The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it's a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with-- to accept that you might have enough, even if it's less than those around you. (查看原文)
Angus Campbell was a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Born in 1910, his research took place during an age when psychology was overwhelmingly focused on disorders that brought people down—things like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia.
Campbell wanted to know what made people happy. His 1981 book, The Sense of Wellbeing in America, starts by pointing out that people are generally happier than many psychologists assumed. But some were clearly doing better than others. And you couldn’t necessarily group them by income, or geography, or education, because so many in each of those categories end up chronically unhappy.
The most powerful common denominator of happiness was simple. Campbell summed it up:
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predict... (查看原文)
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can't believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: you are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take. (查看原文)
Experiencing specific events does not necessarily qualify you to know what will happen next. In fact it rarely does, because experience leads to overconfidence more than forecasting ability. (查看原文)
