Why are non-literary people happier than literary people?

johnsonessays.com/the-adventurer/138-the-happiness-and-infelicity-of-writers/

"Having considered the importance of authors to the welfare of the publick, I am led by a natural train of thought, to reflect on their condition with regard to themselves; and to inquire what degree of happiness or vexation is annexed to the difficult and laborious employment of providing instruction or entertainment for mankind. ... I have, nevertheless, been often inclined to doubt, whether authors, however querulous, are in reality more miserable than their fellow mortals. The present life is to all a state of infelicity; every man, like an author, believes himself to merit more than he obtains, and solaces the present with the prospect of the future; others, indeed, suffer those disappointments in silence, of which the writer complains, to show how well he has learnt the art of lamentation."

It's a very good read, like everything Samuel Johnson ever wrote.

because they're fucking stupid

Such blatant reductionism desu

Great explanation, and he made it 260 years ago

Someone who's literate would be able to be more articulate about their unhappiness.

They're not. Uneducated people are way more depressed. Go to a homeless shelter or a halfway house or a prison and you'll see/ literary people who are depressed are usually stupid and are read for the wrong reasons like to serve their own intellectual purposes. They just like to read so people will think they're smart so they're vapid and empty instead of doing it for pleasure.

Fuck the ignorance is bliss meme.

maybe you should consider that it's hard to gauge happiness in other people, and that making sweeping generalizations about groups of people and their wellbeing ignores the nuances of the individual.

Maybe you shouldn't conflate correlation and causation.

Maybe you shouldn't make bold conclusions from qualitative data.

People who claim that happiness is a product from the 'idiocy of the masses' are just egotistical pseuds who will do anything to justify their own lethargy and fuel their inflated sense of superiority.

So you compare small group of people with literally every person on Earth that isn't part of it ? The sample size is too fucked up to compare

> Tfw happy

This is just a meme desu. There's no correlation between level of education and happiness.

You say, vacuously, just as the ones claiming it does.

I suppose it depends how you define 'literary'. If you define literary as someone who just reads(be it whatever pulp someone has masturbated out) or if you define literary as someone who reads good shit the answer is likely to be very different.

I think the answer has a lot to do with society. Intelligent people(which i do think quite clearly correlates with good-book-readers) clearly sees that society is sick and to engage in it's boorish tumblings can take more of him than a simpleton that never questions anything and is happy with the state of the world because he's too simple for empathy and too simple to ask critical questions. Now, an intelligent person reading good books will more and more see how far man has fallen and when you know how fucked up the world is without being able to change it the result is powerlessness and melancholy. I must mention that sometimes one's knowledge can also lead you to action, and then it can be very changing & good, however far too often it doesn't lead to this result and then it can be very damaging.

But I suppose this has a lot to do with which good books you read also. I don't know of anything as powerful as a good book(perhaps a good psychedelic trip), and just as a powerful trip has the power to change you for the better, so can a powerful bad trip change you for the worse.

What makes his statement lack thought?

>Why are non-literary people happier than literary people?

Do you have any studies to back that up?

Many well read folks are happy. It's not reading that is at fault, but something deeper

>implying they are happy

they are just keeping a facade. we are all miserable inside.

(weeeeeeeeeeeeeeew) lad

dumb question, this board is shit

DUDE I'M SAD LMAO

Everyone's sad some people are just too fucking retarded to realize it

Not me though I'm sad af family

ITT people who haven't read Voltaire's The Good Brahmin.

Come on guys, it's like a page long.

People love to mope and feel sorry for themselves.
In the first page (or maybe second, can't really remember) of The World as Will and Representation Schops talks about how everything you feel is based off the way you perceive things; there is nothing that can inherently make people happy or sad. Tolstoy said "If you want to be happy, be."

Once people try to realize the true implications of nihilism and your unimportant and all the fun stuff, you realize that it's not something that should make feel upset in any way.

People like to be depressed in a twisted sort of way. I used to be really depressed and tried to commit suicide, then I went through therapy and anti-depressants.

But even at my absolute lowest point, there was a kind of pleasure in torturing myself. I enjoyed to make things worse and I wanted to push myself to suicide. The last thing I ever wanted was to feel better. I would go days on end without leaving my bed, wishing that I could just sleep away the rest of my life, but even then I wanted to feel that way.

It's part masochistic and part sadistic, but I think everyone knows exactly what I mean if you are actually honest with yourself.

Because in most well-read people's minds nothing could be worse than to be boring and happy. For me the thing the kept me clinging to depressing was that I thought of being happy as "selling out." If I was to be happy then I must have forgotten how bad things were and how depressing it all was. I had pride in it and I wanted to be a person so well informed that I couldn't stand to exist because existence was terrible.

The truth is it was pathetic. Being happy is much better and nothing about my world view has changed.

Just try to be honest with yourself because I know I was repressing all those ideas really hard when I was depressed; to think that I was enjoying the suffering even the tiniest amount would of course ruin the quality of the suffering.

>Reading Voltaire at all

ALIENS THAT ARE MILES TALL