ADVICE: Columbia ED or Brown ED or Stanford EA?

silverturtle
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:55:29 +0000

Sorry for the off-topic nature of some of the following.



I was not being sarcastic at all, silverturtle.

Prestige does add to one’s happiness. I genuinely believe that.



I apologize for communicating a misinterpretation of your intention. I had figured that, whatever one’s speculation on the influence of prestige on happiness, to single out CCers as being a group that undervalues prestige, when it is tough to find a group that values it much more, suggested satire.

I disagree that there is a positively causal relationship between happiness and prestige. I think that you’ll have an easier time finding people who strongly agree with you on prestige’s influence than you will finding people who believe that money yields happiness. Yet even this latter conception is untrue past a rather modest income.

It could additionally be argued that whatever happiness the achievement of prestige (or money) yields, it faces the countervailing negative force of the strive preceding it, which may be plagued by sacrifices and under-appreciation of one’s present circumstances when wistfully juxtaposed against the romanticized vision of a future with higher amounts of what is desirable. To believe that completion of our goals will bring happiness predicates unsoundly on the validity of the goal. In exacerbation, the non-realization of what was expected evolves into the conceptualization of an opportunity cost, whose salient absence inspires disutility by way of disillusionment.

I will, however, concede the capacity of enjoyment of prestige to temporarily inspire greater self-esteem. This indulgence in the tempting tendency to defer valuation of self-worth to the opinions of others probably has compensatory harms down the road, though. In fact, one would expect at least the same boost in self-esteem from money as from prestige (since money is often used in ways that mark prestige), yet the aforementioned empirical plateau in happiness for higher levels of income exists, suggesting a similarly ineffectual capacity of prestige alone.



Had I not turned down Stanford, while ignoring the value of prestige, I’m sure I would’ve been much happier right now.



It’s well established that people are not particularly good at providing valid attributions for their dissatisfaction. When one is dissatisfied, a common defense mechanism is to rationalize the dissatisfaction as a failure to subscribe to and act upon whatever expectations the person then has about what begets happiness. In this way, hope is vividly preserved, because no new constructs are necessary to account for the disconnect between what one has and what one wants. Deeper, more lasting accounts of happiness are rightly placed in lieu of popularized, mostly fallacious simplifications.