Who would have thought that heroin addicts had the secret of life?
Not everything is pleasurable - sometimes you just have to suck it up and take out the f*cking trash. :P
The article is pretty much contentless fluff, and would be made 100x better if it was just replaced with the quote "do what you love and the money will follow." Still debatable, but at least it has brevity going for it.
In all seriousness, I have a certain grudging respect for the directness of the addict's solution to the Happiness Problem. My indoctrination was thorough enough as a child that I've no interest in it for myself, though.
A lot of those things you can find elsewhere, and if you don't like the work you're doing there's a good chance you can find something that lets you do what you want and still get paid.
This isn't you I'm talking to necessarily, 'cos I've got no clue what you like and what you do, but I've got in mind a friend of mine who moans about how he envies the people working for CollegeHumor and what a dream job they've got. I'm constantly telling him, "No, you'd hate it. Filming is a pain in the ass and having to be hilarious every day is probably exhausting." So-called "dream jobs" very frequently require a certain incredible effort along with their nicer aspects. If they didn't, more people would have them.
I'm a web programmer and I really do love my job, but the ultimate laziness and distraction of video games are tough to beat, even though I know that developing my career and building useful tools will give me a lot more long term satisfaction than virtual-knifing some 13 year old in Arkansas.
PS : I'm an European, US guys seem to have pretty much a stereotype about us all as being "godless communists" who need complicated reasons to work. Well, kind of.
As far as European vs. American (or in my case, Canadian) goes, one of the major differences that I'm aware of is the amount of vacation time that the average working stiff gets. I get 3 weeks per year plus stat holidays. My understanding is that most Europeans get a lot more than that. If you want a lot of time off of work while still maintaining a good standard of living you need to be a 'high-value' employee here in North America.
The problem is, by constantly avoiding unpleasant things, one might lead a semi-happy life, but there is a downside: this way a large part of possible outcomes becomes simply unreachable. (There ARE outcomes, which can not be reached without considerable amount of unpleasantness.)
One might argue, such (hard to reach) outcomes worth more (= bring more happiness).
This is the real question here.
