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Comment by Ricardus | Hacker News Reader

People certainly seem to be unhappy on incredibly large scales these days. I read an interesting piece in what I think was the Atlantic 6-ish months ago, and it basically boiled down to: We're not broken, our culture is.

I wish I could find it again, but I haven't been able to, because it expresses perfectly ideas that I had been meaning to write, for some time.

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A theory I've heard on this topic is that until recently, evolutionarily speaking, it was realistically possible to be the "best X" that you and your compatriots were aware of, in some field, for some X. The best musician, basket weaver, mechanic, farmer, carpenter, parent, what have you - because the maximum number of people you could realistically compare yourself to was probably in the four figure range, tops, and likely closer to the low hundreds for most of human history.

Now, with global awareness being exposed to the best of billions of people, it is not realistic to aspire to be the "best" of anything. I don't think we're close to understanding the full impact of the removal of this particular incentive.

I would assume that most people have been unhappy for as long as there have been people.

    In the beginning the Universe was created.
    This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely 
    regarded as a bad move.

    - Douglas Adams

Exactly. It seems the better our lives get the more focused people become on trivia. When you are struggling to earn enough money to keep your family alive then concerns like having a fulfilling job are not at the top of your concerns.

It looks to me (really little more than a hunch) more like we've bettered our lives immensely in most physical ways (removing disease, hunger, cold, etc.) but pulled the rug out from under our feet on the social/fulfillment end of things. We've taken an axe to most forms of community (to some extent family as well) and sucked all the necessary social interactions out of every day tasks.

It could just be me idealizing a past I didn't have to actually live through, I'm not old enough to have experienced anything else, but it seems like that is where a lot of human happiness and fulfillment comes from.

We tend to idealise the past like it is some sort of costume drama - in reality the community of the past was very restricting. You did whatever your father did if you were a man and raised a dozen kids (most of whom died) if you were a woman. Forget about choice or living the life you wanted.

One thing I think many are missing today from our lives is some sort of painful rite of passage struggle to give us perspective. When nothing has gone seriously wrong in your life it is all too easy to focus on the trivial.

It certainly was restricting, we didn't tear down those institutions for no reason, but how do we go about assigning relative importance to them? If I had a strong community but no choice in my occupation (especially if I had been raised that way from birth) would I be happier? I instinctively want to say no, I really really like freedom, but I don't think I have any real idea. It's also not to say we can't have both, perhaps we've traded one unhappiness (lack of freedom and harsh conditions) for another (lack of community and meaning through directly helping people you care about) and our eventual destination is finding some happy medium between the two.

My experience in life is people’s happiness level seems to be fairly independent of what happens in their life. The happy are happy and the unhappy unhappy.

There's a named phenomenon to describe what you're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocqueville_effect

I have a simpler theory: people have always been miserable, the causes have not been fixed, but we have started measuring them. So we're slowly realizing how bad things actually are.

Peoples' lives get better in the context of what we're aware of, but core problems have never been addressed.

The core problem being that your life is largely not yours.

We're all certainly products of our culture (if you want a quick illustration of this spend some time in a distant culture).

You'd probably enjoy Lost Connections by Johann Hari. I recommend the audiobook.

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