Things like being trapped in a dead end job to keep healthcare benefits in the USA, living in a never ending treadmill of debt.
Or as the Unabomber said, "Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."
I think you're right. The problem is, this is the only life most of us have lived, and so we cannot imagine it otherwise, like a fish who cannot conceive of a world above water, or even that water is the medium surrounding it. If our entire society is causing this, then what can we do? Wage slavery, oligarchy, attention theft by tech companies, disintegration of community from various causes. Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? How do we escape?
Ooof
"Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs."
Examining the social factors that contribute to pathology isn't controversial nor does it downplay the role of drugs in reducing harm.
Not to mention, depression takes several forms, and not all of them are related to unhappiness. A common form is related to anxiety, with people experiencing a constant feeling that something awful is about to happen, sometimes getting terrible panic attacks. Given that many of these people live in objectively and subjectively extremely safe environments, much safer than at any other time in history, it's very hard to take seriously any environmental theory of this kind.
Edit: corrected one bad auto-correct typo ("problem", not "purulente") .
You are playing into the argument, people often don't have a choice to avoid a depression inducing environment, they only have the choice of using drugs or not.
People looking for an actual expert discuss these things should watch Robert Sapolsky's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
For example, in the talk, he points out one of the most telltale signs of depression is waking up early, which is completely backwards from the common perception that depression is someone staying in bed all day.
At the end of the day we are probably happiest when we are foraging for berries or mushrooms. This whole abstract 'society' crap we put upon ourselves leads to a lot of self directed scorn, embarassment, disrespect, and no doubt depression. How many billions of calories have been burned to fuel thoughts of worry about an outfit choice around the world? How many grey hairs have sprung up as a result of fretting about appearance? The stress society tries to shovel on you is such a waste of energy and does nothing to help you.
Sadly, not enough to offset our sedentary lifestyle and diets. I can't be too concerned about the energy expenditure involved in worrying about meaningless things. For now anyway, we've got energy to spare. The toll of all that stress on our bodies is much worse than the calories we lose. Still, I'd rather be worried about the trivial things that we occupy ourselves with than the life or death worries humans regularly faced when we were berry foragers. Going from worrying over "Will we eat today?" to "Which of several restaurants should we go to for lunch?" is a blessing.
Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on.
Fidelio
I find this kind of bizarre because you can look around and see how it's obviously not true. Dogs are happy as clams to just socialize with their owners / other dogs and just live. People hustling to always get to the next goal don't seem particularly happier than people who don't have a goal and just have a healthy social life.
B. The happiest people on the planet are extremely ethical, have a good moral compass and have a will to help others. They have goals and attain them. And they especially don't blame their environment for their shortcomings. They find ways to adjust their environment to themselves and not the other way around.
Someone who is content with a simple life is still following that maxim. Their goal is to live each day in relative comfort according to their own standards.
Russian serfs might've revolted when they got the chance, but they were more or less psychologically normal until then. Their society adapts to not kill them all. (Or they all become alcoholics or something.)
That's an over simplification.
People could still have more free time than we do now[1], while their life could be more monotonous on some aspect, I believe an average office worker life today can be even more monotonous than what a serf life could be. You also have to consider labor alienation, which is a something that didn't exist so much before industrialization.
Most importantly, life commonly revolved around tight communities, while today most people live in individualist societies.
Individualism certainly has a larger impact on happiness than most modern convenience has.
- [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
No, preindustrial ages weren't the hell they're made to be nor a golden age by any means. The same can be said of today. Stop playing defensive and think openly instead, there's lot we can improve by learning from the past.
It's pretty depressing if you dwell on it for any period of time.
Also, we always like to think we will be happy “once I have…X” and then we get X and say well actually what I need is Y.
Most unhappiness is driven by vanity and desire (a bargain you make with yourself where you chose to be unhappy until you get something) to be better than our peers.
Until you can be content with nothing you wont be content even with everything.
If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. They cant stop us from being happy.
I don't think people in concentration camps are happy.
Yet there are more depressives around than ever.
Cars and other manufactured goods tend to get cheaper over time because they can take advantage of economies of scale, as well as global supply chains and free trade. We're seeing that very concretely right now as the global chip shortage has put pressure on the used car market.
Education, housing, and healthcare are largely unaffected by free trade, and Baumol's cost disease is literally a statement about how certain industries cannot take advantage of economies of scale.
Come to think of it, let's also toss childcare in the bucket of "things that have gotten more expensive faster than inflation over time" since, among households with children, we have a predominance of households where all parents who are present work. Again, we have inelastic demand and Baumol's cost disease rearing their ugly heads, so maybe there's something to this theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
TV and automobile manufacturing are a lot more productive than they were 50 years ago. A teacher can still only teach one classroom at a time.
Therefore, service industries like healthcare, education, and even construction get less and less efficient relative to manufacturing and production industries, which enjoy massive increase in efficiency year after year. This is partly why an 80 inch 4K TV is eventually going to cost $500 and a 4 year college education is going to cost $500,000.
it makes logical sense, but i wonder if it really is wage competition causing this when wages have been mostly stagnant for the past 50 years?
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/industries-with-the-most-w...