[jd115]

Of course you choose whether to be happy. In fact, it is the ONLY thing you have control over. But it's the key to everything.

It's the one choice you have to make in every living moment. Keep making this right choice, and life is a song. Choose to look the wrong way and life becomes hard work.

There is nothing more to it. This is all anyone ever needs to know about life.

[themacguffinman]

Sure, it's a choice in the same way that the outcome of an if-branch is a "choice". You have control over it in the same way a computer program has control over its own output. Which is to say: no actual control at all.

Free will/choice isn't a coherent concept philosophically and I find it almost impossible to take anyone seriously when they propose "just change your mind" as a solution to anything. I am already struggling to resist the urge to leave this comment at "WOW THANKS, I'M CURED!".

Twin studies show that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon where the genetic heritability of the stable component of happiness is estimated to be almost 80% [1].

If you're unhappy and reading this with a sense of disappointment, I'd just say "don't count yourself out yet".

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb...

[sethammons]

Not sure where you are going with the free will thing unless you are going for the genetics answer to happiness which I find lacking.

Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics.

Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality...

Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.

[themacguffinman]

There's a lot of fine literature out there that can properly explain better than I can why free will is an incoherent concept, I recommend googling it. Although the philosophy is fairly basic, it's hard to flesh out concisely in the format of social media comments. A one sentence summary might be: we are our physiology and thus bound by the laws of physics and chemistry, we cannot have more free will or more capacity to self-change than the physical particles that comprise us. Honestly I'm not interested in object-level rebuttals to this, the philosophy around this is fairly settled and feels like debating whether the earth is flat.

The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions.

No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6

[artemonster]

That is just a load of shit, I am so tired of this toxic positivity. Of course its a choice in the first place, but choice is not what brings you there. You need to choose right turn, yes, yes! But you have to walk the path towards the destination and that is a whole different story. If all you postulate that it is enough just to make the right turn, then… ah, whatever.

[jd115]

There can be no such thing as toxic positivity. Your doubts are toxic, yes. But positivity can never be toxic. Life IS utterly binary and clear-cut in this respect, there are no grey areas, no nuances. There is an absolute good and it is joy. And it is 100% a personal choice, regardless of circumstances. Once again - it is the only ONE thing over which you have any control, at all times, no exceptions. You can always choose to be happy. AND that's enough!

[kranner]

Leaving out people with e.g. clinical depression, this is still only true for some people. The rest don't believe that they can simply choose to be happy regardless of circumstances, and therefore they can't. I don't think we get a choice in the matter: either we're lucky to be in the first group who know it intuitively or figure it out or come across the idea somewhere, or we aren't so lucky.

[rjh29]

Incredibly insulting to people with depression.

[jd115]

Which is why they are depressed. They choose (over and over and over again, many times in each hour they make this CONSCIOUS CHOICE) to find this insulting, instead of empowering.

I am leaving out no-one. Joy is absolutely accessible to every living being, at all times, under all conditions.

[sethammons]

I have met people who laugh and smile about hardships and I have met people who are sour about unequivocally positive situations.

I don't think happiness is a destination, it is a path. The happy person is happy to have chosen to turn right and to have had the opportunity to so. The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for.

That is the decision

[lexapro]

>The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for.

>That is the decision

What is the decision exactly? If unhappy people could just choose to be happy instead, they would.

[sethammons]

Let's make sure we are talking about the same thing. I don't mean the fleeting joy of a pop cycle on a hot summer day when you were twelve and the cutie you have a crush on smiled at you. I'm talking about a general disposition. A "happy person."

It is the way one looks at and approaches the problems and/or situations. You can choose to change how you approach the problem and you can choose what you find rewarding in that problem and the approach. You can also choose to focus on what you've yet to attain.

In our little parable here, the unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. We are getting terribly abstract now. But they could instead focus on what traction they have gained, they could "enjoy the art of the search," or whatever else they choose to put value on. But it comes down to what they value.

Talks and whole books are written on this and I wont be able to do them justice. This mental outlook thing extends to depression. See CBT, Congnitive Behavioral Therapy, which reduces depression by changing how you think about things. One could choose to apply those techniques.

[bradlys]

A lot of this “choosing to be happy” as the way you describe it though is merely self-deception/lying-to-oneself.

If I’m starving - I have every right to be upset. Yet in your mind - I should just learn to enjoy the search for food (even if it doesn’t exist) rather than being upset that I’m literally dying.

[sethammons]

"Enjoying the ride" doesn't mean not trying not trying to improve it. And you can be upset at a situation and then get to fixing it with a positive mindset.

Since you bring up starving, I'll give you my starving story. BMI was under 18 and trending south. I got kind of abandoned for a bit in high school. My daily food was one potato in the morning (baked, plain), the high school free lunch, and, as long as I stole an extra hamburger that I could sell (which was not every day, depending on rotation), I'd have enough money to get a can of soup for the evening. This would be warmed on a wood burning stove that I also used to keep my room warm. The rest of the house was, literally, ice cold due to a missing wall (which is non-ideal in the mountains and also encourages wildlife to steal your meager food stores). What meager food I could stash away got stolen by raccoons once - there was a missing wall on my house at the time and the mountain wildlife could come on in if they could navigate a tarp.

I could have been upset with my dad for leaving me in that situation. I could be upset with other extended (and close by) family who did not help. I could be upset with neighbors who didn't help. I could be upset when I saw people wasting food (and, yeah, that stung... a lot). I could be upset that my stomach being in pain or some stints with nausea was a normal feeling. I could be upset by a thousand things in my situation (and these are but the surface of my hardships). I could have decided that my happiness was based on all that.

However, I tried to enjoy "roughing it." I took the time to enjoy searching for wood to heat my wood burning stove to heat my cold room and my can of soup that I got only because I stole and sold other food earlier. Would I prefer that to where I am today? Hell the no. I looked around and knew I did not like where my life was directed and the current state of it. So I focused on what I could do. I could get my school work completed. I could talk to friends before school if I got there early enough. Maybe a day was a no-hamberger-available-to-steal-and-sell day; I would enjoy that I got to sneak a slice of pizza from another classroom's party or I could get the left overs from a friend before they tossed something. I think I was a generally happy person despite all of my hardships (and these are but the surface of my hardships).

So I've been starving with every right to be upset. I chose to, instead, focus on things I could do something about. Slowly I improved my situation. I found food. I got good grades. I got scholarships. I starved some more. I worked crazy hours. I failed. And I failed some more. By my late 20s, I had started to figure things out and I, for the first time, could buy a pizza on the way home and not think about the financial hardship. I could avoid being hungry. Tack on another decade and I am wildly successful. However, I've also had to deal with depression, anxiety, insecurity, and feeling like not belonging along the way.

Edit: post question I meant to ask:

> self-deception/lying-to-oneself

I'm curious on what you mean here - why is that significant? This sounds like saying you shouldn't read fiction because it isn't real. When you pump yourself up (for a lift, a sports game, to ask out someone attractive), you are practicing forms of self-deception. Also, you are not saying, "this is great, life sucks." You are saying, "life sucks, but there are great things." Reality doesn't change, but the way you interpret it can.

[maximus-decimus]

I'm usually happy during the day and groggy and depressive at night when I'm tired. Being happy being a path doesn't mean you get to pick the path you're on.