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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

It would be weird for happiness to increase with prosperity. Think how much more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.

Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?

This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in.

This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.

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This is why happiness can only be reached by learning to appreciate what you have. You're much better off pondering how lucky you are to have, and how miserable you'd be without, the things you already have, rather than how happy you'd be with things you don't. The latter is an illusion.

Exactly this.

The human psyche has its pluses and minuses. The fact is, humans are never satisfied with what they have, they always want more.

This is good when it comes to driving progress. We’d never have gone to the moon if we were satisfied with just colonizing the earth.

At the same time, it’s the root of a lot of unhappiness. People have grand expectations for their life - and fall into depression if they never reach them, despite the fact their life is far richer than most people experience.

That is excellent advice on an individual basis, but I don't think that is the point when the goal is to try and establish a broader perspective and evaluate a societal shift.

I mean that is exactly what a manager tells you when they cut hours, increase work, and dumpster workplace morale. They have very obvious financial incentive to provide less for the same output and there is no determinable metric of what is "reasonable". You're much better off in this case in actively searching for a better job if it is affecting your day to day life negatively.

People seem to forget that consistently throughout history that the societal shift has fallen so far negatively that it has resulted in the final resort of being solved by violent revolution.

Sounds like Stoicism.

> We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.

I actually do think it's plausible for happiness to increase with material wealth, but not because we're delirious with joy now, but rather because life was really, really, _really_ fucking horrible for the vast majority of human history (by our standards today).

Significantly, we can't actually measure happiness, and have to rely on "reported happiness", which is pretty much by definition anchored to expectations and thus not appropriate for long-term comparisons. Your point applies here: you wouldn't expect reported happiness to change directionally, on average.

> how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?

This is a twisted way to view happiness. Wouldn't you be happier if you helped others succeed? Feel connected, part of something you really believe in?

Happiness is so much more than prosperity. Money helps you avoid death. Happiness exists on an entirely different foundation.

People adjust.

In 100 years, people will look back and say things like, "How did they survive 100 years ago? Some countries didn't even have decent governments, let alone proper healthcare for everyone. Some people lived on the streets. People could just walk up to you and kill you! Bang! You're dead.

Now that we've got personal electron shields and everyone is guaranteed food and medical care, people should be a lot happier than back then."

But in the end, it's all relative. We look at what we have and what we didn't have, we're thankful for it, and we go on. People in third-world countries are happy, too, despite not having all the modern conveniences.

And there are plenty of miserable people because people are people, in the end.

> Think how much more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.

I don’t see how the second sentence follows from the first. Can you explain? What rate of increase are you assuming?

Say there is some function connecting some measure of wealth to some measure of happiness. And the function would be monotonically increasing.

Well, the measure of wealth in the modern era ought to be orders of magnitude bigger than it was in the stone age. Back then people had control over something like 10 items. There were no property laws to ensure you kept them, either. If you got a minor cut it could get infected and kill you, there was no modern medicine. Your wife had a massive 5% chance of dying each time she gave birth, and that was a lot of times.

Whatever you thought the function was, the value ought to be much, much higher now than then.

> Well, the measure of wealth in the modern era ought to be orders of magnitude bigger than it was in the stone age.

This is what I don't understand. Why should this make happiness "orders of magnitude bigger"? Isn’t it possible happiness has increased, just not by orders of magnitude?

I think the point is that since we have OOM more wealth, we are looking at some sort of asymptotic behaviour, right?

So if you expected wealth to be connected to happiness, and the connection is linear, you would expect happiness to be similarly off the scale.

It doesn't seem to be the case, so maybe it's something like a logarithm, so there's still an upward slope but it's barely anything.

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