Year Of The Opposite - Travis Stoliker's Substack Podcast

I bet my friends $500 that I could make them happier in 7 days and 100% either got happier or stayed very happy. It was a huge success! In my opinion… However, one of my readers significantly disagreed with me.

I shared the readers previous comment in my last post titled “Challenge Results: All Participants Got Happy In 7 Days!”

That reader replied to the last post so I wanted to share it to see what you all think. I want to get outside opinions to see if maybe I’m off the mark on this one. I always like to check my thinking to make sure I’m not missing something. So I look forward to your feedback and input.

Below is their response to my last post. Please share your own feedback in the comments, email me, or in reply to this poll:

“Travis,

I’ve purposely waited a few days to comment after reading your most recent blog, just so I could rethink my prior comments, and your reaction to them.

I think it is wonderful that you have been successful overcoming your grief and depression. I also think it is very kind of you to try to help total strangers do the same. So, I am sorry if my words seemed harsh. In retrospect, they were.

Please know, that I didn’t take issue with your attempt to help others. I merely thought that your offer to pay someone to try out your system of increasing happiness was misguided.

My issue was, and continues to be with your comments about the world being such a better place than when you grew up, because it clearly is not. Yes, advances in technology including space adventures have improved the world in many ways, but those same advances have made people crueler, and the world more dangerous.

The timing of your comments amidst horrific school shootings and increasingly dangerous world conflicts was what bothered me. I immediately wondered if the Michigan school shooting had happened in the Haslett school district where you are a member of the school board instead of Oxford, would you still have blogged about how much greater our world is today?

How would you have responded to the parents whose children’s lives were brutally taken from them? Would you still have issued your be happy challenge to members of a community devastated by another horrific act of school gun violence, which incidentally, never happened when I was growing up?

That’s what I meant by being tone deaf.

I still think you mean well.

Take care”

Here is the readers original response to my offer:

“There’s a reason for that Travis, and it’s not the money. Are you really that tone deaf?

I read your comments a while ago about how much greater the world is today than in the past because of Elon Musk and his space ship right around the time that I read the horrific stories of the numerous women, young and old in Israel who were gang raped, passed from soldier to soldier, had their breasts cut off and tossed around like footballs, and only after all of that were brutally murdered.

Seriously?

Just yesterday, I watched the sentencing of the stupid kid from Oxford whose stupid and neglectful parents bought him a hand gun which he then used to execute four of his classmates, and traumatize an entire community.

This is the world we are leaving our children and grandchildren. It is NOT better. It is not better than the era when I went to school with my parents or myself not fearing if I would could home at the end of the day.

Your privilege is blinding you.”

I look forward to hearing from you. Am I off base?

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