How do you stay happy when things in the world are so terrible?

collectively, as a species, i don’t hold much hope for us given our consumption rates. eventually there will be places on Earth that will be entirely inhospitable without continual access to AC. that’s a precarious way to live. an other species would either just lay down and die or migrate. so we’re either really smart or really dumb.

Yeah, like my car with broken AC or my house with no AC. When it's close to 100 degrees and no AC, it's hot!...And yet I'm still happy

yeah, but i’m sure you don’t live in a place that is projected to see temps of 120ish in the coming decades.

Who knows how hot it will get here. We made it to 103 in Western Washington last year which is just insane. 90 is usually the highest we go.

See, that's an actual reply that takes the issue seriously. Thank you for that. Why do we have to go through the rigamarole of a few flippant non-sequiturs when we could just go straight to this?

In response to your (frankly still perplexing) question for examples of good things. Which is a different thing than saying "there are good things but they pale in comparison to the bad ones." If you had said that I would have said something else in response.

Holding your child in your arms? Marrying someone you adore? Being moved to tears by a piece of art? This question has no answer and an infinite number of answers. And no one answer is really sufficient anyway because you're weighing the totality of existence, so it's cumulative. It's "sometimes wars happen" vs. "every good thing that has ever happened to you." You're asking for the readout on a scale the size of the cosmos.

It means almost exactly that: it is better to exist than not exist. To complain about the nature of our existence is to desire better, but is not generally an argument that we have been wronged in some way.

Precisely.

Feels, yes. But is?

That's kind of the problem here: it's very easy to make an emotionally compelling argument. Much harder to make an intellectually compelling one. Grief overwhelms sense.

Perhaps we can construct elaborate, comically rare scenarios where circumstance is clearly responsible for happiness/unhappiness. But if we're having this discussion in a first world country on an internet forum, we're part of the 99% of people that fall outside of those extremes, and for whom their level of happiness largely exists independent of the state of the world.

I remember a stand-up comedian doing a riff using this proverb: he told how when he was a kid he wanted a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers more than anything else in the world. All he could think about was those Nike Air Jordans, but neither he nor his family had enough money to afford them. He begged and begged his mother, but she said they couldn't afford them. Then his mom pointed out to him a boy about his same age sitting in a wheel chair - and the boy had no feet. The comedian said he felt really bad at that point... because... wouldn't you know it... tied to the handles of that wheelchair were a brand new pair of Nike Air Jordans!

Beats the original version, in my view. I’ve always found these proverbs invariably baffling. All they’re saying is ‘it could be way worse for you’, which, I would argue depressed people/those who are feeling down are already aware that everything largely sucks, thank you very much. Why would you encourage someone who is already down to dwell on even more depressing possibilities?

Sometimes, the best thing to do is to wallow in it. Also, realise that happiness isn't a permanent state.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Indeed. Everything is temporary.