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Comment by 000ooo000 | Hacker News Reader

Kind of ironic that TFA came after their previous piece.

>I Literally Don’t Know

>TL;DR: You don’t need to pick my brain, or probably anyone’s brain, for general life advice. It won’t help.

Overall the Optimism piece is just long-form LinkedIn garbage. What insights does it present? Complaining bad, optimism good, not all complaining is bad, but complaining is mostly bad? OK..

Improvements rarely start with "I'm satisfied with this". Writing off complaining because one conflates complaining with misery is silly.

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> Improvements rarely start with "I'm satisfied with this". Writing off complaining because one conflates complaining with misery is silly.

I've found improvements rarely start with complaining either. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that people I know that are complainers are rarely the source of improvements. They're usually too busy complaining about the situation and the proposed solutions to pick one.

Improvements most often come from a mindset of "this thing is not the way I want it to be, so what am I going to do to change that?" Sometimes "complain to someone with the ability to change it" is the right answer, but usually you have some degree of agency yourself and it's a lot more effective to exercise that agency than to get someone else to act on your behalf in response to your complaints.

I see it like a scale of how easy it is to deal with a problem.

The easiest thing is to stew and do nothing. Next easiest thing is to is to sit around and complain. After that comes actually doing something about the problem.

I think efficient, productive, optimistic people are people who don't have the ramp up time of stewing and complaining, and it becomes self perpetuating: they have a better life that's easy to be optimistic about because problems get solved by themselves without issues ("complaints").

Improvements start because someone has a better solution to a problem, not just complaining about the current solution. We should implement x because it fixes these problems with current solution. Rather than just current solution is bad.

Point out where I said "just complaining".

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