Comments by "justgivemethetruth" (@justgivemethetruth) on "Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | TED" video.

  1. +chestypants78 The problem, like with Dickens' stories, is that those miserable greedy people set the infrastructure up to make everyone else miserable too.
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  2. +color coded speak Your comment is the most true here. The people who are lonely probably do not choose to be lonely. Are the people who are not lonely nice people, better people somehow? And looks at the result of the internet? Do all these assholes here help anything after the great promise of the internet? There are forces at work we do not want to look at.
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  3. +Ron maest I don't think you can say that if you cannot qualify what it is to choose loneliness? What does it mean to choose anything? Do we have free will, or are there just not options available for people to chose, or are they even rejected when they do make an effort. You react to this in a way that provokes your own interpretation of the world that you have come to some terms with, but by definition, that is something that you have found you can do ... by definition you do not know what you do not know ... the unknown unknowns as Donald Rumself would call them. Can you say we have a choice when we face fear ... fear has a biological effect on people, not an intellectual effect? Some people can look at their fear, and if they are lucky enough, of the fear is not paralyzing enough, or if they can see something to try to change how they feel they may be able to make an effort to affect that. You say the world is a fright-fest ... but we are all humans, we have dominated this planet, and we have nothing physically to fear, so how I interpret what you say is that these people are afraid of other people, they have been intimidated, bullied, frightened by other people ... so this is my problem with this kind of video ... it spins the people with lots of friends like a TV show, and when you look and dissect many of those friendships ... the should have different qualitied, like family, parents, children, associates, aquaintance ... and I think these friendships might more productively be classes as power, political power, so some people are disenfranchise by other people. This fits more into the research they do with apes ... but we like to spin human research in some kind of positive more intellectual way. Say look at the cultural life span of native Americans or blacks in this country ... that is more telling I think than this study. I think this study misses the forests for the trees.
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  4. Actually, if you want some scientific data on this, look to the book "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond. This book is a real gem because it is a broad scientific survey of human beings through history compared with other primates. If you do real scientific analysis, yes, primitive people had a hard life, but in reality they had closer knit social relationships and surprisingly better nutrition, better health - except for accidents and disease and more leisure time. When you think about it most of the ideas we have had have been around since primitive times. They had time to think in groups, where our substitute for that is scientific forums and the web. Our bodies are more tuned to being used and getting a lot of activity, and most of the illnesses we get today are not getting activity that clears our arteries and uses up the calories we eat. Most of our food is just,whereas nomadic people had the whole environment to pick from. There are trade offs and few of us would want to go back to primitive times, but using the first hunter-gatherers as a model our lives would be better modelled by that, that what we do today. The book talks about how when people first started farming we went from a varied balanced diet to a carb-based diet from corn, wheat, potatoes and often not fresh. The regular people did not get the special nutrition the rich rulers and priests got. Gotta challenge those orthoxies!
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  5. Rich and famous ... what is what we see plastered in front of our eyes every single moment of our lives? One You-Tube video is going to turn that around? More and more the only people who count are those who are working for the biggest companies at the highest level, those who are famous, or well known ... the rest of us are anonymous parts in a machine that do not get recognized or paid fairly. We fit into the BS supply and demand commodity economy. So you see the writing on the walls, and the results of being a regular person whose life doesn't matter ... what else are people supposed to think? Why do we always want to see the same faces in the movies for example or hear the same kinds of songs, even though more than ever today most of the media is filled with junk so that we keep buying new junk every year instead of wanting to see quality programming that is classic? When are people going to have the brains to rebel against this?
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  6. +Sichan Yuh Maybe you ought to really read Wealth Of Nations instead of posting what you think it might have said.
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  7. +Themen Jamal  I am not sure I understand your question, or rather its point. What part are you talking about ... loneliness? I am not sure, but if that is what the numbers say, then our society seems to be set up that way. But is that really an answer? Do they have a solution for it? If a given person is lonely, what difference does it make that he knows that. What difference does it make to all of us if we see someone who is lonely, or the government ... does anyone care. Maybe loneliness is a result or something else, for instance some kind of bullying or oppression, see above. Who can avoid loneliness? What can you do about it? There is a subtext here that is useless and blaming of individuals. How does this loneliness come about? Or when people are told that society is one way, ie fame and wealth and high achievement ... how conscious are they, and when they develop habits of individuality ... how do they change or find out it isn't working. In other words, what is this guy telling us? I don't see any value to it, as he says we all know this, but what can you do about it? They say money and achievement don't get to happiness, but they can certainly facilitate making friendships, having families, avoiding conflict. I think this guy is shirking away from the what are real political ramifications of this study because the reality would be that our society kills some people so that others can live better. Do we really think that these people that are lonely choose that? How do they get there, how can they change? Agree or disagree with the study ... I don't know. what is there to agree or disagree with? Just sayin' ;-)
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  8. +IlluminatiOfficial Is that the best you can offer? Why bother?
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