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Comment by gmarx | Hacker News Reader

Funny (ironic?) thing is that each incremental advance in civilization may be a good thing in isolation and, given the choice between adding benefit X to their existing situation or not, most people would choose adding benefit X without hesitation.

And yet, somehow the sum of hundreds of such benefits (secure food, healthcare, fire departments, internet) doesn't lead to a significant increase in average happiness. In fact it may be that we in the west are less happy than people living in stone age societies.

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I think about this a lot. One of my own theories is that we always want more. A columnist here, South Africa wrote about how when he was in high school he just wanted enough money to take his date to a movie and have enough money to buy popcorn. In college, he wanted enough money to buy a crate of beer, as a young employee he wanted enough to buy the cool car. Get the drift, somehow we always want more.

People in the village are not immune from wanting more but the pace is slower. They are more patient. They exercise, not by going to gym but walking 10km to say hello to a neighbor then walking back. Food is organic, all cows eat grass and roam free. Little of the food is highly processed. They also manually process their food. The thought of spending half a day pounding millet for supper has me getting so impatient and thinking surely there is a better way. They have accepted.

Sorry I went on a bit of a rant, but this is topic close to my heart.

I wonder if it's because of the kinds of stress people in western societies deal with. Humans have always had to deal with stress, but the modern world seems to have more "intangible" kinds of stress. It's one thing to be stressed about being in danger from a predator. The stress drives you to action, and you either survive or don't. But the kinds of stress people deal with now is somehow different. Most of the time, the things you're stressed about won't kill you, but the stress won't go away either. Worrying about money to pay rent, etc. The stress drives people to make enough money to make this month's rent, but that same stress will constantly be there, because of next month's rent.

I dunno if this makes any sense, just something that popped into my head.

I think you hit the nail right on the head. I believe there has been research with rats on this type of thing (sorry I don't remember the name of the study). The sort of 'ambiguous' stress of modern life is much harder on the body/mind than say, being chased by a tiger.

I've read this is why soldiers like combat deployments. I always figured war was something you were drafted into and were terrified most of the time. There is a subset of the population who enjoy soldiering and this is part of why

When humans come into conflict, and they always do, it's not happiness that decides the winner, it's power. The societies that exist today are the ones that survived, not the ones that are best for their constituents.

Agreed. Finding valuable minerals in a village is one sure way of ending the peaceful existence. Everything changes!

The lack of increase in happiness sounds like simply hedonic adaptation.

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