Quality of human life (optimism bias and pollyannaism)

[davidtorez]

I thought I'd post these pages here from a book titled The Human Predicament by David Benatar who is a professor of philosophy from south Africa. Sometimes depressed people do indeed have a more realistic view of human existence than the positive happy chirpy people .

 

[iloverachel]

Life is actually awful beyond comprehension. Most people are delusional about it and ignorant about it which is fine, I wish i could forget how bad life is and trick myself into believing its okay when its absolute shit.

We should be authors and write books on how terrible life is. I can probably like 100 paragraphs right now on why life is unbelievably shit

 

[davidtorez]

I wish I could turn on my optimism bias. Just believe life is excellent , and move on. Joint pain ? No worries. Crap job? No problemo. Living at home at the age of 42 ? Great ! Life is beautiful baby

 

[iloverachel]

I wish I could turn on my optimism bias. Just believe life is excellent , and move on. Joint pain ? No worries. Crap job? No problemo. Living at home at the age of 42 ? Great ! Life is beautiful baby

I had optimism bias before i think. Walked around city by myself no problem. Now i can't even go to a quiet park without crowds ruining my day.

 

[Darkover]

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bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good.
The obvious objection to this view is that billions of people judge the quality of their own lives to be good. How can it pos- sibly be argued that they are mistaken and that the quality of their
lives is, in fact, bad?
The response to this objection consists of two main steps. The first is to demonstrate that people are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives. The second step is to show that when we correct for the biases that explain the unreliability of these assessments and we look at human lives more accurately, we find that the quality (of even the best lives) is actually very poor.
Why people's judgments about the quality of their lives are unreliable
People's self-assessments of wellbeing are unreliable indicators of quality of life because these self-assessments are influenced by three psychological phenomena, the existence of which has been well demonstrated.
The first of these is an optimism bias, sometimes known as Pollyannaism. For example, when asked to rate how happy they are, people's responses are disproportionately toward the happier end of the spectrum. Only a small minority of people rate them- selves as "not too happy?" When people are asked to rate their

 

[UKscotty]

Our depression saps away any optimism or love of life.

It's quite difficult for those of us with depression to give a sensible view on life. We often say life sucks, life is terrible, life is the source of all suffering etc etc.

If you ask people without depression they will generally feel very differently to us. They do enjoy life and want to be happy.

 

[Praestat_Mori]

Without reading the book, the quality of human life in our modern world mainly depends on health, good relationships/family and money.

Those are the basic ingredients for a good / bad life in our society.

There are certainly many other factors that have an influence on the quality of human life and how we experience quality - the whole thing is complex.

There can hardly be optimism when everything around someone is pretty much shit and there's no way out - however a few people may have the ability to see sth positiv in every shit around them and to be optimistic in the same time.

 

[grauzone]

It is called depressive realism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism#:~:text=Depressive realism is the hypothesis,inferences than non-depressed individuals.

 

[davidtorez]

Thqbks

Image to Text (Extract Text From Image)

Image to text converter is a free online image OCR tool that allows you to extract text from image at one click. It converts picture to text accurately.

www.imagetotext.info

bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good.
The obvious objection to this view is that billions of people judge the quality of their own lives to be good. How can it pos- sibly be argued that they are mistaken and that the quality of their
lives is, in fact, bad?
The response to this objection consists of two main steps. The first is to demonstrate that people are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives. The second step is to show that when we correct for the biases that explain the unreliability of these assessments and we look at human lives more accurately, we find that the quality (of even the best lives) is actually very poor.
Why people's judgments about the quality of their lives are unreliable
People's self-assessments of wellbeing are unreliable indicators of quality of life because these self-assessments are influenced by three psychological phenomena, the existence of which has been well demonstrated.
The first of these is an optimism bias, sometimes known as Pollyannaism. For example, when asked to rate how happy they are, people's responses are disproportionately toward the happier end of the spectrum. Only a small minority of people rate them- selves as "not too happy?" When people are asked to rate their

Thanks for showing me this app! I never knew it existed

 

[AbusedInnocent]

I have read "Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence" by David Benatar, great read and easy to understand.

Would you recommend "The human predicament" too?

 

[davidtorez]

I have read "Better never to have been: the harm of coming into existence" by David Benatar, great read and easy to understand.

Would you recommend "The human predicament" too?

Most definitely.

 

[iloverachel]

Life is utterly atrocious and disgustingly bad