If you could change your culture to focus more on making more effort to sensibly plan and fulfil their pre-requisites to happiness or eliminate and downsize them, which would it be and why? — Judaka

Is this two different things?
I’m interested in what you’re suggesting, but I’m not totally sure, from your post, what you’re suggesting.

A person gives you a long list of things they say they believe would make them happy.

Do you advise them that they should reconsider whether they really want all those things (eliminate), reconsider the scale of their desires (downsize) or encourage them to work hard and fulfil their pre-requisites?

Learn to love what you have or work hard to get what you want, that kind of thing. That's the simplified version.

Learn to love what you have or work hard to get what you want, that kind of thing. — Judaka

Both of these seem valid to me. Working hard to get what you want is a very satisfying experience. But the thing you’re working hard to get can sometimes be for the wrong reasons and consequently fail to satisfy you.

Learning to love what you want is equally important. But again what is that? If you love making a lot of money, making deals, defeating the opposition, then your satisfaction, in time, could sour, or even finally, in an older more mature perspective, prove to have been a pointless.

If someone gave me a long list of things they believe would make them happy, I would question the size of the list first. I would almost bet there would be contradictions in such a list.

Sorry, that sentence of yours is ‘learn to love what you have’, a big difference.

It might be hard to learn to love what you have when all it gives you is heartache,

Ah yeah, "learn to love what you have" was a poor summary of what I meant, better is "learn to be happy with less".

If someone gave me a long list of things they believe would make them happy, I would question the size of the list first. I would almost bet there would be contradictions in such a list. — Brett

Yes, I agree with that. I think also that people want things because they think that thing will give them something it won't. It can also be a more arduous task to attain something like respect depending on how you intend to get it. If you really want respect, are you going to be a responsible, nice person or try to buy a nice car and wear fancy clothes? Two people can want the same thing but the requirements are steeper.

We may also want respect because we think it will give us something else like self-esteem. Once again, self-esteem can be more easily attained than by getting respect and so on.

Equally though, perhaps trying to attain respect is worthwhile and really will increase your happiness if you get it. Just because it's hard work doesn't mean you should just look for an easier option. It's not easy for me to decide what approach is generally better for people though I lean towards eliminating/downsizing pre-requisites.

For people who aren't happy overall, I'd want them to realize that it's a matter of attitude/disposition/perspective rather than an issue of having any particular statuses or possesions. Changes in statuses and possessions can have a short term impact, of course (including a negative impact), but on a broader scale, it's purely an issue of attitude/disposition/perspective.

That makes it more difficult in a way, because it's not something that can be gained or lost like a house or a boat can. It's harder to say just how one develops the disposition that will produce happiness. I think it can be cultivated if you aren't naturally prone to it, at least in many cases if not all, but probably different things work for cultivation for different people, and it's not something that we can just lay out a step-by-step plan for.

A person gives you a long list of things they say they believe would make them happy.

Do you advise them that they should reconsider whether they really want all those things (eliminate), reconsider the scale of their desires (downsize) or encourage them to work hard and fulfil their pre-requisites? — Judaka

I tell them neither things/statuses nor a lack of the same are correlated to happiness . . . which means that there's no more reason to discourage them from changing statuses/gaining things than to encourage them. That simply has nothing to do with happiness. What needs to change for happiness is the way they look at things, their disposition, their attitude, etc. towards what is.

I think we all accept that happiness is transitory, so whatever we do we probably won’t have the amount of happiness we would like. Nor do I think moments of happiness vary in quality; you’re happy or you’re not. Though is being content the same as happiness?

So will the re-requisites for happiness, whatever they are, create more happiness? If you’re a poor dirt farmer ploughing the hard fields day in and day out, you might want another horse or a barn, maybe even a wife. I imagine any of those things would make the farmer happier. Maybe because he had so little of it to begin with.

Some people believe a simple life is the best for us, and they want to create that society. So going back to the dirt farmer, who has a very simple life, how close do you get to him before you cross the line into misery? This seems to me to be the process of eliminating.

Downsizing is different. Do we need two bathrooms? Do we need a bedroom for each person in the house? Do we really need all the things that put a strain on the energy grid, or to use them as often and thoughtlessly as we do? Do two people really need to live in a big house?

People still want things. There are reasons for that which is a big subject. That desire also happens to drive the economy which also makes our life richer: we can travel, meet other people, xperience other cultures.

“Learn to be happy with less.” Isn’t that just elimination?

Should it be; try to chose what you need as opposed to what you want? That does mean eliminating, or downsizing your delusions of grandeur.

But I have a problem. I’m really happy and content in the country, I’d like to live there. But I like access to libraries, cafes, etc. I really feel that I need both. So I forsake owing property in the country. And I’m still quite happy with the way things are. But I could convince myself, for the sake of my happiness, to get a mortgage and buy a country property. And in the end it’s just wanting more. Once there would I want something additional again? What’s more the extra mortgage could end up making me stressed and unhappy.