[Brushfire]

We often worry about how to make our children exceptional, but I wonder of the people studied here, how many were genuinely happy? Shouldn’t we want our children to be happy more than we want them to be exceptional? The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course, but the pursuit of exceptionalism might lead to a less happy life, especially if that exceptionalism doesn’t materialize. I know far too many people pushed incredibly hard by their family/circumstances and burned out fast.

[corbulo]

Can you define happiness in this context?

I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.

[Brushfire]

I think that’s a great point, and I don’t disagree with it. (Although I don’t particularly care about being “interesting” as a value). My point was more that as a parent I want to be responsive to my children instead of deterministic. I want them to find their path, not me to find it for them by declaring that they will be exceptional. My love is not conditional on their outcome of becoming exceptional, and further, an ultimately fulfilling life doesn’t require that either, nor should we teach that it does.

[emodendroket]

> People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.

Personally I would have chosen this unflattering label for people who were pushed from birth into a particular career path and just followed along.

[n4r9]

Happiness is indeed a vague term. In the context of parenting, I would hope to foster self-esteem, an internal locus of evaluation, curiosity, and courage. These provide a solid foundation for general contentment, aside from the occasional inevitable traumas and trials of life.

[leobg]

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

[merlinran]

> I'm more of the mind that happiness is better as a side effect of a good life than the sole pursuit of your life. People who chase happiness as their primary meaning to exist usually are not very interesting and highly materialistic.

Those chasing happiness are usually unhappy https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/laurie-santos/

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

"Happiness" is an overloaded word in English, much like "love". In this context I think a better word for what parent probably means is "satisfaction".

Are these people more satisfied with their lives? Do they feel their life is meaningful and worthwhile?

Victor Frankl might argue that meaning and purpose are more important and entirely orthogonal to "success".

[eslaught]

s/happiness/health/ and then I think we have a more reasonable starting point. (And I mean health in the holistic/whole person sense, not in the limited sense of how well your biological machine is running.)

I think this helps make it clear that any single goal can compromise overall health, even if along that dimension you're exceptional.

[wazzer]

I guess those people that you observed being highly materialistic have a false idea about what will bring them happiness. There are people that strive for happiness and choose a different path. Money, I belive, can only get you so far.

[amriksohata]

highly materialistic? look at the hindu sages in INdia, completely content and happy within themselves and they are not matieralistic, the western concept of happiness is chase all your sense to make sure you are happy above everything else

[imgabe]

Someone who has the capacity to be exceptional would probably not be happy to be held back. Would Ramanujan have been happier if he didn't pursue math and became a taxi driver or something instead? I don't think so.

You're creating a false dichotomy. People can be both exceptional and happy. Parents do sometimes create unhappiness by trying to force their children to be exceptional at something the child isn't interested in, but you don't have to do that. You can let the child develop and follow their natural interests and support them without trying to force them to be something they're not.

[emodendroket]

I doubt anyone is arguing to suppress a child's interest in mathematics but more against trying to squelch their interest in less obviously "worthy" pursuits in favor of making them burnish their college resumes.

[DC-3]

> Would Ramanujan have been happier if he didn't pursue math and became a taxi driver

Depends what number cab he got!

[FormerBandmate]

The parenting approach advocated for here (freeing people from peer pressure by homeschooling them) is way more likely to produce a 4chan shut in than going to normal schools (which includes Harvard and MIT) is likely to force someone to end up a taxi driver.

However, tutoring your child intensely is obviously important and will result in good outcomes

[carabiner]

What's fucked up is that the average Mexican line cook who doesn't speak english contributes more to the world than an MIT-trained McKinsey consultant making 10x as much.

[edanm]

Ummm, no? What makes you think that is true?

[curiousgal]

> making 10x as much

Yeah the chasm is much bigger than that.

[voisin]

We are concerned with exceptionalism as a society because we want to benefit from the exceptional person. We tell people it is better to be great than happy and assign all sorts of value judgments around that.

We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.

[emodendroket]

I would posit that much of this drive has little to do with that and more to do with anxiety about the child's future earning potential.

[twayt]

People think that the happiness (in the way society thinks about it) is a given. It is not.

There’s a lot that goes into you being able to “do nothing” / be present / mindful / enjoy the moment.

Many exceptional people sacrificed their happiness to build the world that you can enjoy. And if you want that to continue, many more will have to do the same.

[mer_saulty]

We’ve lost track of the best parts of being alive.

[seymourhersh]

The people described in the article don’t seem to have been “pushed incredibly hard” by their family or circumstances. For the most part it seems like the opposite - they were just given access to a lot of resources and expertise to help them in the directions they were already heading.

[NovaDudely]

Bingo! The strive to achieve was an innate function. Having others realize the resources they needed allowed it to happen.

[notShabu]

Yep, copying the external surface behavior of exceptionalism misses how a lot of exceptionalism is due to compounding internal motivation and meaning making.

A way of being that constantly re-emphasizes that way of being. Super-linear growth that doesn't stall out or crumble when external motivation is absent.

[twayt]

I don’t buy that truly intrinsic motivation exists. If anything I think the display of intrinsic motivation is an external performance more than anything.

If everyone a person cared about was taken away, I can’t convince myself that they’ll still have the motivation to perform the same way they did before

[twayt]

Happiness is like flux and is predicated upon moving goalposts (hedonic treadmill).

It seems to have emerged that way to drive evolution / progress.

In order for happiness to be sustained, you need economic / technological / societal growth. Who do you think is capable of producing that? Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?

[mach1ne]

> Why should society care about the happiness of those people if them being happy / content slows down growth and hence the collective happiness?

This is the basic problem of what is our purpose. There's no definite answer. What if it's better to optimize towards having no unhappy people rather than average happiness?

[watwut]

What makes you think there is no technogical progress without few suffering geniuses?

[Jach]

There are no guarantees, and trying to optimize for happiness could very well lead to more unhappiness than doing nothing or optimizing for exceptionalism or something else instead. And that's even if you have a theory for how to optimize the thing in question. If instead you're just stumbling around or working off vague hunches or the latest parenting fads, or perhaps overcompensating for something in your own childhood you thought was a parental mistake, don't be surprised if whether they do or don't become or achieve what you hoped for seems pretty uncorrelated with your own efforts.

As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.

[Foobar8568]

Maybe the kids were happy to have these activities, to feel unique and privileged, and happiness in childhood to feel like shit in adulthood because we missed out so many opportunities as your life is mostly defined about what you are doing as a teenager just suck more.

/mylife off

[mer_saulty]

Maybe they were, and then they ran into real competition to be at the top of their field, and that dream just disintegrated.

What are you left with when you are raised on one specific value system and reality proves you’re not going to excel in that system?

We need to teach our children to have a variety of value systems, and that, of all of those, their academic or professional performance is not the priority.

[vouaobrasil]

For a variety of reasons I would say I am exceptional. (Since this account is anonymous I don't consider it bragging). I would say I am a happy person with some resilience, but that is because my upbringing had two facets, not just one:

(a) A lot of encouragemeent to explore things, and the benefit of family members in the sciences

(b) My family teaching me a healthy attitude of not caring what others think too much

I was never pushed. I was always told just to do whatever I wanted....so I think those two elements are crucial, since I grew up never caring whether I "succeeded" or "failed".

[paulpauper]

These are mutually exclusive or positively correlated slightly, that is, successful people generally being happier. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other.

[kortilla]

Successful and exceptional aren’t the same thing here.

[lordnacho]

Doesn't the research on happiness say that by and large you can't change happiness? That thing about people who've won the lottery or gotten seriously ill?

[lapcat]

Money can improve happiness, but there are diminishing returns to money. Winning the lottery is really one of the worst possible ways to improve one's happiness. For example:

1) Wanting to be ultra-wealthy is arguably a vice rather than a virtue. A form of gluttony. It doesn't make you a better person.

2) Hardly anyone is prepared for the massive, sudden change in lifestyle brought by winning the lottery. Not to mention that everyone you ever knew, and also people you never knew, suddenly want a piece of you and your newfound money.

We talk a lot about big lottery winners, because it's fun to imagine, but it would honestly be better for most people to win $10K or $100K rather than winning $10M or $100M. You can improve their lives without radically changing their lives, which can be a curse rather than a blessing.

Unless you already have a very specific idea of what you would do with lottery winnings, e.g., start a business or foundation that required $X million in capital, a newfound giant pile of unanticipated money doesn't necessarily do you good. Money needs a purpose.

[tiborsaas]

I'm not familiar with the research, but from experience, you can change it without a doubt. Happiness is an outcome, if you change things that prevent it then you'll have better chances of achieving it.

Tons of money alone is not a guarantee of happiness, there's a cutoff of income beyond which happiness maxes out. Getting seriously ill can of course induce depressive traits, however I've just seen a documentary about using psychedelics for cancer patients and it did improve their lives significantly, although not curing cancer itself.

[maleldil]

I'm not familiar with the research you mention (it would be great if you could cite it), but from reading and thinking about this, I'd say that happiness is intrinsic, and that external factors can't change it.

If you were miserable before winning the lottery, the money probably won't change that. If you have a bright outcome on life before getting cancer, you're more likely to cope and stay happy.

[jalapenos]

I feel that most people aren't happy, but being exceptional gives you more rocket fuel to break out if you can.

[xvilka]

There's no happiness without sadness, there's no enjoyment without pain.