from Hacker News

A 70-year-old's secret to a full and happy life

by lynnetye on 11/20/19, 6:18 PM with 168 comments

• by Diederich on 11/20/19, 9:46 PM

  I was raised by my grandparents. They were born in the 1910s, and grew up in the midwest during the dust bowl and great depression. My grandfather lost most of his buddies in Guadalcanal and Burma during World War II, and, in his own words, fully expected to become worm food himself.

  He said little, but one phrase he did repeat more than any other was simple: "Any day you're breathing is a good day." To him, every day, every year, every one of the six decades past 1944 was a cherry on top gift.

  Growing up in the 1970s in the United States, conducting nuclear attack drills with regularity, many of us felt that it was fairly likely that we would be incinerated before our 21st birthdays.

  "Every day you're breathing is a good day."

  There are certainly limits to these 8 simple words, but radical gratitude is at their core.

  It's quite likely that everybody reading this post is having a FAR better life than 99.9% of every other human being who exists and has ever existed.

  I'm a generally happy person because, from a young age, I have chosen to focus on that simple truth.

  This perspective need not lead to complacence. Those who know me will say that I've always been a driven person, personally and professionally.

  Every day you're breathing is a good day. Thanks, grandpa, for the wise words. He would have celebrated his 100th birthday last month.

• by devmunchies on 11/20/19, 10:14 PM

  Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) said (at around 70 as well), "The notion that one's goal in life is to be happy, that your own happiness is the goal... I just don't buy it"

  I think as we focus on mastery or craftsmanship, happiness finds us.

  Not everyone, but I'd say modern society is hedonistic—we seek happiness instead of achievement and get neither.

• by topmonk on 11/20/19, 11:05 PM

  I think human emotional state is nature's tool to get us to procreate and improve the chances of our offspring to survive.

  If at anytime we become truly happy this hurts these goals. For example, if an old man could be building a wall or an arsenal of bows an arrows, or inventing a better way to go fishing, his tribe would be more likely to survive. But if he just sat there, content to being alive, this is bad for his offsprings' future.

  You could say, well why can't he do these things and be happy at the same time? I can't really explain why not being happy leads to a better outcome for the safety and procreation of society in general, but I would assume that it must serve some purpose in that goal, or the whole concept of it would have been removed by evolution long ago.

  So, I think it's better just to resign yourself to the fact, barring using mind altering drugs, that you'll never be much happier than you were on average before, or much sadder, either.

  And as far as this 70 yo lady is concerned, I'd bet when this was written she was simply riding the high of accomplishing something, and probably soon crashed back down below her baseline, only to recover back to it sometime later.

• by starpilot on 11/21/19, 2:38 AM

  This is why people make fun of HN.

  How to be a billionaire: Work hard!

  How to start a business: Start working, believe in yourself!

  Now that I've read OP article, I realize what I've been doing wrong all my life. I had disabled my "fun" switch. Glad someone finally pointed it out. Everything is so much better now, wow! Thank you!

• by Cougher on 11/20/19, 8:49 PM

  This reminds me of the Monty Python skit, "How To Do It". To rid the world of all known diseases, "become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical world really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be diseases any more." The secret to a happy life is to be happy now instead of waiting for stuff!

• by ericajohnson on 11/20/19, 7:35 PM

  Dr. Bik Kwoon Tye could be a poster child for Dr. Seligman's work in the field of positive psychology! This story reminds me so much of a book I just finished reading: The Happiness Advantage.

  "Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around."

• by UnpossibleJim on 11/21/19, 12:53 AM

  Weirdly enough, I was having a chat with my mom about this sort of thing last night (she's 69, not 70, so I'm not sure she's old enough for her opinion to count, yet). Both of us were chatting about our tendency to be solitary and only see family and a couple of core friends. Past that, we'll hide away in books and study for days and not notice, perfectly happy but when we have to come out of our houses we are out of sorts with the world and it scares us a little that we are so very happy in this hermit way. We have to force ourselves to be social, which is supposed to be the key to long life and happiness - and we try, but it comes so foreign to some. I have to wonder if these 'keys to happiness' are as universal as advertised.

  And for the record - we both are social, but it isn't our natural state =)

• by gfs78 on 11/21/19, 2:33 PM

  Happiness is not about achieving your goals or having a stress free life or anything related to wealth.

  Happiness is about being able to live in the present moment and share your life with the people that you love. Of course a minimum of wealth, health, etc. is needed and that minimum could be quite an effort to reach depending on where you start with.

  I´ve never met a happy unloved person no matter how rich or powerful.

• by callesgg on 11/20/19, 8:43 PM

  The secret is lie about how happy your life is.

  To others to yourself. To everyone.

• by doodlewind on 11/21/19, 2:04 AM

  My grandpa is an agriculture scientist. He graduated from university before the Culture Revolution disaster, and still served the country selflessly. In the 1980s he won Chinese national science first prize.

  He raised me up and I am proud of him. All the difficulties and chaos that happened in this country doesn't affect his perseverance doing researches and making my family better off. He is still optimistic and healthy today. With your stories, I found that as human being, we are really seeking for and sharing similar happiness, which can go beyond ideology.

  Thanks for all your sharing again.

• by toephu2 on 11/20/19, 11:18 PM

  Haven't seen anyone talk about it but I believe happiness is partly hereditary. It's genetic (not totally, but it must play a big part, since depression is heredity[1]).

  Just think about yourself and your own natural happiness level. For my siblings and I, it seems very similar to our parents. Of course not everyone is this way but I definitely believe some people are born a lot happier than others.

  [1]actually the jury is still out on that one

• by paulz_ on 11/20/19, 8:58 PM

  The author also did an episode of Indie Hackers [0] which is in my opinion the best episode of that podcast.

  I wish her and Courtland would do a regular podcast together.

  [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/086-lynne-tye-of-key-va...

• by ken on 11/21/19, 3:05 AM

  Even as homogeneous as the set of HN readers tends to be, we can't agree on anything. The idea that there is a singular "key that unlocks everything" in life is downright bizarre. You probably wouldn't copy her diet or sleep schedule or religion or footwear or anything else. Why would anyone look to adopt her life philosophy? Monty Python and Douglas Adams mocked this very idea.

  The author has her MBTI on her profile, and it's nearly the opposite of mine. That suggests to me that her preferences are likely quite different from mine.

• by Pistos2 on 11/20/19, 9:18 PM

  Here's something I sometimes tell people:

  Contentment comes when "the way you want it" and "the way it is" overlap enough -- but sometimes in life, you can really only change one of those.

• by hindsightRegret on 11/21/19, 7:38 AM

  Is this an article or a commercial? Psych, it's both!

• by ropiwqefjnpoa on 11/21/19, 2:18 AM

  FTA: "Making "have fun" the goal is the key that unlocks everything"

  This is enticing blanket statement. However, there are many things you'll need to do that will not or should not be fun. And if you fully believe this sentiment, during those times you are not having fun, you may feel like you're "doing it wrong" when this is just how it is and that's ok.

  Happiness is more related to contentment than fun.

• by spark28 on 11/20/19, 7:55 PM

  Wow, I went to Cornell and actually remember a professor Tye! It's something we all need to be reminded of — happiness isn't the destination, but rather our mind-frame along the way. It's easy to get trapped in the mundane, daily grind if we forget to keep prioritizing (and re-evaluating) our happiness, especially when it sometimes flies in the face of what's "societally important".

• by Scapeghost on 11/20/19, 10:50 PM

  The secret to a happy life is ignorance. As in not caring about stuff.

  There's too much depressing shit in the world, too many injustices happening to other people and lifeforms, to truly be happy with that knowledge even if your own life is perfect.

• by starpilot on 11/21/19, 2:35 AM

  This is just an ad for a job board, "Key Values"

• by alexanderscott on 11/21/19, 2:42 AM

  click bait for author’s software

• by pi-squared on 11/21/19, 1:10 PM

  TLDR: Have fun. Otherwise: ad/clickbait for author's startup.

• by yters on 11/20/19, 9:25 PM

  When I step back and look at my life, I have to say it is pretty good. I get agitated when I lose perspective and magnify some particular bad thing. Also, as a Christian, this gives me the ultimate relief, because I can step back and say whatever unimaginably horrible thing is happening God is ultimately in control orchestrating things for maximal good, of which maximal good is also at some fundamental level in line with my intuition of maximal good, so I'll be satisfied in the end of it all. And if God doesn't exist, then nothing matters anyways, so why worry? Either way, no reason to worry in any ultimate sense. Sort of like the opposite of Pascal's wager. Worry has no rational basis regardless of one's worldview.

• by GoodJokes on 11/20/19, 8:19 PM

  Cool way to use your mom to advertise for your company.

• by bitfhacker on 11/20/19, 6:24 PM

  It's similar to the half glass of water... Do you see the glass half full or half empty?