The world being indifferent to your pain is not helping if you're in acute pain. Step outside your perspective, sure. I guarantee you this will not work if you have real issues like physical pain due to terminal cancer.

You should read "A Man's Search for Meaning" sometime. While not exactly Stoicism many of the ideas are similar/related. How a person views and responds to their situation, has a huge impact on them. No one is saying any of this will remove all of someone's acute pain, but as crazy as it sounds, accepting that suffering can lead maybe the pain not being quite so bad.

It simply doesn't work, even assuming you had no empathy as described in the quote.

It works handsomely for the 1%. The rest, well, ...

gpt-5.1 gave me the correct answer after 2m 17s. That includes retrieving the Euler website. I didn't even have to run the Python script, it also did that.

Or maybe, just maybe, becoming a billionaire has way more to do with luck than anything else.

I don't know about any billionaire in the history of billionaires who appears to have gotten there solely based on special abilities. Being born into the right circumstances is all it really takes.

Oprah Winfrey? Still some luck but she didn't start in great circustances.

> Being born into the right circumstances is all it really takes.

You do still need to do the work. People have squandered golden opportunities because they didn't put in the effort.

Surely

It wouldn't surprise me if healthy, privileged people with access to good healthcare are more optimistic than those with serious illness, no coverage and three shitty jobs.

Hard to be optimistic when you have cancer and can't afford treatment.

> These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.

Yeah I also feel introducing some social class - income level variable would help clear things up.

>due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious

And how do you become that? Exactly, by being lucky.

Luckily, these things are all learnable.

The other ones I can maybe understand, but why would I be embarrassed to go to water parks?

Some are indeed impressive, large and full of long queues of older children and their adults but some are decidedly kiddie!

When I have been unhappy in my life, it was never about the past or future. It always had to do with the present.

Start a corporation so that you don't need to sell your soul to corporations?

There is a skit out there about the American dream, something like “where the little guy does well, advances, gets promoted, becomes the boss, and then can stamp on all the little guys”

Start a corporation so you can buy other people's souls