you think what I did was an act of terrorism, then please stand up and be counted.
I know that Alicorn considers it harassment, and you observably know that. Given the subjective nature of the emotions at hand, that seems sufficient for me.
Compare: I have minor-to-moderate tactile sensitivity. Being touched, even gently and in socially normal ways, is often painful to me. If I tell you this, and you acknowledge that you understand it, and then you intentionally touch me in a way that you know is likely to cause me pain, claiming that your intention was not to cause pain does not excuse the action.
(Edit: I apparently misremembered Alicorn’s position on the issue.)
Given some people’s willingness to abuse our deference to their subjective experiences, no, it’s not. My comment was not “use or threat of violence against non-combatants to induce fear as a means of pursuing political or social goals”. This isn’t even debatable.
People have criticized me for the extreme comparisons. I hope they can now see what I’m dealing with. If Alicorn really has such terror at seeing a general comment under her posts with my name on it, she should have thought about that before posting in “my” thread, not when her Machiavellian instincts kicked in and saw a chance to play victim.
Get some perspective, please.
I don’t think your comment was an act of terrorism, nor do I think you needed to suggest that it might be. Couldn’t you just have said:
Thanks for the input, but unfortunately, no, I couldn’t have.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of the reddit interface that you can’t join any conversational thread in which she is the last person to post, without your comment having to be a reply to her that shows up in her messages… even if you aren’t even trying to interact with her. I’m worried about the precedence of non-moderators on LW essentially having the power to ban people they’ve had conflict with out of interesting discussions. [Edit: realized that Alicorn is currently a moderator. My point was to discuss the potential problems from User A requiring that User B never reply to them on a Reddit-style interface, and how it can effectively become an unofficial thread-ban, not just a reply-ban, even when mod powers are not used.]
The ideal solution in my mind is if it’s OK by Alicorn for you to respond to anything that she posts (at least, when you don’t ask for a reply), and she has no obligation to reply to you. (Of course, you must limit these replies to be abstract, and resist any urge to make them personal or snide.) Given your past interactions with Alicorn, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to reply to her and attempt any discussions, but it seems a bit steep if you can’t reply to comments by her, even when you aren’t trying to have a discussion with her, because that potentially locks you out of threads that others are reading.
Failing that, the next best solution is probably to just take the high road and not respond directly to any comment by her, due to the conflict and status hits incurred to both you (and her) in the eyes of various observers every time this comes up, particularly when you make “terrorism” comments. If she posts something interesting, often other people will reply to it, and you can reply to them.
If you must respond to a comment by her simply out of interest in the topic, I suggest that you keep it impersonal and neutral, and she can simply ignore it.
As you know, I don’t think your punishment is proportional to what you’ve actually done. But sometimes people are going to be unfair to you, and often the best solution is to just move on and live your life.
absolutlly, I like to shop the $1 bin at the used shop. all kinds of nice stuff too big for a hipster. I keep fresh by cycling my cheap stuff to the DAV for the “gifting thrill”
I wasn’t disputing the importance of clothing (and a PUA was my guide for shopping in NYC), and I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that it would be better if people weren’t so judged as a reason not to wear better clothes!
I was disputing whether you need to spend at that level, buying from and heeding the very marketers lukeprog despises in 14. And the justification you gave, that “spending on lot in this area is different because it will really bring me happiness”, is not distinguishable from what people are thinking when they are consumerist.
At this point I think it might be productive to taboo “consumerist”; the connotations seem to be getting in the way.
What I’ve gotten out of the conversation so far is that (a) buying things based on an exaggerated estimate of their future value tends to make people less happy; (b) buying things based on an accurate estimation of their future value tends to make people happier, and (c) rationality techniques are helpful in deciding which is which. That seems entirely consistent to me, and using mass-market consumer guides to help estimate social capital while trying to ignore the actual marketing seems sane if a little risky.
I’d also be willing to entertain the possibility that a lot of people in the central LW demographic cluster are buying less than the optimum for their happiness. I’m almost certainly guilty of this; most of my net worth lies idle in my checking account, where it does no one any good.
Well, I’m not sure what concept—whatever the name—lukeprog is carving out when he warns about consumerism. His advice amounts to “don’t blow large amounts of money thinking that the stuff you buy will make you happy … unless I approve of it”. Whatever failure mode he was trying to encompass by talk of consumerism surely must cover buying straight out of a fashion magazine.
The fact that it “really works” is no defense—all acts of “blowing large amounts of money to be happy” seem like that!
Some people buy things just because they think buying things will make them happen, which is what the consumerism stuff is about. From your words I suspect you don’t quite grokk this, probably because it’s a very silly state to be in and you’re lucky enough not to be in it. (I’m having a bit of trouble with the concept myself, though it does happen to me too.)
The point about the clothing (“stuff he approves of”) would perhaps be more precisely expressed as “it’s a good idea to be dressed/accessorized/etc close to whatever silly thing society decides is ‘current fashion’ because this improves your interaction with other people”. The article expresses this as “buy fashionable clothing” because “buying” is the usual way of owning fashionable clothes. You can satisfy point 3 by making your own clothes or wearing (inconspicuously) cheap knock-offs or any other method; buying is not necessary, it’s just the usual method.
The apparent contradiction between 3 and 14 is a bit like the apparent contradiction in an (imaginary) article about digital photography that advises to pick a camera with at least 4 megapixels (i.e., worse than that is probably too low for good photos), but that you shouldn’t give in to the hype about megapixels (i.e., it’s not the only thing that’s important, and you hit diminishing returns way before whatever is “top of the line”).
The kind of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.
Also, for men at least you don’t have to buy very many clothes at all. You just have to buy the right ones, and know how to wear them.
That’s not very helpful (and warpforge should not have been modded down for his/her reply if it was by one of the participants in this subthread—that would be kind of petty). I’m pretty sure the research papers don’t specifically carve out an exception for expensive clothes shown on models in high-class fashion magazines. Feel free to use your deep knowledge of these articles that you did read to prove me wrong though!
Alternatively, you could just admit that this is an exception to your general warning against consumerism—that buying expensive clothes shown in the glamorous magazines in the hopes that it will bring you happiness actually works.
Unless you’re planning on wearing the same $500 suit appearing in these magazines and can find hairstylists that make you look like them, yes, you do.
Yes, but that truth could have been discerned from a dictionary, without any empirical research.
This post was a whirlwind tour of happiness research. Those who are interested can follow what I’ve been provided to learn more. It sounds like you’re not interested enough to do so, which is fine. It took me more than 15 hours to research and write this post, and not everyone has that kind of time.
But I do plan on doing more posts in the future to elaborate on some of the topics and methods I rushed over in this post. Perhaps I’ll eventually do one specifically on consumerism, so you won’t have to read the papers yourself.
Luke, if you actually read the articles you’re relying on, it shouldn’t be that hard to explain the relevant parts in this context. If you don’t have an answer, all you have to say is:
“I’m sorry—I didn’t notice the dissonance before. I’m sure there’s a way to follow expensive fashion advice without falling into the trap of consumerism, but I really only read the abstracts so I can’t quite explain how to walk the line.”
That’s it! That’s all you have to say. It’s not hard, and it avoids the need to get snappy and shift blame to others.
Okay, in brief: what the research seems to indicate is that materialistic goals (ends) may lead to unhappiness, especially if they lead to ever-growing desires for material goods (which they often do). Also, those focused on financial success tend to derive less satisfaction from other aspects of life (the Nickerson paper).
So that is why I recommend (at least) two things: Get nice clothes because it helps your social life, but also beware the threat of consumerism. Beware the pursuit of material goods for their own sake. Material goods are often of value, but don’t let them run away with you. And certainly don’t make money the focus of your efforts and passion.
But what if, e.g. you personally assign a large preference to avoiding conforming to modern fashion standards. For example, I think it is bad to vote for modern fashion with dollars because it is an unsustainable industry. I don’t have enough dollars to buy “sustainable” clothing. And I also don’t value the social opinions of others if they are based largely upon the way I dress. It would feel painful for me to take steps to be fashionable. If you told me today that my future self would adjust to being fashionable, would have no moral qualms with that, and would feel somewhat happier as a result, this would make me currently feel deeply unhappy about the person I would become.
Also, where can we find more specific instruction about how to “find a more fulfilling job”? I spend many hours thinking about this, talking to the career counselors for my grad program, writing LW posts about it, talking with campus representatives, friends, family, etc. I also scour the internet for job listing, the BLS descriptions of jobs (which are essentially the same as O*Net), etc. I feel that 2+ years of doing all this effort on an almost daily basis has not taught me a single thing about what a “fulfilling” career would be like. I truly feel like the preferences I have that I like are arranged in such a way that there are no existing modern jobs that could remotely approach the ability to make me feel fulfilled. I think rapidly increasing technology plays a drastic role in this, much like the Reeks and Wrecks from Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.
Also, I am a healthy, well-adjusted, reasonably social person. I have good speaking skills; I frequently go out to get a drink with groups of friends; I am very active and I exercise and play on a pick-up soccer team. Yet, I am also an INTJ and I actually enjoy being alone and very introverted. I am not “fluidly” extroverted, it’s more just that it’s really simple and easy to do extroverted behaviors while still feeling introverted inside the whole time, and I like this. But I am not very agreeable (I am a bit of a contrarian and I also believe this is justified). I am compassionate to an almost dopey degree. I have no symptoms of any mental illness other than that I am chronically unhappy. The only mental illness in my family is my dad’s PTSD.
At any rate, I basically feel like the advice you give does not actually explain anything. It’s a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. How do you find a more fulfilling job if you don’t even know how to begin to know how to start learning what ‘fulfilling’ means? I think I already outwardly exhibit almost all of the happiness indicator traits that you describe and I feel very miserable almost every day.
Also, I write research papers similar to this sort of thing. 15 hours is not a long time to tabulate this kind of paper. There’s no way someone could read and truly absorb the main points in 49 research articles, and then also write this post about it, in 15 hours. So either you had already read some of the posts and the total time was more than 15 hours, or else you did not read all of the 49 references. And even if someone could read and comprehend 49 research articles that quickly, I wouldn’t want them to. The paper that they write would suffer from being surface level, and while I really appreciate the fact that you’re willing to use your own time to write this post, I think it really is very surface level.
The reason this bothers me is that now, on other LessWrong posts, everyone just refers to this post whenever someone brings up a question about happiness. People seem to act like it’s ‘solved’ and just go read lukeprog’s post; it explains everything you have to do before you can ever query for more community advice. But it doesn’t. This post is potentially helpful to people just scratching the surface of even recognizing that they want to alter their own happiness. I think it’s targeted at the wrong community. I can see how some LWers might not make any effort to be social, but most of us are already thoughtful enough that the things in the post are the first things we tried and for any post about happiness to be helpful, it needs to dig much deeper on very narrow topics (like how to actually decide which career goals to set, and then practical steps to achieve them, and what to expect once they are achieved, etc.)
I’m sorry if this seems harsh; I don’t mean to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You clearly do. But I would rather see one post citing 4 references on the psychology of career factors, where in 15 hours you actually could make a deeply insightful synthesis of the 4 papers and include other web resources besides the trivial O*Net, for example. All these posts with 30+ references are too diffuse to be worthwhile. Focus on fewer references, but references that offer deeper insight and can be mapped into a practical set of instructions rather than vague notions that might govern the reader’s future search criteria.
“The time [sic] of consumerism I advise against is the kind of consumerism that seems to make people unhappy according to the specific research papers I cited.”
When writing an essay about achieving happiness, it’s not very helpful to define a term as inherently causing happiness or unhappiness, even if you can point to the literature for clarification. You end up with the tautology that “doing X—which is defined as causing happiness—makes you happy” or the inverse.
The rest of the essay is a rather nice survey of achieving happiness; I’ll be sure to point some friends at it.
Sorry if this was unclear. Nobody is defining consumerism as causing unhappiness. It’s an empirical claim that certain kinds of consumerism cause unhappiness, and those are the kinds of consumerism I’m advising against.
I fixed the typo, thanks.