my happiest friends are all impressed by everything all the time

there's a very strong correlation between "I'm proud I did X, I should show it to Y they'll be like wowowow" and Y being outlier happy

(they're often wowowow walking around all day in their life already, just impressed by everything around them)

I think the reason is that being impressed is a combination of being perceptive in the moment -- literally the senses "impressing" into you -- and gratitude, two keys to life satisfaction

Hm, now I wonder if it's an unintentional hack of the hedonic treadmill? Like in theory your system's expectations should catch up, it just shouldn't be possible to continually being impressed by the fact that mirrors reflect or something, but in practice it works out somehow

also, they're generally crazy productive, which seems counter-intuitive. Maybe being in flow and not attacking yourself is far more important to productivity than being emotionally critical all the time (you can still give criticisms, but emotionally you're still impressed)