Why does culture get less happy year after year?
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
Bravo.
There's in the front page a post that's named: "A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore"¹ that shows registers from as early as 1894 of media saying "Nobody wants to work anymore".
Even the classic "Kids these days" can be tracked back to 624 BCE².
Socrates said too something along those lines: «The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.»
The "great responsibility" that should have accompanied the "great power" is dwarfed. Wisdom should needingly¹ increase more than power - of course this is not how things go.
(¹I cannot find the term for the modality: not "deontically", not "absiologically"... The idea is "X, or you are in trouble".)
So, "in the times of yore, civilization was falling apart". Today, it is with boosted damages.
I wouldn't dare deny that many parts of the world are slowly approaching a tipping point, but even if the world was perfect, people will invent their own struggles. Seems like we instinctively crave challenges, and emotional challenges are the low hanging fruit.
I think people like the idea of overcoming suffering so these days they exaggerate a lot of things.
Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state.
If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having a body that's not broken and logically knowing how fast those things can change, I'd probably be really into extreme sports.
Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid.
The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
Perhaps we're simply missing having and being able to overcome pressing challenges as much as we're missing physical activity, nights without light pollution, or contact with nature?
And anyway, I only wrote that those kinds of things don't trigger that pleasant crisis-flow-state for me, not that I'm not worried about them.
I can't fight climate change, I can't fight COVID. I'm powerless against the specter of fascism. We have all these anxieties about what's happening, but no way we can do better. Frustrations and anger pile up but there's no catharsis. A lot of the time embracing the darkness in media is cathartic.
Anectdote: I was very into “extreme” sports as a kid and into adulthood. I eventually took up skydiving and had quite a bit of fun with it. Met a lot of old timers with a lot of jumps under their belt. An observation really struck me talking to them: the people at the top of “extreme” sports are not really adrenaline junkies, but control freaks.
survivor's bias? :P
But that’s exactly what a control freak would say ;)
The Ukraine situation by contrast had the contours of a crisis, and so did COVID-19 in the beginning. And in both cases we in the "developed" world watched our leaders squabble and foible and generally reveal their total unpreparedness. I can see how that's depressing.
The main reason is the temporary flattening of social hierarchies and true meritocracy where you are more valued for your skills than for your position in society.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/144344958X/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
I would posit the opposite, that gritty content resonates more each year due to American's lifestyles being less subsidized by those abroad.
Some “dark and gritty” does suffer from a true lack of maturity on the point of the screenwriter - Zac Snyder does not have the writing talent to support his darkness without it seeming cheesy and silly - but a lot of it - Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight - very much does touch on the real suffering of the modern era: terrorism, surveillance, class divisions.
> Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living
Hasn't this always been true? I can't imagine a time in history when plays/literature/music has been more accessible to the working class.
Who've never faced opression's gun
We are the fortunate ones
Imitations of rebellion
We acted it out
We wear the colors
Confined by the things we own
We're not without
We're like each other
Pretending we're here alone
As for the general happiness of the population decreasing, I think that's mostly unrelated to the media trend. Economic troubles (low wages, housing unaffordability), societal strife, and social media all seem like obvious causes. However, Movies and TV are still generally viewed as an escape to most people, so while they reflect greater trends to some degree, I don't think they're as tied to it as the author may expect.
There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.
edit as I'm still reading: "The one note today’s entertainment strikes is the depressive tone" is an eye roll level of reductionism.
I'd be curious how the reduction in influence in religion has played a roll as well. The FCC rules on what you could say in TV/radio used to be downright archaic, and I think religion espouses this idea that good people are happy and everything turns out ok in the end because god.
So I think it's more about the "coming out" and normalization of the darker side of human nature, which was always there of course, just wasn't OK to talk about out loud, at work or on stage and especially if you are a celebrity.
For most people, it is more complex than that. However this is a trend that I worry about.
It definitely lowers the quality of the suggestions... but that's kind of the point.
The main issue being, doomer culture can be embraced as a way to accept things that are beyond your power and double efforts on what you can change, or as a way to toss away all efforts and be in a perpetual state of not caring. It also serves as a counter to society continuing to polish turds.
Yeah, the over-romanticizing of mental illness, and how prevalent it is thanks to always-on digital culture, is a real concern. But historically, there are always subcultures centered on unhappy and negative emotions, in contrast to the subcultures that focus on happy and positive ones.
'The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better - We need to see that [these three statements] are all true to see that a better world is possible'
https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
Proposed example: "4.3% of children globally - 5.9mil/year - die before the age of 15; BUT: in the past it was 50%; YET: in the EU the current value is 0.45% [HENCE: progress is possible, goals are available]".
...Which is more times relevant: difficulties are increasingly topical, but complications in dealing with them are in public conscience, and an approach to make them increasingly present is explainable in more branches of said conscience.
Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc
Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people.
Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve
(2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less
(3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation)
(4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)
Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people.
Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve
(2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less
(3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation)
(4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)
I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.
I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
Though it is true the speaking of anxiety and depression has been normalized, there is a substantial non-linear spike in these maladies in our modern times that cannot be reconciled just with normality. Just take, for instance, what the 'threats' in social media are doing.[0]
The saying, 'all things are relative' applies here. If you have never experienced a true threat to your life, actually continuous threat and/or actual bodily harm, threats to your food or shelter then social media might be the meanest worst thing you have ever seen and thus a true terror to you.
[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...
I personally like William Gibson's take on this, from Gernsback Continuum:
> "But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world."
> "Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."
A movie about chasing the love of your life down at the airport right before they board would be solved with a text message and some emoji instead.
A movie about everyone going off to war would instead be droning some people from far away. Even getting droned is less dramatic... no chase or fight or glory, just one second there and the next second not. The war in Ukraine would be implausible as a modern movie (An evil villian attacks with tanks and blows up schools to rebuild some mythical empire? Uh, sounds dated and cliche.)
So drama in movies is now mostly due to people making unnecessary drama. And has anyone else noticed that political dramas are almost always about what people say and never what they do?
Something like that anyway. Horror films and dark stories make everyday life feel more enjoyable. Or they could, if we can take things in that light.
Happiness is ultimately a pretty subjective matter, no less when trying to compare across many generations.
Reject folly and pursue wisdom.
Proverbs 5:18 - Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.
Because smart phones were about to ruin their lives.
LSD was synthetized in 1938, its psychedelic potential discovered in 1943 and it was used both by psychiatry and for spiritual/recreational purposes through the 50s and 60s until Nixon started "war on drugs".
It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet.
It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two prescribed excessively if you deviated in any way from the norm. It was OK with performing lobotomies on people to have them perform within norm.
There were almost no news except what was officially approved. You'd mostly lose contact with friends who moved more than a few miles away - long distance contact through mail is hard.
Housework was hard manual labor, because there were little affordable tools. (They were just starting to become normal). In terms of performing arts, it was a wasteland because the vast majority of cities didn't have the size to support art scenes.
I could go on. But what I'd really like to say is: Both the picture you paint, and the one I paint, are likely overemphasizing certain characteristics. In that, we generalize way too much. Happiness is individual, not cultural. Culture is tribal, not general. And more importantly, culture is what we make of it - and so imagining where to go from here very much becomes "where do you want it to go, and what can you do about that"
Or people outside of North America. Really, the main cause for the '50s seeming like a golden age was that the U.S., protected by two oceans with its massive industrial capacity and population, emerged from WWII as accidental global hegemon. So it was easy to be optimistic when not only did America win the war, it was very prosperous and on its way to running the world. A decade after the Great Depression, American capital was helping to rebuild old Europe. All of the domestic cultural changes were just second order effects from this situation.
Commercially, you can start high tech businesses in your garage that weren't even dreamt of in the 50s.
As for space, we're currently landing rockets on ships. We're actively planning Mars exploration.
The UN still promises global peace. The second half of the 50s had much worse nuclear saber rattling than anything we see right now. The Korean war very much was a high risk of US and USSR clashing directly.
I really think you romanticize the 50s. (I strongly encourage talking to people who lived through the 50s, especially minority groups)
Again, I really want to say "you're completely wrong" here - in terms of GDP growth, the 50s were great. In terms of sharing that growth (as opposed to concentrating wealth in a small group), they were great. BOth of these only apply to white men/families, though. And I deliberately exaggerate the picture in the other direction to show how much this is a question of framing.
And your right, one culture can be happier than another. We know which cultures are happy, and we have a fairly good idea why they are happier. It's on us to change our culture if we want that happiness.
You see this as a dark picture. I see it as a call to action, and the potential to make the world so much better. I don't know what the chances of success are, but I can promise you that seeing the future as malleable and culture as an ongoing project makes life better than focusing exclusively on the darkness.