What haven’t you survived? And where in heaven (or hell) are you posting from?
I did not say you will survive everything. I said you can, and obviously everyone here has survived to this moment. Indeed, some people have probably survived things I haven’t had to face.
You can survive. Whether you will survive is another story.
I went to Starbucks this morning to order a breakfast sandwich and they didn’t have the one I wanted. I think this is literally the worst thing to happen to anyone.
Well eventually we all die of something.
You can survive a lot of things, but not everything. Some things you’d need to be Superman to survive, some would need a retcon even for him.
Sure. But how people take things isn’t related to how bad the things are.
Take my grandparents. They both survived Auschwitz after losing their entire families to the Nazis (this after being rounded up into the Lodz ghetto, having everything taken from them, lives destroyed, then afterwards refugee camps, immigration to a foreign land, etc)
My grandmother was a wreck for the rest of her life. She was extremely anxious, controlling, and in constant angry feuds with her very few surviving family, to the point where us grandkids were not allowed to know them.
OTOH my grandfather’s motto was “why be miserable”. He was a cheery dude who got along with everyone. He didn’t believe in spending a lot of time thinking about bad things and the past that can’t be changed. In his opinion being upset about the past was a waste of time.
My grandfather would say his life had been pretty good, lucky even. Whereas I’m pretty sure existence was constantly painful for my grandmother. Similar, extremely horrific experiences, different emotional styles, different results.
Tell that to my wife. Oh wait, you can’t because she is dead.
No.
Difficult? Unpleasant? Scarring? Sure. But no, not “extremely difficult”.
Cite?
The happiness indexes I can find show a pretty clear trend for extremely poor places to have the lowest reported happiness, and the moderately wealthy to wealthy countries being much higher.
There’s also the fact that the harder you have to work to get something, the more you appreciate it. Modern convenience has reduced the amount of adventure in our lives. Without the threat of starvation or the fear of a lion attack or whatever, we have more security and comfort. But we’ve lost the reward of feeling grateful and relieved that we made it in one piece another day.
I don’t think we’ve become happier as a species. But we have become more bored.
I’m glad you posted your grandparents’ story. And it’s a travesty that so many millions went through that and worse.
That story perfectly illustrates your point from your earlier post. The one I cited and said I agreed with. Your cite of my post seems to indicate you think I’m disagreeing with you. Not so.
My secondary point, which seems to have been misinterpreted is that different people do have different objective life experiences. We don’t all get the same objective mix of good and bad. Certainly your grandparents are examples of folks who got especially bad, even by the dismal standards of all Europeans in WWII.
The part I left unstated, which was more in reply to other commenters, is that IMO, a lot of people who “don’t get” people having trouble processing some adverse life event are the folks who’re fortunate to have never had a significant adverse life event.
E.g., folks who’ve never lost a job can be amazingly clueless about how much objective hardship it brings, much less how much subjective heartache that may trigger depending on the personality of the person afflicted.
And folks who consider not getting a good parking space to be a crisis are generally folks who don’t have too much to worry about in their lives.
It’s a hassle having to separate your laundry and do different colors in separate loads. I never bother with that, but so many other people do. Life must be tough for them.
First world problems.
Third world problems? Now you’re talking about sometimes life is tough.
Something to remember is that you can get used to A LOT, aside you know from watching your family be murdered and raped, but any lesser hardship yea you get used to it. If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow you’d quickly learn to roll with losing facebook and electricity even if it seemed big at first, if you get my meaning there. So things that might seem horrible to one person aren’t as bad to someone used to them.
I also think having things can change your priorities, like it might seem amazing to someone who grew up always hungry to have food always available, but if you grew up with it you’d probably not care as much.
I dunno hard to explain, everything is relative really.
Okay, but the Facebook/electricity thing is not going to be nearly as bothersome as being on constant run from zombies and watching your friends and family get attacked. Sure, on TV they just get used to the new normal and still manage to have other drama going on, but in real life being in constant survival mode is going to push non-essential things into the background.
That is my point kind of, at the start not having electricity and facebook seemed like the end of the world, two years in you’d laugh about it even though you have new more serious things making your life shitty. TV or not you will get used to the new normal, everyone does.
There is the other issue that unless you can get inside someone’s head you don’t know what they value or care about, things people think must be a enormous burden for me aren’t but things they think are silly and trivial I have a big issue with. Everyone just values different things.
I think their are problems we would LIKE to have or we have problems others wish they had.
I’m stressing out getting my kid to do his homework but I also think about the millions of children worldwide who have NO access to school.
I’m overweight and need to make myself get on a treadmill while many others are having to walk miles everyday just to get scraps of food.
I was reading about children from extremely wealthy families who once they turn 18, basically get handed a big check every year so they are set for life. So then, their problem is just what DO they do? What’s the point of going to college?
I think on the one hand, there’s a built-in tendency to “equalize”. If one were overly content with one’s life, there’d be little impetus to improve things that could be improved upon; if one were perpetually miserable, there’d be little motivation to cling to any good parts and try to built on them. So to an extent I think our emotional response to our own quality of life tends to reset the zero-point periodically so that there are some peaks and some valleys.
But speaking from experience there’s also some overall happiness & satisfaction sense that seems more absolute. I’ve been quite happy with my life for quite some time now. My life has hard moments but my life overall is easy and pleasant. My childhood and early adulthood, on the other hand, kind of sucked. There were nice moments in there but the general tendency was pretty awful for me.
My life is great. Sure once in a blue moon I met get some small issue like when I had to call a plumber or when a mouse ate some wires in my car that cost me $300 to fix but really my life has been full of small issues.
Certainly one day all that will end, I mean health issues are bound to occur at some point and I don’t see the company I work for lasting forever. So I’m bound to endure some common hardships eventually but nothing like what some people go through in the world of course.
Lottery winners no happier than quadriplegics
(I have a hard time swallowing this. But maybe it won’t hurt to keep it in mind just in case I am ever paralyzed.)
My past experiences had me thinking that was true. It usually took me less than six days to become accustomed to a new worse normal.
Alas, that turned out not to be the case after all.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve spent time in some of the richest parts of the US, and some of the poorer parts in Africa. A few things are a big deal- child mortality, chronic disease, systematic opporesion, etc. But the vast majority of life is pretty much the same. People love their children, gripe about their jobs, enjoy their hobbies, have complicated romantic relationships, and want just a little bit more money so they can buy (laundry soap, a yatch, a bicycle, a summer home.) Life in the end is about relationships and finding a job you don’t hate, and those are all consuming across the spectrum.
Happiness and hardship are not the same thing. Not everyone’s life is “hard,” really, unless you make the word meaningless. Stephen Hawking, for example, has had a harder life than most similar people (white middle-class male of his generation), but he’s had an easier life than someone else with motor neurone disease who didn’t also happen to be a physics genius and thus pretty good at living inside their head. Having a healthy kid is not as hard as having a disabled kid. Etc, etc.
Most people have some hardships, but some have more than others.
Happiness is another matter. You can manage to be happy, or at least relatively content, even if your life is really hard, and the opposite also applies. Unhappiness is not an automatic result of serious disabiity, for example, at least after having time to adjust.
However, I think the comments about modern conveniences not actually making much difference are wide of the mark. If you have, say, severe eczema, causing pain, itching and disfigurement, that’s going to be a lot worse if you have to spend hours a week with your hands dunked in hot water washing your clothes by hand. Whether the pain, etc makes you unhappy depends on other factors, but you’re still in more pain.