Because I'm a miserable person, my first response is, what's the vertical scale? Percentage change? μg of dopamine? Rat orgasms?
As I recall, the wealth/happiness thing is that happiness stops correlating with absolute wealth at some quite low threshold, and correlates with relative wealth thereafter.
What male-female differences? With the exception of the divorce, they seem very similar.
They don't seem to actually define "layoffs" in the original study, but it's taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel data. They do say this:
The incidence of these life events is calculated directly from the panel data, rather than using retrospective information. For example, "entry into unemployment" is defined by current labour force status being unemployment, whereas labour force status at the previous interview was not unemployment (i.e. UNt=1 but UNt-1≠1).
The format of 4 last negatively affected my happiness.
3: Women also have more of a return to happiness in years following layoff or unemployment.
And men are affected substantively worse by unemployment and widowhood. In general I think the end points are similar for men and women, but the shapes of the graphs are interestingly different.
Hey nopey, is a fake email address really your pseud, or are you in need of a pseud?
I had that same question. Also, I'm wondering if it is known that rats only enjoy the part of sex with the orgasm or if that's just all they can measure?
I'm a little curious about people who get to experience these things one-by-one. I don't know how to single out how hard it was to lose my job while being a single parent in significant conflict with my ex and dealing with children's crises in mental and physical health on my own seriously sprained ankle, and that's even a month or two before I found a breast lump that required a lot of intervention but wasn't cancerous. (I mean, the severance gave me the time and money to get the surgeries I needed and get some rest so I could catch up on my life, so in a lot of ways it was a great thing to have happened to me. But living below the poverty line since is not stress-free either.)
Mossy! I'm here! I'm happy! I still read but don't comment much. My concussion is definitely much better after two months, which is good for improved happiness for sure.
12: That's great, Thorn!
10: It does seem like there would so much overlap between the various "life-events" -- I mean after 5 years of marriage a fair number of couples are already well into their divorce.
If you're worried about concussions, stay out of Cleveland. They beat people over the head there.
14.2: For example a person could be simultaneously 5 years into a marriage, 2 years past a divorce, and one year into a marriage. That's not a particularly unusual situation.
It's not unusual to be loved by N+1.
18: Glad you agree, Mr. Jones!
17: But maybe I'm misreading the data -- does the 5 years after marriage data include everyone that got married or just those that stayed married?
If you aren't randomly assigning couples to divorce, you're not able to easily separate the effects of divorce and unhappy marriage.
@8 Its been my pseud for 15 years now. But nopey is fine.
I always thought you were somebody else being presidential but doing it wrong.
On reflection, I have no idea why I thought that.
I read it as "Nope, I'm not telling you who I am right now, but there is a name I could tell you that would mean something because I'm a regular under a different name." I was apparently wrong about that.
I was also wrong in thinking that Halford was a guy commenting under his real name.
@25 I am an affable irregular. But I remember when your bio described the unaffordability of your legal advice. And when there were only 6 bios.
26: Holy shit, Halford's a woman? They always seemed way too rude for that.
The emoji shrug doesn't render correctly in the archive view, though it does in the front page view.
I'm waiting (in a state of subjunctive terror) for widespread unicode support by interpreters and/or compilers, which will let us all use emoji and non-ascii characters in code, both as variables and as the names of packages or functions.
Here is what came up in a cursory search of the legal professions response to this: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/01/displaying-emoji-evidence-in-judicial-opinions.htm
Still seems like a retreat from literacy to me. Yes it's nice thta people are writing more, but I have a hard time not seeing the online flight away from words and towards anoanymous images as a contributor to our post-truth world. This belief makes me unhappy.
Halford's pronouns are he/his/him.
Halford is an emoji that takes over half the phone screen
29: I hate emojis as much as the next socially inept person over 30, but it seems to me like the problem here is conventions of the legal system. In 4,000 years of codified law, I'm pretty sure problems like irony, metaphor, and other forms of communication where intent doesn't perfectly match the literal meaning have been grappled with.
In my limited experience layoff = severance, as opposed to other forms of unemployment. Not sure how they are using it though. I can see how it can affect happiness though - I once effectively got paid to wait out a non-compete and it was kind of like having a short sabbatical, which was kind of nice in retrospect.
I bet shitting out a tapeworm produces a real quick drop in happiness if you didn't know it was there.
Don't they just die in the open air?
Don't they get to frolic in poop germs until someone else licks their contaminated fingers?
I believe the baby tapeworms are the future.
I can't figure out why we're talking about tapeworms. Was it something I said? If so, I'm sorry.
I We believe the baby tapeworms are the future.
FTFY
Something from the other end, shall we say.
46: I believe that heebie was channeling Whitney Houston/George Benson/Masser/Creed.
I thought whole you had a tapeworm, you were pooping eggs all along.
That is the whole point, yes. Reproduction for the sake of reproduction, on and on and on
The real eggs are the poops you took along the way.
Poops you take at home or work don't count, because they go to a treatment plant.
20: If you look at the years leading up to the divorce, you can see the unhappy marriage effect. It seems to be a lot stronger for men than women.
Under the Constitution, we would all have the right to poop on all public property without exception, except for tapeworms.
54: Right, but you don't know the effect of divorce as opposed to the unhappy marriage until you study happy couples who divorced.
How many fifths do tapeworms count for?
Heebie or someone should do the gerrymander-gaming in depth, but my gut reaction is any tapeworm allocation would benefit Republicans on net.
54 is interesting, because I thought there was some research showing that women were less happy in marriage than men. I think the exact form was that women's happiness went down with marriage and men's went up.
The OP reminds me of a study that was described in a Richard Powers novel. I suspect it's real but don't have a citation). The participants were handed long surveys about their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with various aspects of their lives, then sent into different rooms to fill them out. Some people found a quarter on the chair in the room they were assigned, others didn't. People who found a quarter immediately before completing the survey reported more satisfying marriages, more accomplished careers, better relations with their parents and their children, etc., than those who did not.
I thought whole you had a tapeworm, you were pooping eggs all along.
Hey! These must be the real friends!
60: That sounded like something from the Kahneman book.... and a google search later....
In another experiment, Kahneman arranged for unwitting subjects to find a quarter near a pay telephone and asked them afterward how happy
they felt. "It was a very strong effect," he said, noting that most subjects reported they were happy and that their lives in general
were going well. "We have to compute about happiness, and we do that on the fly," he said. What's more, Kahneman said, "life circumstances
account for little on the scale of well-being."
https://news.rice.edu/2001/03/29/happiness-often-is-little-more-than-finding-a-quarter/
59: "We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you're a man, you should probably get married; if you're a woman, don't bother."
54,56,59,63: Also helpful to include couples stuck in an unhappy marriage that they can't end. Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog or Mme Bovary aren't just ancient history.
Is this data from Germany? I would bet different types of welfare state produce quite different results.
||
Speaking of happiness, this week, I hit my main weight loss goal. Approx 30-31kg (67-68lbs) lost. 24kg since early Jan.
So a new (to me) guitar in celebration.
Now to slowly lose another 7-8kg and I'm done.
>
Hey ttaM, that's great. Congrats on the new guitar too (what is it?)
65: Yes, the date is from Germany.
We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals tend to return to some baseline level of well‐being after life and labour market events? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead effects. We cannot reject the hypothesis of complete adaptation to marriage, divorce, widowhood, birth of child and layoff. However, there is little evidence of adaptation to unemployment for men. Men are somewhat more affected by labour market events (unemployment and layoffs) than are women but in general the patterns of anticipation and adaptation are remarkably similar by sex.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02150.x
59 sounds familiar.
How have we gone 69 comments w/o anyone saying "hedonic treadmill"?
The real treasure is the friends that got squashed under the hedonic treadmill.
So, I'm supposed to be losing weight because that's the best way to fight high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I'm assuming I'm succeeding because I'm not enjoying my food as much and hardly drinking at all. But I don't own a scale, so I don't know. I used to work in an office with a scale, so I would weight myself before and after using the restroom to see how much I could void.
72: No, I already failed to see 52 when I made the same joke in 61. I still failed to see 52 when it came time for 71, but I was aware of 61.
I know. I was just too lazy to scroll up and remember two numbers.
Anyway, mostly what I learned is how easy it is to lose five pounds if you don't care about how ephemeral the loss is.
I used to work in an office with a scale, so I would weight myself before and after using the restroom to see how much I could void.
1. Wow, gross.
2. In college, I had a game where I'd try to maximize how long I spent peeing. It's not just waiting until your bladder is super full - there's also paying it out slowing. Eventually I heard that it's not great for you in terms of bladder infections and the like, and so I quit. A full minute is truly an impressive feat but I can't remember if I actually achieved it or not. Life was so different before pocket computers.
As the saying goes, "A pint is a pound, yellow or brown."
YOU CRAP FIVE POUNDS?!!
I worked on a trout farm one summer in college, and so whenever I need an intuitive notion of weight, I remember the trout. Most were in the 1-2 lb range. JUST SAYING.
You need to combine a full bladder, a full bowel, and dehydration.
But why are you using a pint glass, mate?
I rinsed it off before it went back on the shelf.
If you pee while standing on the scale you can watch the needle descend. Now we have a digital scale instead and I am forgetting all my old records. 1.4 lbs, maybe?
If you have guts, you put a pint glass on the scale and pee into it and watch the needle go up. Just the sure the glass doesn't say "Strongbow".
America: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Canada: peace, order, and good government.
Growing up in Canada, I totally knew that we were boring: who the hell gets excited about peaceful and orderly good government, for God's sake? Yawn.
The Americans, they had a damn revolution, while we just quietly and politely agreed to a gradual emancipation from Mother Britain, while still being members in good standing of the Commonwealth, of course.
What's funny, though, is that today's Canadian is happier by far than today's American, even though the pursuit of happiness is not part of that Canadian's brief.
87: As a person who has never peed standing up, that would never ever have occurred to me.
I wonder about the effect of kids on happiness. Tracking to only five years out feels like cutting the experiment short just when the kid is starting to behave a little more like a functional human being.
Yes. That why We take over at that point.
Intuitively, the data about happiness and unemployment among men makes a lot of sense. Especially in a modern Western economy, a man who loses his job is both worthless and without the satisfactions, such as they are, of struggling. Paradoxically, you might have moments of greater happiness if in danger of starving (on the "quarter by the payphone" principle). Then, the attainment of food and shelter would fill you with fleeting delight. This is not really an argument for starving the poor. But an unemployed male in a welfare state can feel very keenly that he has no status at all, no use, and no purpose in the world. It's a social, which is to say real, version of the "Here am I, alone in an indifferent universe" posturing that some adolescents go through only this time the universe really is indifferent and nobody actually gives a fuck whether you think this or not.
just as a genuine life sentence appears to some people crueller than a death sentence it's possible that to be a redundant miner is worse in mouse-orgasmic terms than dying on the job might be.
79: a five pound trout in one go would be a very distressing experience. For the human, too.
Re: 67
It's a PRS singlecut with soapbar P90s. Korean made SE range, though, not full fat USA. I've also got some nice hand-wound pickups on the way for it.
Off topic, and possible better as an FPP but anyway ...
Jesus. So the Indian cops take four rapists back to the scene of their crime and shoot them all dead, to general approbation. Is this an advance on the previous attitude of the police, which was roughly that "boys will be boys"? [NW: yes]
Should feminists applaud? [NW: no -- we all benefit from the rule of the law, rather than that of the cops alone]
Meanwhile, the perfect guide to contemporary Britain. I think my favourite is Manchester, though York, with the twee shoppes selling "Craft Meads" and "Papal Indulgences", is also spot on.
Is that Grimsby thing supposed to be a Pharos lighthouse or what?
In fairness,
The All India Progressive Women's association condemned the manner in which the accused men died. "We, as a country, will now be told that 'justice' has been done, the victim avenged ... But this justice is counterfeit," the association said in a statement.Which, based on its parent organization means approximately nothing.
Though AIPWA apparently has been on anti-rape kick, so credit for them on high roading etc. OTOH they apparently are centered in Bihar, which, long way from Hyderabad. So.
89.last: Ah, but happiness is explicitly not part of the American brief. It's the pursuit that we honor. If we ever actually catch happiness, we're like the dog that chases cars: We don't know what to do with it.
I prefer my version.
96: That makes a good pairing with the news story of the day before - India: woman set on fire on way to testify against alleged rapists
And down the article this incredible quote, "Such views were on full display in a series of social media posts by the Indian film director Daniel Shravan, who, in response to the Hyderabad rape case, suggested that "rape is not a serious thing, but murder is inexcusable" adding that "the government should legalise rape without violence for the safety of women".
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/05/india-woman-set-on-fire-on-way-to-testify-against-alleged-rapists
103: I always try to put things in perspective. When I'm feeling shitty about the state of the US, I try to remember that the US has always shit on people -- just not me -- and that the world at large sucks, too.
Oddly, I am unable to derive much consolation from this.
Not taking pleasure from the suffering of others is the worst kind of unAmericanism.
Because I am a stereotypical boomer, every time I would see the post title "Happiness" I would think "Happiness is a warm gun". But for the first time now, I realized that this song title was almost certainly intended to parody another definition of happiness that was very prominent at the time the song was written, "Happiness is a warm puppy."
I'm guessing this was already obvious to all the people with any interest, and of no interest or utterly incomprehensible to everyone else. And yet still I am sharing it, because I am so generous in that way.
Just don't heat the gun in a microwave.
Whereas a puppy can be conveniently heated using the appliance of your choice.
So that was a Beatles song? It really sucks.
109: I love it, but I'm a brainwashed boomer.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I prefer the U2 version.
111: There's a U2 version? This is the second time this has happened between us. I guess it's a trope of intergenerational dialogue.
Bono heats his guns by having puppies sit on them.
112: For those keeping score at home, the previous time, Mossy didn't know that "Behind Blue Eyes" was a Who song, and I didn't know that some horrible 90s band had covered it.
U2 isn't a 90s band. They were washed up by then.
116: I know this was a classic Moby deliberate misinterpretation, but nonetheless it compelled me to look it up. The "horrible 90s band" in 115 is Limp Bizkit.
Sometimes, it's just me not paying close attention.
112: Literally this week I was thinking "all I want for Xmas is to hang out with some people who use the word 'trope' casually in conversation." Literally that exact thought. So happy holidays, peep!
119: Happy holidays, chill! Though I have to admit it wasn't all that casual - I gave it a good 15 seconds of thought, and for another 15 seconds wondered if I was using it right.
