Besides porn star, is there an occupation where you get to work hard and be happy 100% of the time?

(Not trying to hint at anything personal, just a question that crossed my mind.)

No, there's no way physiologically to be happy 100% of the time.

That's actually a very interesting insight, because it suggests that happiness and other related emotions only exist for evolutionary purposes.

But that's too obvious. What's even more amusing is to think that consciousness is an evolved adaptation:

[Quote=Judea Pearl]
We’re going to have robots with free will, absolutely. We have to understand how to program them and what we gain out of it. For some reason, evolution has found this sensation of free will to be computationally desirable[/quote]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/machine-learning-is-stuck-on-asking-why/560675/

Also, I'm thinking there may be some workarounds here, if you're willing to drastically change who you are to maximize happiness.

For example, the absence of ever needing to work could decrease frustration. Another idea would be to never have goals, since it seems to me that many of life's frustrations are a consequence of uncertainty of which goals you'll actually succeed in, long after having committing to them.

So, so far my recipe for happiness is to never work and have no goals. That said, kids on summer vacation aren't happy all the time (God knows), so maybe happiness is something that is secretly somewhat constant, and where we feel it going up or down, it's only with respect to various outcomes and experiences we choose to care about.

idk about that, friend. have you tried chewing five gum?

Quick update guys. I did a quick google search of a phrase which I feel well encapsulates why somebody like myself in particular simply can't ever be perpetually blissful without fail: "life is time consuming".

...and lo and behold, the answer appeared before mine own eyes†:

[quote=What seems to be a poorly edited and poorly typeset religious self-help book]
Life is time consuming and demanding, but when you look at Jesus you see life is worth every second.
[/quote]

Juidth's certainly got some of that old fashioned religion, and she sure looks happy to me!

I do believe it's by now been long past the time for me to enter into my religious conversion phase...

† https://books.google.com/books?id=mhUtBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=%22life+is+time+consuming%22&source=bl&ots=fgK2C5_O6L&sig=WOevDf9c24_EQfPSLsLdN2rlErc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW57T1jZbbAhXj5lQKHS7FDQgQ6AEITjAM#v=onepage&q=%22life%20is%20time%20consuming%22&f=false

Reid is well aware of this. But Reid is also aware that there's that brief gap after one piece goes stale and you're desperately fumbling in your fanny pack for the next piece.

It's physiologically possible to be happy 98.4% of the time.

On the subject of jobs where you can be happy the whole time, I don't know. That probably depends on you. When I try to think about a sort of "stress-free, ideal job" I think about doing boat dives for tourists in the Caribbean or something. Getting to SCUBA all the time, getting to be on the water, having a semi-technical but relatively simple set of gear to manage, getting to teach or shepherd people through the process, getting to end the day cleaning up w/ the sun setting on the ocean. That all sounds pretty lovely to me, but I'd never assume for a second that it wouldn't have its fair share of annoyances, stressors, necessary interactions with negative people, whatever.

Also, I don't pursue that job, because despite how nice it sounds, I have aspirations and objectives elsewhere, professionally, that I value highly enough to outweigh the desire for total peace/happiness/ease.

^^ Except tourist season there is only ~4 months and you have to earn enough money in those 4 months to support yourself and your family for a whole year. Assuming the docu-series I watched on Amazon Prime Video was telling the truth. https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Paradise/dp/B077W4L464

Also, when you're in business for yourself, a huge part of being in business is finding and booking the customers and dealing with reservations and cancellations and money and all that BS. I'd be totally on board if I didn't have to do any of that.

Obviously, a great deal depends on personal preference. My brother is a programmer for a video game developer. He shows up to work at 10ish. They have breakfast goodies and massage chairs. He gets to do his work at his own pace, and whenever he wants, he can take a break to play video games on the clock as "research." They regularly have ping-pong tournaments. They require a "nap or rest period" after lunch. He leaves around 6:00. He said he loves it. To me, it sounds terrible. Being inside with weirdos and computers all day is no good. As a result of my existential crisis in the other thread, I recently applied to be a deputy again (even though I did not enjoy it the first time). This agency is in a rural county, and they have a special opportunity called "back-country deputy." The deputy works 100% outdoors in the national and state forest lands on dirt bikes, 4x4s, ATVs, snowmobiles, and boats. They respond to calls in the woods and do search and rescue for lost hikers and hunters. That is exactly MY ideal job. My brother would hate it and would probably die.

All that said, everyone has unique interests, but everyone also has to do things they don't like. I guess the trick is to do enough things that make you happy to make it worth enduring the unhappy.




Booking business and customers isn't bad. The first two years are the hardest part. Prepare to make no money the first two years and work your ass off to build a reputation and you'll be OK. Leverage google and yelp reviews. I have lots of business because I have a perfect five-star rating on google with 28 reviews. People go out of their way to hire me. I even raised my prices by 25% and discontinued using coupons, but lost no business because people believe that higher prices means greater quality. A lot of my reviews actually say "pricey but worth it." It wasn't without effort, however; I had to go out of my way a lot of times in order to secure those reviews. I would offer discounts if anything was less than flawless in order to preserve my ratings. I would go back two or three times to make the customer happy. I would send follow-up postcards and regular reminders. That can be stressful, I guess, but I am willing to give someone $50 off their bill or spend a few cents on some mail if it keeps my phone ringing all week with $400 jobs.

In your case, right now, I would say the answer is no. You admittedly have no passion to do anything. I was going to post in Steven's thread about a person I just become aware of. He's got around 130 podcasts up and I just started listening to them from the beginning. Jocko Willink whom I learned about from a recent Business Insider youtube video about why you should get up at 4:30. I find no reason that anyone couldn't take something away from his lessons.

I'd like to see Jocko take extreme ownership of the fact that the Iraq war was a mistake and that his AO was already a powderkeg of **** by the time I got there.

I recommend being an anonymous lottery winner with a passively managed trust fund.

How can he take ownership of any of that? Going there and prosecuting the war in the way it was wasn't his order.

A fitting way to segue into an admonishment for maggots like myself to haul my sorry ass on over to boot camp!

I bet a lot of porn stars are sad

Ah yeah.

I was probably projecting some observer happiness onto the actors, buuuut according to Jordan Peterson, I'm sad too, and that the only cure is complete religious conversion.

So I guess to summarize, my goals from this thread are to become a born again Christian and attend a boot camp.

(and, I guess, win a lottery ticket)

You asked a question then you posted "So, so far my recipe for happiness is to never work and have no goals." I never brought up military service nor am I the sort of person to ever do so in any manner to disparage another or qualify an opinion. The best route towards happiness with regards to employment will most likely involve you finding something you are passionate about actually doing. I empathize with that quest and merely passed on a suggestion for a motivating personality I found by chance.

And, yes, attending church can definitely help your attitude. I never feel judged by not going through all the Catholic rituals when we go and often the social engagement and readings/sermons are positive enhancers to my attitude.

I wasn't serious about never having goals! That was sort of a joke.

The problem with church is that there is a lot of people there.

Understandably, our minds work quite different. I would have assumed your porn star comment was a joke but apparently it wasn't and it if you told me that your comment about my "segue into an admonishment" was a joke it would clarify things and make your statement: "So I guess to summarize, my goals from this thread are to become a born again Christian and attend a boot camp." humorous in a healthier way. Your delivery is terrible and perhaps you have to resort to the appropriate smiley. Happens to me too. Having posted on this board for about 15 years I would assume more people would get jokes that I make.

Anyway, sorry I can't help. I mistook your intent here as serious. My bad.

Tell me about it but there is definitely healthy results from getting outside of your comfort zone.

As a rule, I only post when I don't know myself whether or not I am joking.

Splains alot.

Join a cult yeah

I once was lost, but now am found.

Tomorrow is a new day... I will free my slaves!

In the realm of introspection, has anyone ever read the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman? I'm a quarter through and am really appreciating it. It might just be self help written at a postgraduate level, but I find his advice to be insightful.

Especially for me, where I make many decisions on autopilot, which in his terms is the homunculus system 1 thinking, when reminding myself I need to think about the consequences a bit has helped me make preferable choices.

I don't think I would enjoy my job if I had to get erect on demand.

ooh, yeah. I've actually heard it's quite hard.

Learning probability / statistics is a form of self-help, so there's no need to sneer at the genre. It would be quite arrogant to assume that there's anything more special about your brain than other homo sapiens who, like you, evolved on a savannah and not a casino.

Anyway, I quite like this:

[quote=Daniel Kahneman]
I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.” This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. We measured the distances from the target and could see that those who had done best the first time had mostly deteriorated on their second try, and vice versa. But I knew that this demonstration would not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency.
[/quote]

A friend of mine says she was the happiest when she was working as a prostitute. Her parents disaproved though, so she stopped doing it. And now she's getting married.

So she's starting again?