Appreciate what you have!

EB5AGV

I am spending the weekend at a hotel which has an old upright piano in one large hall. I have asked this morning if I could play it and have been given the OK. So I have played for 10 minutes this morning and about an hour tonight...

Well, now I understand when people talks about light action!. I had never found a lighter acoustic one. It is so light that is very hard to control. Then the pedal... Oh my!. It is also extremely soft and I would say the dampers don't fully do their work. It is still useable, but by an small margin. Then the key to key response varies and the action feels imprecise, but is worse on some notes. And the tuning... Let's say it has not been tuned in years. Luckily it still maintains some relative tuning but for sure is somewhat low. The tone of the piano is not too lovely, but for the mostly pop repertoire (it was hard to manage any delicate playing on that piano) it has worked fine.

All in all, now I appreciate my Yamaha U3H quite a lot more, what a wonderful precision machine it is. What a nice and even action. What a precious tone it has.

It has been a lovely experience nonetheless. Playing in public is like a balsam to me. And my poor playing has even raised some applause! 😆

Enjoy and appreciate what you have!

Jose

Ralphiano

That is always great advice, Jose.

I'm a thinker, and the fact that there are mysteries that I have not solved is one of my nagging troubles.

I've long believed that mastering the art of contentment holds a supreme position in the formula for happiness. I think of it in mathematic terms. What I believe is:

Happiness = Expectations - Reality.

If your reality is greater than your expectations, you experience positive happiness.
If your reality is lower than your expectations, you experience negative happiness.

Stated otherwise:

If your expectations exceed your reality, you experience negative happiness.
If your expectations are lower than your reality, you experience positive happiness.

While this is no great revelation, it does help me disengage from the fury and carnage that sometimes results from a headlong assault on my unsatisfactory reality. Sometimes, just reducing expectations goes a long way toward positive happiness.

MacMacMac

I agree with your idea, but your equation says quite the opposite. 🙂

vagfilm

Ralphiano: what is say is (in a nutshell) what in neurobiology is called the Reward Prediction Error of dopamine signaling, one of the most important concepts of learning, memory and behavioral adjustment in the brain.

But from a psychological/cognitive point of view, your theory of happiness is way off the mark: people are not happy because they have low expectations (according to your theory, unless you had bottom of the barrel expectations, you could only be depressed because probabilistic, you cannot always be above average expectations). In fact, happy people have high expectations and thrive for that. But somehow, in their eyes, they are able to bring reality UP to the expectations and decrease their distance… Tendency to form low expectations is an hallmark of mood disorders.

QuasiUnaFantasia

vagfilm Unless I misunderstand some of what you wrote (which is very possible), it seems to me you are treating two different meanings of the word "expectation" as one. It is very true that you cannot remain on one side of the statistical expectation, but you can certainly remain on one side of the psychological expectation. People can expect things that would not be expected from a statistical model point of view (because the statistical model is not based on the same data the psychology is based on, and because they are not produced in the same way).

vagfilm

Sorry, but now I am the one not following you 😄 …

What I was trying to say is that when you formulate a decision you always have an associated expectation, be it good, bad, or neutral (for inconsequential decisions that do not matter for this discussion). For the sake of "happiness", let's concentrate on the long-term decisions with good expectations. For example "I will start playing piano because that will give me some peace of mind", or "starting a family and having a kid, will bring me joy" (I am avoiding monetary examples, because rarely is wealth equated with happiness; and I also do not like to say "contentment" because to me contentment is to happiness what MacDonalds is to backyard grilling - cheap substitutes).

What I wanted to convey is that objectively, it is highly unlikely that your piano learning will be a blissful journey, or that your kid would give you nothing but good positive experiences (if so, I want to trade in my 4 years old 😀 ). However, in the eyes of the beholder and for the same exact piano or parenting experiences, some people will tend to value the positive and forget the negatives ("shoot… Twinkle little star is really difficult, but I am enjoying it and after 2 years I will able to pull it off"; "what is the importance of a boatload of diapers and tantrums, compared with one genuine smile from my kid?") and be happy, while some others will focus on the negatives. This is what I called adjusting the reality and not the expectations. And the solution for that is not to decrease your expectations ("well, as long as my kid does not stab me in my sleep for inheritance, I will be happy"). If you study psychology of happiness (and let's not get bogged down with "what is happiness"? Let's define it as what each people perceives it to be, when asked "rate your happiness in a scale of 1 to 10", or otherwise we will discuss in circles), you will see that people that rate themselves as "happy" are the ones that have long-term expectations or dreams (some very down to earth, some really delusional in their unrealistic hopes), while the ones that rate themselves as "not happy" are usually less capable of formulating positive expectations.

Was I more clear, this time? Maybe not…

QuasiUnaFantasia

vagfilm Whether you were more clear, or whether something else explains it, I am in general agreement with what you wrote. Although I know of no studies documenting a link between having positive expectations, and feeling "happy", it seems obvious to me that such a link must exist. To me, having no positive expectations must be the ultimate self destruction method.

vagfilm

QuasiUnaFantasia To me, having no positive expectations must be the ultimate self destruction method.

Either as cause or as consequence… Fully agree…