Only if you are also a Harvard grad. For those of us who aren't Harvard grads, we'll make 6 figures below the unhappy group.

Sorry, but it's rather funny that what you deem depressing is not making 6 figs rather than being a lonely alcoholic. Maybe some pondering about happiness would do you some good?

> I drown my sorrows into a mug of beer every friday.

I don't think once a week makes him an alcholic.

Besides, honestly everything is futile anyway. So you can go play Frisbee golf with a group of friends, or stay at home in the dark drunk. At the end of the next century it doesn't matter, you'll both be dead. Happiness is fleeting and an illusion when seen. Get use to it.

That's just a lie. Ah, the beautiful false equivalence... you will be nothing in 100 years, but you're something now. You can choose to be nothing now as well if you want, except that you're not, because you're something while you're here.

You've been given about a half-century on this planet; you're one of the luckiest groups of atoms in the entire universe to have agglomerated into a self-replicating sentient body that is on the brink of voluntarily expanding into a next level of its evolution at a more and more rapid pace.

At the end of the next century, the human race will probably be, as a whole, more aware and more advanced than ever before. And you, of all the agglomerations of atoms in the universe, get to be a part of it. You get to contribute; you get to be a cell in this incredible human race. And even better, you get to exist at a time when all the humans on earth are connecting to each other and spreading information and knowledge faster and better than ever before. We're becoming a human organism, we're cells in a great life-form, neurons in a giant brain; we're going to evolve as a planet now, faster than biology could ever dream.

Happiness is love, and love is the glue that binds us together like neurons, each knowing if only instinctively how important the others are to the great network we're in. You can isolate yourself and think that you don't matter and everything is futile, but if you do that, then and only then will everything actually be futile. Otherwise, you are very real, the time you have is real, your life is real, what you choose to do with it is real, and the results will—in some small or maybe big way—evolve the human race.

To me, that matters.

Happiness is not an illusion, it is actual neurons firing, hormones rushing and what not. Of course from an abstract standpoint it is meaningless, but you can catch the ball nature has thrown you and play. There is a reason humans haven't gone extinct yet.

I don't know if this will make you feel any better, but this study probably didn't teach us much that we couldn't have simply assumed would be true. If you were to do a study on group of men who have a bad relationship with <fill-in-the-blank> and <drink/eat/smoke/exercise> <too much/too little>, I would bet that these men would be found, on average, to score lower on any measure of success and would have a higher incidence of every problem you looked for. This is because problems always seem to cluster, they never occur independently. It's like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Men that argue with their mothers and drink too much are probably a group of miserable men. Why are they miserable? Maybe because they have lots of problems. I don't know if it's a real phenomenon that bad things tend to happen disproportionately to a few unlucky people, or if it's just a statistical illusion. But I am never surprised when a study finds a correlation between two negatives. It's a given.

What makes you happy?

Working, solving problems. Days where I can work on my side projects for the entire day without being interrupted are like a gift from god.

I hate being around people because it comes down to either just sitting there and listening to other people converse, or trying to contribute to a conversation and making a fool of myself.

I've found that most people vastly underestimate the helpfulness of a good therapist.

Your fear of making a fool of yourself smacks of an irrational level of insecurity that may stem from dysfunction that you may not be aware of.

A good therapist can help you get to the root of that dysfunction and teach you exercises and attitudes that could make you feel immensely more confident and happy.

If all else fails, a therapist will recognize if you might need pharmaceutical help.

I've seen therapy work for multiple people in my life - but addressing dysfunction isn't something that you can deal with on HN. You have to seek out a professional and commit yourself to working hard on getting better.

Why is "solving the problem" of "trying to contribute to a conversation and not making a fool of myself" something that doesn't makes you happy?

Because there's no cerebral solution to that problem short of going out there and making yourself look like an idiot until you don't looks like an idiot anymore.

I think the first step is to stop caring about looking like an idiot. The trick is to be confident that you're not actually an idiot. Then you can look like one, and people can laugh at you, and you can laugh right along with them because you do look rather dumb, but you never think for a moment that you actually are an idiot. Tell yourself enough that you don't care what others think about you, and that what really matters is what you think about you, and you'll start to believe it and actually have that kind of confidence. If you don't have it, fake it until you have it ;)

Why do you need a cerebral solution? Isn't trial by fire good enough?

Everyone looked like an idiot as a child learning to socialize. Enough exposure, criticism, praise, etc will curb your actions away from looking like an idiot. You just need to adjust your self image and realize that looking like an idiot at that specific time does not mean that you can't learn adapt and look like a socially adept human at a future time.

I've heard it suggested that a very good way of practicing conversation with people you don't know is to talk to people who are paid to talk to you - shop assistants, baristas, waiters, etc. There is no social cost in getting it wrong, and it helps build conversation skills

I haven't tried it myself, but it's plausible

Now, I find myself to be a pretty darn introverted mofo internally (I line up perfectly as a full-out INTP on the Myers-Briggs scale if that means anything to anybody), but I've found that socializing is just as useful of a skill as programming or playing a musical instrument. Sure, I find it to be significantly more tiring than either of those two activities, and I'm not nearly as proficient at it as I'd like to be, but it is a skill -- not some distant genetic trait that you might be hopeless to turn on -- therefore, it can be at least somewhat learned. The issue then is just about wanting to learn it.

I'm not about to be condescending about it and suggest something along the lines of "if you really cared/wanted it bad enough... blah blah blah", because I find statements like that to be annoying and unhelpful. I merely wish to bring awareness. Learning is a skill, and equivalently but more to the point: learning how to learn any specific skill, is a skill. It is OK to be inexperienced in this area, we all start off this way; it is merely being aware of this situation that seems to set mindsets apart. This inability to learn a skill that involves "looking like an idiot" as part of the learning process, signals inexperience with learning skills that require noticeable/major discomfort to acquire. And again, that is OK -- it makes total sense. The thing to realize is, that is all it is: discomfort. It's not really 'dangerous' regardless of how much it feels that way, it's just as benign (and possibly as annoying to some people) as developing callusus on your fingers to play guitar. It's a bit of a painful process, and you really can't get into the 'flow' of playing for extended periods of time until you develop them, which requires building up the calluses in baby steps; because otherwise you'd just be cutting up and burning your fingers up trying to go any longer. So if it helps at all, just look at it as building up 'social calluses'. It'll hurt, yeah, I acknowledge that. But hey, that's what's involved if you wan't to learn how to play. I mean, You might prefer to learn other instruments like piano because they doesn't involve this painful step, and you might get pretty darn good at pickup up those other instruments, but at the end of the day, you still wouldn't have learned how to play the guitar.

As for the depression, I've been completely and deeply suicidal many a time in my short life (used to be an annual tradition practically), and I really can't give you a quick answer for it unfortunately. The best thing I found is to just keep busy, but you seem to have discovered that strategy on your own already, so kudos! I know it took me a while... I believe there are many reliable findings about meditation reducing depression+anxiety (possibly as a result of its regenerative abilities with regards to 'willpower'), but meditation is really just an intense exercise in attention. And attention I believe, has also been found to invoke a state of anxiolytic relaxation. Therefore, keeping busy makes sense as an anti-depressive mechanism. I wish I could produce some sources on this, but I'm already procrastinating quite badly on a paper I need to have done in about an hour, I just felt I needed to leave a response here before I forgot. Hopefully I was able to help.

Imagine that learning social skills from scratch is like tuning a feedback loop. You need to have something in the loop to begin with in order to tune it. If you're a child, good news, you can just feed your imagination's random number generator into the loop and see what happens. If you're an adult though, you might find yourself with absolutely no starting data on which to iterate, and your internal RNG has been forcibly shut down by growing up.

It's like trying to run Newton's method with NaN as your starting value, or like you're trying to follow a linked list, but your ->next pointer infinitely redirects to itself.

That's where I was at not so long ago until I realized that if you have no starting data, just copy over some data from your peers :) Look at how others behave socially and start with those bits, it's not going to be easy but it is something to use until you have enough to bootstrap your own thing.

And remember even if it is weird, play along, things get better as you go. Keep making conversation (and always smile), it's better to be the awkward guy trying rather than the weird/silent/alone guy in the corner of the room :)

Start by appreciating what makes you interesting to yourself.

After a point, its no longer a problem you are solving - it's saying "you/I am a problem"

You could learn lots of tricks to be a better conversationalist, you could practice and make habits. But at some point you won't move the needle and you won't be changing.

And if you've never seen the wreck of a human being that shows up when you define your natural (normal) inclinations as a problem, then you are fortunate.

Much of socialization is making a fool of yourself---and other people spending time with you anyway. I socialize to get out of my head, and it sounds like you could use it too.

Working hard, and doing a job well done.

Always worth remembering when reading these things: You are not a probability.

'On average etc etc' is vastly different from 'if A then always B'.

Why is that depressing? Odds are its not those six figures that make them happier.