Happiness Vs Moral Character
Added 2025-07-01 17:55:54 +0000 UTCComments
I have been thinking about this more, and I feel a tension between "giving a shit" and "being happy". The more you invest yourself and your emotional state in the things that you do and the opinions of your community/audience, the more it will affect you. To stay happy, you need to maintain some emotional distance from the performance. That distance will be perceived as a lack of personal authenticity - which is amoral or immoral. If your definition of integrity and authenticity requires that you earnestly give a shit about your work and the community reaction to it, I think it will be difficult to stay consistently happy. You will either be sacrificing your integrity to create some emotional distance (and be unhappy about the in-authenticity) or you are sacrificing your mental health by reading and taking seriously every comment and critique. Is this a false dichotomy though? I think there is a way to both give a shit AND maintain some boundaries to protect your mental health. I think the key is that you are strategic about it. If you just DGAF about what anyone thinks or says: that's at best amoral. But if you are engaging in good faith with the criticism and commentary that you have the capacity for (staying cognizant of echo chambers), I think that is both moral and a way to maintain happiness. Will you be AS HAPPY as you would be if you just did dgaf? Actually, yeah, I think so! But it feels controversial to say that, and I think that's what this post is really reckoning with. The incentive is to DGAF - ignore everyone because it's the easiest way to manage your own mental health/happiness by sacrificing authenticity and Moral Character. But I think engaging with the community could result in MORE happiness overall. Yes, there is a nonzero risk you engage with the wrong critic or comment and your happiness takes a hit, but this is a skill issue, right? With expertise comes, I think, a greater capacity for happiness than if you just took the amoral path of DGAF. I think that Aristotle would agree, because there is no way that DGAF is virtuous, it violates several moral virtues. And I would posit that living a moral life produces more total happiness (eudaimonia) than an amoral or immoral one. Maybe this is controversial? Another follow-up question might be: how mentally dangerous is Moral Character? What skills do you need to develop to live this way and protect yourself while harvesting the joy of high moral virtue? Can we glean some advice from Aristotle on this count? We will see....
pol
2025-07-10 17:17:22 +0000 UTCAs I see it your argument is: - in the past, techtone had high moral character, and that caused him to take community criticism seriously , which made him unhappy. - now techtone appears to be happier and does not seem to take community criticism seriously, which indicates reduced moral character. I am not sure I agree with the logic here. The two important questions are: 1. high moral character means that you take community criticism seriously. 2. Taking community criticism seriously means that you will be deeply emotionally affected by it. For the #1, I agree. I think it does show a lack of character to not take community criticism seriously. For #2 though, I disagree. I think it is possible to take community criticism seriously, but also keep emotional distance from it. To compartmentalize the criticism as "the business of being a public figure". At least some of this work is performative and optics, it is part of the job. I could be wrong, but I would posit that it is possible to: a) have high moral character which b) includes taking community criticism seriously, but yet c) you are able to set aside your emotional response because this criticism is directed towards your public performance, not your humanity. Not super confident in this, but I think this is where I would land. Marcus Aurelius I think would urge us to separate the man from the job. His value and competence as an emperor is different than his value as a human being.
pol
2025-07-03 17:27:05 +0000 UTCi'm not sure if i agree with your idea that 'keeping it real' actually makes you less moral. i mean would you say tectone is currently acting immorally? and if yes, how exactly? saying the things that nobody else wants to say could also be interpreted as a courageous/moral thing to do, no? is the immoral part that some people will feel negative emotion (being offended) from hearing his truth? is caring about what everyone online thinks about you really a moral imperative? is it even possible to please everyone? sure, always blurting out every horrible thought you have is probably an extreme to avoid but so is never speaking up because it might hurt someone's feelings. also maybe i misunderstood that part but why do you think that being happy likely leads to someone being a worse person?
predicate
2025-07-01 20:01:21 +0000 UTC
