General Thoughts
Posted: February 20, 2009 Filed under: General Stuffs 4 Comments »I kind of wanted to keep the blog specifically to game related news and updates, but thats not going to happen really, so lets get on with it =p
Truth be told I’m a pretty happy with my life, theres definately things I wish were different but they are things outside my control, so I dont let stuff like that determine how content I am. and after quite a long time thinking about it I realised I can be happy with very very little.
Thats not to say I dont have dreams and aspirations, and that I dont spend almost all my time pushing for them and doing all I can to achieve them, but they are so far from the kind of things other people strive for I sometimes worry that people may have concerns for my happiness in that way, that what I aim for many people wouldnt enjoy.
thats quite confusing actually, to put it another way, I dont care how much money I have, and I know for sure that some people see my attitude as pretty self-depriving, in that I make decisions that will lead me down the path of ‘less fortune’ than one of ‘security’, even when the safer path is easier I have this habit.
I guess its true, but I am honestly still happy, if my life is uneventful and I achieve nothing, find no-one who will spend time with me and am totally broke, I wont mind all that much. money and sucess would be nice I guess, but I’d only be happy with them on my terms. just like relationships I guess; you can pretend to be something you are not in order to be with someone, but you cant keep that up forever, and you cant be happy doing it.
I’m the kind of person who finds hapiness in the simple stuff, which if we are all honest, is the most important stuff. Anything you enjoy in life can be stripped down to just the one element that is special to you, I think I’m just lucky that I can find my elements so easily, and have so many of them to enjoy 🙂
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anyhoo, in other news, a little toy I made a few weeks ago got pretty popular for a little while on deviantArt, which is cool, though making updates and stuff for it that people want is taking up alot of time, but I’m almost finished with them and once they are added I’ll go back to working on other stuff. To be honest I dont mind working on adding new stuff because I know its making some people happy (one of the elements I like), but its taking up alot of my time so I can complain about it (complaining is another pleasure I have, though a little bit of a guilty one =p)
In actual gaming news I have a new platform engine coming together to replace my old one so artists and non-programmers can make platform games, its really easy to use and wont require any scripting at all but also alowing a pretty wide range of possible game types. anyhoo, its called ‘Edward’ so if I mention its name thats what I mean 🙂
It makes me happy that you’re happy……which should make you even more happy ‘cos you like to make people happy 🙂 xx
Thank you,I found lots of fun here,they make me happy,one of your element ha.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I am also very happy with very little. As a matter of fact, an objective analysis of my life would probably point out the number of dreams I didn’t follow properly, the relative lack of success in many areas etc and would come to the conclusion that I should be a pretty glum person (also I wear black all the time and listen to horrible music). And still there hasn’t been a day in forever that I didn’t smile most of the time. Even when horrible shit happens (as it does every now and then) I’ll have a passing thought that cheers me up or I’ll notice something cool that no one else noticed and all of a sudden I am happy again.
The effect of outside influences on our happiness is generally overrated. My current model is that there is a lower threshold, below which further bad luck doesn’t make us unhappier, and an upper threshold, above which further good luck doesn’t make us any happier. It’s probably not quite as binary as that; I see it as an extreme case of diminishing returns.
This band in which the outside has a strong influence on us is very narrow. More importantly, the upper threshold is so much lower than anyone suspects, I suspect. (HAH!) Basically, the lives we all live here in the developed world are so good that any movement up on that scale isn’t going to affect us that much. I mean, I work a non-spectacular job, making basically enough to eat and pay my rent, and I would really like to upgrade my PC so I can play TF2 with a smooth framerate (but can’t afford to right now), but I don’t honestly think that having twice as much money is really going to make me feel twice as happy. Probably not even 1.025 times as happy. Also if I had less money and had to move into a shittier apartment and eat only instant noodles, I don’t think I’d be any less happy than I am now.
Baseline happiness is very strong in most of us. We have a level of happiness that we gravitate to, no matter what the outside world does to us, and the more people I meet the more convinced I become that there are wildly varying baselines and that you can’t do anything to affect your own baseline. I (and, so it seems, you too!) have a very high baseline happiness. Of course, if you have a low baseline happiness, all this doesn’t really help you. You’re not going to be happy, no matter what. And if you, like us, have a very high baseline happiness, you probably didn’t care that much in the first place because you’re just happy to be happy 😉
LESS THAN SLASH rant GREATER THAN
Daniel Klein » I think that all makes sense, though I think people can change their ‘baselines’ though that may just be because I’m an optimist, I want to believe anyone can change. though experiance tells me people cant change or its insanely difficult to do so.
still, theres much worse things to believe in 😀