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Comment by moh_maya | Hacker News Reader

At some level, I think this is orthogonal to technological progress.

One possible way of getting at this is to ask if people were more ‘happy’ when there wasn’t this level of tech available - and I’m not sure the answer is yes - I mean, there’s the mythos of ‘a simple life’ and ‘noble savages’, but from what I’ve read of life even a 100 years back - I would surmise folks were as unhappy / miserable then too - but likely for different reasons.

I think expecting just tech to make us happy is framing the wrong problem space.

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Maybe happy isn’t the right word, but I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose. Social media has made things worse, but it’s really the loss of community and religion that has led to the crisis of loneliness and depression among todays people.

> I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose

From what available data would you derive this and not immediately question selection bias?

> but I think it’s pretty clear [...]

Is it? Because that is not clear to me in the slightest.

Modern loneliness is a far more multifaceted issue than it’s often presented as.

For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.

Those kinds of movements aren't new though: Entire generations in many a country ended up emigrating across the sea, back when it was far slower and dangerous, to make their fortunes, as their home was too poor to handle more than one son. And today we have our home culture on our phones. I can watch TV from my home country, and my home team's soccer matches live. I can video call whenever, for free.

So maintain connection has never been easier, and migration is not any worse. I have no doubt there are far more things than social media making people more unhappy than historically, but having to move away from where we were born isn't it.

Moving itself is probably wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t as frequent, for instance if maybe moving once after college would be it for most people. That’d still give people time to set down roots.

Instead it’s often necessary to move repeatedly, for reasons varying from going to school to getting a job to finding housing with room for kids to just trying to keep rent from eating up the majority of one’s paycheck.

In my case I’ve moved 9 times in the ~15 years since I turned 20 and it’s very likely I’ll be moving again in the future. It’s been very disruptive for maintaining connections, even with the power of modern communications at my disposal. I’ve more or less grown used to it and am kind of introverted anyway so I’m not depressed but I could see where others might not be so lucky.

As opposed to living with a spouse that abused them/who they were not in love with, without a way to divorce. Or a huge percentage of people having to experience losing their children?

It was simply not spoken about, people either poisoned their husband if it got that bad, or lived a sad life in silence.

but existence influences choices

so technological progress in itself, regardless of its use, is a consideration

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