Comfort And Productivity

I've been reading a lot of books lately where I've noticed a common theme: the idea the when we get too comfortable, we become lazy. I'll allow Hemingway to say it better than me:

"Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."..."They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body."..."He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, when writing Antifragile, writes:

"Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste. He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will."..."Cato would have smiled hearing about the recently observed effect in aeronautics that the automation of airplanes is under-challenging pilots, making flying too comfortable for them, dangerously comfortable. The dulling of the pilot's attention and skills from too little challenge is indeed causing deaths from flying accidents."

These ideas bring up the question... how do we maintain our edge? How to we realise our full potential? By being led by our passion? By being pushed along by the prospect of doing something before our slowly creeping death? By removing our comforts?

Factors For Happiness

Over the years I've noticed that my levels of happiness have been affected by a few different factors. I've taken the time to think about and found that they can be classed into two different areas: environment and social perceptions & judgements:

Environment
The Kind Of Job You Perform
Some jobs require more slow, deep thinking than others: such as engineering, coding - any technical subject. As such, happiness can actually a detrimental attribute for these jobs. The feeling of happiness is associated with actions of spontaneity and quick decision making. These attributes could be seen as mindless, quick recklessness: undesirable in a job where a mistake can be costly and where slow, deep thinking needs to take place.

How People Feel Towards You
Later I'll talk about how people perceive your emotional state... even if they like you as a person. This point, however, touches upon whether people do actually like you or not. If people aren't happy being around you and show that they don't really like you, it can make for a very uncomfortable environment. This environment makes it a lot harder to be happy and can easily cause unrest and discomfort.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs - Bottom Two Platforms
We need to have food, water, shelter, safety, security and comfort within our environment to facilitate happiness. I won't dwell on this one two much as you can look up Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs if you'd like to know more.

Social Perceptions & Judgements

How You Perceive Your Own Happiness (Self-Talk About Your Happiness)
This is perhaps the most important factor in determining your own happiness. How you perceive your happiness has a huge affect on how happy you actually are. I'll just leave that there for a second, because to me, that's quite a big one. One of these is a perception - being aware of a feeling and making a judgement on it. And one of them is actually the feeling. And the judgement affects the feeling. If I judge myself to be happy, I start feeling happier. If I tell myself (judge myself) that I'm happy, it's almost like I re-calibrate and anchor my baseline happiness (if such a thing could be said to be on a spectrum) back up to a feeling of being happy.

We ask ourselves the question, "Am I happy?" We answer in either, "I am happy", or "I am not happy". This is a problem, though. Happy relative to what? And what process are you going through to make that decision? Because we like to rationalise things, this is usually based on how our lives are going with regards to a judgement of personal goal completion, but after a while can still be detached. Why can't you tell yourself that you're still happy, even if you haven't completed your goals? If you're not completely fulfilled in an area of work? In the end, due to, "happy relative to what?", we can answer affirmative or negative with truth 99% of the time. Ultimately, this comes down to our own mentality - do we think negatively or positively? If we think negatively, we'll find flaws or problems with how we're doing. Of we think positively, we'll look for what we've done well.  And how you answer affects how happy you actually are.

How Your Friends Perceive Your Happiness Levels
How your friends perceive you is like a feedback-loop, feeding back into your own self-evaluation of happiness. If they see you as a sad/upset person, although they might not say it explicitly or even work around it implicitly, their perceptions and judgements will make themselves known through the language that they use and the way they interact with you. This behaviour will feed back into how you see yourself - validating your own judgement about your happiness, or throwing your own self-evaluation into question.

How You Judge Your Performance In Completion Of Self-Set Goals
Intellectualising and judging how your life is going based on pre-set goals can impact your happiness. If you deem your life is going well based on the targets you've reached, you tell yourself that you should be happy. If you deem that you haven't reached the goals that you should have reached by now, you tell yourself that you shouldn't be happy. This is important, because it's vital to understand that 99% of us have things that we have yet to do in our lives or yet to fulfil in our lives. If we constantly focus on this aspects that we have yet to fulfil, we will judge our lives as not meeting the goals we have set ourselves and we'll rationalise that we shouldn't be happy. This will go on to affect our perception of whether we think we are happy or not.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs - Top Three Platforms
Love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation also are social factors that affect happiness. Again, I won't dwell on these further, as you can look this hierarchy up if you're interested.