I’ve been pondering this same topic for a while. I know that the maxim is “You don’t know what you have until you lose it,” in which case the obvious mental trick is to somehow develop that appreciation for something while you still have it. In other words, appreciate your father as if he’s already dead but somehow you got him back alive again, etc. But I’m just not capable of that sort of mental gymnastics yet, as hard as I try. I’ll have to…find a way.
This might be a thing where being prone to anxiety can lend a hand. I think about my son’s mortality every day. I imagine losing my husband every day. This habit can start in a dark place or it can be something more… constructive. It’s not that thinking about a loved one’s death can prepare you for it, but it can make the present more poignant. It really seemed to start after my son was born when the rate at which he grows made me realize how fleeting time really is. Then I read 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The other day I started worrying about something weeks into the future and then it dawned on me I might not even be alive then. Oddly liberating.
Yes, this. When I finally got away from CA I felt a huge weight drop from my shoulders. I spent my whole life there, and was living in exurbia in a redwood forest, on a property that had been in my family since the early 1970’s, when I could ride my horse down the main road without concern. By the 2000’s I felt trapped in my house because leaving home meant facing traffic jams at all times of the day and gridlock during rush hour. Everyone around me had put up gates and signs so there was nowhere to go in the woods, where once I had hiked all day. I lived on a dark steep hillside where keeping animals and gardening, two of my main solaces, was an endless unprofitable struggle.
Perhaps my gratitude wouldn’t be so great now, if I had not suffered so long.
These thoughts are like something a therapist once told me. I’m not even sure how to interpret what she literally said, which was essentially that all the people you love are already dead, all the things you care about are already gone. Did she mean their losses were inevitable and guaranteed? Did she promote pretending they were gone for a moment, to gain a proper appreciation of them? Was it some kind of physics of time philosophy? But what I absorbed from it was that loss was a built-in part of everything, and that I have a kind of default way of thinking that the present will go on forever, and that helping myself see beyond that is a good thing. It’s like you said, Spice_Weasel:
I’m not terribly optimistic. To the contrary, I pretty much expect everyone other than my VERY CLOSEST family and friends to let me down - or at the least, to not place much.any weight on my personal preferences/interests. So I’ve focussed much of my efforts on insulating myself from the need for such external support/validation/reward. Of course, I acknowledge that I am very fortunate to be reasonably healthy, reasonably intelligent, etc.
I think happiness is pretty much a myth - and certainly a horrendous aspiration. Instead, I aim at contentment - which is much more realistic and achievable. In my mind, contentment is somewhat akin to what is described here as gratitude. Life may suck, but (not being religious) it is the only life I’m going to get, so I can either figure some way to appreciate/tolerate it, or I should check out.
I think that people’s expectations get in the way of their contentment. A hardworking low paid person is not content with a warm place to live and nutritious food, because they WANT everything so many other people seem to get who are no more deserving than they. Well, life is unfair. You can choose to appreciate what you’ve got - while deciding whether you wish to strive for more. Or you can resent what you lack. Your choice.
Not to sounds like a dick, but social justice or whether or not I “deserve” whatever economic advantage I have plays little role in my overall happiness. It’s important and all, but it’s all very abstract macro stuff that I don’t really deal with day to day.
I do think happiness can be affected by to what degree a person feels their success is a product of their own efforts instead of a result of forces beyond their control. In many cases I think people who work simpler jobs that don’t pay as much can often be happier because there is a clear expectation - you do your work, you get paid. They may find aspects of the work tedious or frustrating, but they can also leave it at work when they go home for the day. I find that a lot of high paying corporate jobs are more a product of politics and the whims of executives who you may never interact with.
It’s something I think about a lot. Even in the context of my agency where the pay is very skewed. Yeah, I have a master’s degree and they don’t, but even things like that are often a product of circumstance. I was born smart, I had an innate ability to succeed in academics which I did not earn. I don’t work any harder than the people who make a fraction of what I do.
It’s mostly luck that I am where I am, doing what I’m doing.
I don’t know how that bears on my happiness. On the one hand, I feel gratitude, on the other hand, I feel guilt.
I didn’t mean that the topics had per se significance in your or other people’s happiness. I meant that these social justice issues help perpetuate the disadvantages that keep being hard on the same people, as microinequities or worse. For example, wealthy bosses may be unhelpful to those under them of slender means, specifically because they think they deserve no better. Wealthy bosses inevitably have an outsized impact on those under them, for better or worse.