Ask HN: If technology is so good for the world, why are we becoming less happy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If technology is so good for the world, why are we becoming less happy?

36 pointscmcy49 comments

People are becoming less, not more, happy. Since the internet era began, every meaningful metric reflects this same picture - self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates. Anything you can think of as a proxy for whether people are enjoying life is either stagnant or down.

Of course it's not as simple as saying technology is the cause of all of this unhappiness, but what is clear is that, at minimum, technology is not doing enough to counteract it. And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it? A generation and a half of some of the smartest people in the world working on expanding the boundaries of what is possible and people are less happy than they were when it started. This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?

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>And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it

From what I understand, important factors to happiness are family, friends, sense of belonging, sense of purpose, and then more immediate factors such as stress and work/life balance.

Technology is arguably a negative influence on some of these factors like meaningful in person relationships. Also, much of this has more to do with society as a whole (having kids, having close extended families, being in meaningful long term partnerships) than technology in particular.

Let's look at the obvious, social media, which is some of the most impactful technology used everyday by real people. It's been discussed to exhaustion, but these arguably aren't tools that contribute to factors that promote happiness. They optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not happiness. Dopamine hacking =/ happiness boosting.

Technology is just a tool. It can be great, it can be very bad. What can of technology are we investing in ?

If you look at top US companies, half of top 10 is investing tens of billions $ trying to get people addicted to screens. That's reflected in the metrics you're seeing. It's an unfair game. Hell, even the richest guy in the world got his brain rotten recently (arguably with a solid help from drugs) and is spending his days posting soft anime porn AI generated images and videos.

It's just really all about the incentives. Everybody would like the world to be a better place, but who among top technologist, which are in big numbers here, are willing to work for 1/10 of what he can make at a big co, to make it happen ?

One reason (and certainly not the only reason) is that our governments are using economic growth, specifically GDP growth as a primary measure of success. That naturally leads to under spending on education, health, police, infrastructure, programs for disadvantaged, etc.

It's also justified the destruction of workers rights, which has led to a huge number of people being paid less in insecure jobs forcing them to work longer hours.

There was a time when ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" and trickle-down economics justified focusing economic success but increasing inequality has shown that it's not true.

Edit: And of course technology has enabled a lot of this.

I think the technology that has had the most impact on modern humans is the computer (in whatever size and format). Our lives aren't worse because of technological development in agriculture, manufacturing and so on.

I think that computers are simply too good for us. They are incredibly useful tools which fill in for gaps in our own human abilities (memory, processing, analysis), but are largely misused by most of the population (including myself).

We shouldn't be staring at glowing artificial screens filled with unnatural colours and designs, especially not for several hours a day. We shouldn't be consuming as much media as we do. We shouldn't be swapping real life socialisation for a sub-par digital rendition. We shouldn't be bombarding ourselves with so much easily acquired information every day.

Sure, there's many people who do moderate well, but they are a complete minority (getting ever smaller). If you use computers for work, for study, for entertainment, for hours every day, they are rewiring your brain. The best thing anybody can do is to reclaim their life. Use computers (including phones) sparingly, where they boost your abilities, and try to minimise the harmful effects of them.

I cannot even imagine how the brains of young people (I am 30) growing up today are developing with constant and very early onset exposure to computers, the internet and media, and the changes in the real world to reflect the online world. It's not natural, in any format. You can't truly adapt to it.

I’d like to posit a scenario that I’ve often thought on. Imagine you and 100 people all working together to say build a road. These are your friends, some family and other local community members many of whom you also care for and have known for many years.

As a group you work a 5 day week, 40 hours laying roads together.

There’s an especially hard part of the process, and you’ve been thinking on it and realise that with a new approach it can save 20% of the total effort.

To whom do you want the benefit to go. All to the boss, as they pay everyone and run the business? All to you as it was your idea. Or alternatively it could mean that everyone works 20% less, translating into that now everyone can do a four day week and have that extra day back to do and help with other things.

Consider less how it’s split now, and more how you’d want it to be split.

The big idea of yours is like the tech, consider also if others had come up with the improvement.

I’d be interested in what folks saw as fair splits and why. Boss, inventor, the collective.

The benefit will go to the buyer as 20% more road for the same price. The road workers will get performance reviews now, as any slack will drop production to a higher degree. The stuff turnover will increase as people can maintain that performance level only during short period of time and any injury will disqualify you instantly.

There will be more buyers because more people can afford road at that price and other businesses will benefit from more roads: shops can sell more tires, road repair and snow cleaning companies will have more work. Road building companies will delay hiring new hands as long as possible.

At the end, what we'll end up doing is working more for less money under higher pressure because any slack multiplies faster. With more companies buying cheaper services, there will be less stable companies who shouldn't be in the business anyways but who now is on the verge of bankruptcy and will make life of other businesses way more stressful and unpredictable.

Technology isn’t good or bad, it all depends on what is done with it.

The shift to the attention economy moved a lot of the major platforms from social media to an entertainment slot machine. Without being very intentional about how you use devices and seeking out actual connection, it is very easy to get sucked in while time slips away.

I would like to point out that technology is driven by a market of consumer apatites, not for the purpose of well being.

This is a tricky one, because the answer is so simple you may refuse to accept it, or it is made meaningless by its banality.

People are their own problem. Before we had to take more time to ourselves, we had to work out our problems and have some patience. That didn’t work for everyone either, though you can see life has been abstracted away from living somehow. It affects our self satisfaction.

Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.

Technology is only an extension of ourselves.

> Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.

This is good advice. There's not a small amount of irony that I'm writing this reply agreeing with you instead of actually doing any of those things.

Technology has created more complications and lead to less need for others, eroding the social fabric of communities. While it has been beneficial to certain subgroups or specific circumstances, overall it seems to a social negative.

Technology has also lead to less reliance on others, less real interaction, and disconnected cause and effect. So our jobs and lives seem less impactful than the past.

This might be an area the Amish get right. They generally seem like a content, if not happy, group. They have family and community with jobs they can see the impact of. It may be a simpler life filled with more hard work, but it seems wholesome.

It seems like what happens is the more choice - not less - is what makes being unhappy more probable, at least for some people. Maybe it is a sense of being overwhelmed with all the opportunities that the world provides.

The connectedness then also made it easier to see what others leverage the opportunities for, which constantly forces one to compare. It is of course, well-documented that these comparisons, almost by design, make it seem like one falls behind.

It is notable that poorer countries score pretty high usually on metrics trying to quanity happiness.

The cause is not technology, it's fossil fuels. The abundance of fossil fuels has made it possible to produce more and more. There are multiple counterparts:

1. Global warming, which is a direct consequence of fossil fuels. This has an impact on happiness, given that kids today are likely to die because of it, and society is not remotely addressing the problem; we're making it worse every day.

2. Biodiversity loss. Our increased productivity means more pesticides, more artificialisation of soils, more deforestation, more tourism, more fishing. All that contributes to the mass extinction we're living now. We are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs. We've lost 80% of insects in 20 years. That has an impact on happiness.

3. Geopolitics. We all rely heavily on fossil fuels and globalisation (which requires fossil fuels), and fossil fuels are not unlimited. The world geopolitics will become more unstable every year. That has an impact on happiness.

Look at the news: record fires every year, and we know that those are smaller than the ones that will come next year and the year after.

To improve happiness, technology should be used to do the same with less and in many cases just do less with less. Instead we want to do more with more, and this is killing us.

Human happiness is extremely elastic and subjective once the basic needs of life and essential safety from obvious, imminent, extremely visible threats are reasonably well covered.

This makes it easy to understand why many people self-report as unhappy despite having all measurable metrics of their material and fundamental existential well-being protected like at no time in human history.

Couple this with the bias in reporting on their subjective experience of unhappiness without ever having lived the harder kind of life that was normal in the past, for the sake of perspective.

Add to both the tediously demoralizing (unless you're resilient to it) effect of other social media-using humans trying to paint their lives as wonderful through selective reporting on a constant basis and all of this being visible for everyone else to see.

Also include in a moderate flow of (paradoxically) being saturated via media and social media with exaggerated, pathological over-focus on the dangers of generally uncommon problems and threats in life and the world.

The resulting pastry from all these ingredients: One very dubious notion of us haivng many more reasons to be unhappy today than before. We may think we have many reasons to be unhappy, but that's only because for the most part, we haven't seen what real reasons for deep unhappiness look like.

Obviously, i'm generalizing here. Not every unhappy person is unhappy due to frivolous things. There still exist many threats in life and many things that can bring on genuine misery, but they're more a minority now for more people than ever in the broad strokes of history.

One final point from all of the above: We're the source of our unhappiness. Technology is with rare exceptions just a tool, that we can use to interpret the world however we do, whether for bad or good.

To me the biggest problem is the over-financialization of almost all aspects of our lives. Our financial sector is much larger now than it was during WWII, when we were facing a national emergency. The emphasis is always on money and double-digit profits; whether it is our health care system, which always weighs our health against investor returns (and are happy to medicate our resulting mental distress, for a nice profit); our jobs, which are structured for "maximum efficiency"--for the owners, of course, at the expense of workers, who get low pay, low satisfaction, and burnout; all the products which we "buy" but don't own; automakers who have "innovated" new ways to squeeze every penny they can out of customers (subscribe to heated seats!).

Tech is not at all exempt from this. If anything tech is more affected by this phenomenon than most other industries due to the nature of its products, which are particularly susceptible to enshitification. Tech has no shame in actively manipulating its users to their ends, as we have seen with social media, and now with this phenomenon of AI psychosis. Further, tech leaders and investors are much more interested in the next unicorn than in meeting real needs and providing genuine user satisfaction. So yes, this is a hot mess. And it is driving people mad. To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?

Jacques Ellul's classic The Technological Society is very relevant here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

What he said in the 1950's has come true now;

From Confronting the Technological Society - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...

Rather, it [i.e. Technique] is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency … in every field of human activity. ... The machine has created the modern, industrial world, but it was originally a poor fit for society; technique was the process of adapting social conditions to the smooth churning of the machine,”

Ellul distills the essential characteristics of technique to a list of seven. The two most obvious ones, he says, have been addressed so often by other scholars that he can set them aside: rationality (for example, systematization and standardization) and artificiality (subjugation and often the destruction of nature). The other five characteristics of technique are less widely discussed. They are automatism, which is the process of technical means asserting themselves according to mathematical standards of efficiency; self-augmentation, the process of technical advances multiplying at a growing rate and building on each other, while the number of technicians also increases; wholeness, the feature of all individual techniques and their various uses sharing a common essence; universalism, the fact that technique and technicians are spreading worldwide; and autonomy, the phenomenon of technique as a closed system, “a reality in itself … with its special laws and its own determinations.”

Also see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society Overview - https://medium.com/@NimaCheraghi/jacques-ellul-the-technolog...

Awesome, came here to mention this important work of Ellul!

Following a parallel theme of labour vs. work vs. action and the dissolution of the public sphere (as enabled by technology), I can also recommend Arendt's The Human Condition for further reading.

Jacques Ellul's two classics The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (wikipedia has an excellent overview - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...) should be required reading for every educated person today. With the rise of AI and its unconstrained applications his works seem even more prescient than before.

Technology and "Technique" have become so inherent and intrinsic to modern society and life today that hardly any intellectual is able to stand apart from it and critique it like Ellul was able to. We are already in the early stages of a social dystopia but are unable to recognize it since the paintings of it (by vested interests) are so very seductive.

Assuming you're a technologist of sorts, did this knowledge impact your life choices? I'm currently diving deeper into philosophy with the aim of gaining a wider perspective on things and maybe, one day, find a more meaningful job than my current one.

Yes, i would say my study of Philosophy, Understanding of Science, Practice of Technology, Applications to Psychology (both Individual and Group) has had a powerful impact on my life choices. It enabled me to sacrifice my job/career/future in the tech. industry a decade ago so that i could live with/take care of my aged Mother until her end without too much regret.

Philosophy taught me to discount Money/Worldly standards, Science taught me the need to have mental philosophical worldviews not be too dissonant from Objective Reality, Technology enabled me to earn my livelihood and finally Psychology enabled the coming together of all of the above in one's own being.

The way to think about this is;

1) What is the meaning of Life objectively i.e. outside-in from the pov of the Universe? This question is meaningless and unanswerable. However you can know aspects of Objective Reality using the Scientific Method and learn to manipulate/adapt it thus enhancing your subjective experience of it. This is the realm of all the Modern Hard Sciences and Technologies which are borne out of them.

2) What is the meaning of my Life subjectively i.e. inside-out from the pov of personal Experiences/Feelings/Emotions/Thoughts/Actions? This the fundamental question of Human Condition and answered by the various extent Philosophies/Religions/Psychologies. You devise "Worldviews" into Objective Reality but taking care that you don't stray into fantasy land.

The various Hindu Schools of philosophies and their derivative Buddhist schools have much to offer here. In particular the Samkhya School (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya) provides a good Worldview which meshes nicely with our Modern Sciences. A practical realization of the above Worldview is provided by the Ashtanga Yoga school of Patanjali (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_(eight_limbs_of_yoga) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali)

The Greek schools of philosophies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_philosophy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_philosophy) also have much to offer here though their focus is more on harmoniously interfacing to/experiencing of/modulating of Objective Reality for a Good Life.

PS: You might also find the book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia interesting. Pdf available at https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...

> To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?

Well for starters: consume less, vote, volunteer, get outside, engage with your local community, etc. Just be mindful that it’s easy to get discouraged when you are seemingly trying to take on the world. Small steps matter in the grand scheme of things.

Technology is not one thing, it includes many things that are good for the world and many things that are bad for the world. Over the last generation or two it's trended from empowering the poor to empowering the rich.

Here's my list of things making it worse: cities designed for cars, no third spaces, poorly designed public space, hostile architecture, no social safety net, replacing social relationships with parasocial relationships, filling every moment of idle time with glacing at your phone, smaller families/smaller extended families, low access to nature, needing a second job (or low free time), too much screentime.

One problem is that we're, on average, fatter than before, and while tech isn't the primary cause, it's a contributor. Being overweight can cause sleep apnea, which in turn can cause depression and anxiety because it turns out you get pretty anxious in your sleep when you can't breathe.

The question you need to ask yourself are:

- what exactly is “technology”?

- what is the difference between a screwdriver and Twitter? In other words, what are tools, and are they all equal?

- what is the end goal of a technological society focused on ever-increasing shareholder revenue?

Neil Postman has good books on this topic.

Are we really more unhappy? Or is it more that we don't know what happiness is nowadays?

Answer to first question: "every meaningful metric reflects this same picture - self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates. Anything you can think of as a proxy for whether people are enjoying life is either stagnant or down."

Answer to second question: No.

The key bit there is 'self reported'. The second question - your opinion is important.

P.S. Note that "self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates" lists 5 measures, only 2 of which are self reported. And how else could they be measured? The point is that the evidence shows that happiness levels have declined. Talk about "your opinion" is ... ironic.

> If technology is so good for the world

What makes you take it as axiom? Technology is not good for the world and never was, few applications excluded.

Its so good for market and it's puppets, for tech bozos, for government.

And as a book recommendation, I would suggest Unabomber manifesto, by Theodore Kaczynski. Its very short and concise, written decades ago but reflecting modern society in a very uncanny way.

”The modern labourer…becomes an appendage of the machine” Marx

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” Einstein

“Our souls have become corrupted as our sciences and arts have advanced toward perfection” Rousseau

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” Thoreau

And on and on. Who said technology is good? The simple things in life are the best.

I have a book recommendation for you: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.

Read it. You will find some answers and some actionable steps to alleviate your problems.

Unabomber manifesto will fit him more. And likely hit him as well

Despite the fact that it was written by a terrorist, it’s a correct recommendation. It has an unexpected staying power, even if you fully disagree with it.

Does the truth change it's state if comes from a terrorist, if you like?

I am addressing those who won't read something written by a terrorist.

This question is so multifaceted and psychological (personally, and in the end, collectively), that it cannot be answered satisfyingly.

> This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?

Everyone afraid of indictment has either sold their stock or died.

Maybe the purpose of Life is not for happy, There are other more important purpose!

Because inflationary fascism rules the world.

Less happy compared to some earlier time period, but which one is the question. The 1950's, 1960's perhaps when single income was enough to afford a middle class life style? Likely less happy than our boomer parents. But are we less happy when compared to the gilded age when workers toiled 12 hours daily? Definitely not.

The answer lies not only in technology/social media but as other commentators have pointed out, but perhaps in inflation and cost of living crisis. Family breakdown due to one income not being sufficient could be a major factor.

Despite current politics, as a minority I’m definitely happier now than if I had to live through the 50s and 60s.

Go outside, touch grass and trees.

The internet, smartphones, social media, all want your attention by bombarding you with information. Too much information to process.

You need to go outside in nature, go hiking, do some sports outside, read a book, have a picnic.

Everything in life is about balance, even with technology consumption.

Capitalism makes the world worse faster than technology makes it better. It's like Andy and Bill's Law.

I think capitalism is directly responsible for the technological innovation and breakneck speed it has occurred at that we enjoy today.

https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2023/5-key-findings-on-the-relatio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocapitalism

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-o...

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/denny-center/blog/the-role-of...

Which has made the world worse if you go by vibes and better if you go by numbers.

We (the general population, not so much us decently-paid software developers) have no money. Technology is not the cause or solution here, people are becoming increasingly less able to afford things by the day.

It'd argue it's both cause and solution, as it, in the hands of the rich, drives the disparity between poor and rich further and further.

Almost all people live in places where there is a division between ruled and ruler, or something close to it. Technology enables rulers to do ruler-type things easier, so that's why it stays. The rulers are probably happy even if they put on a show of unhappiness to the ruled, and whether or not the ruled are unhappy are immaterial to the rulers. It's not that the rulers are evil, it's just that the rulers are ones to take care of themselves, so when the ruled are unhappy, they perceive it as their fault.

The Internet was weird in that for a brief second it really looked like it was the great leveler and a place where all humanity to stand on equal footing, at least to the ruled under the current major players on the world stage at that time. But of course, maybe that was just post fall-of-the-Soviet-union zeitgeist. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Time to stop relying on the Internet and get back to building in-real-life networks.

I'm definitely not in the ruler class, but I'm happy. Media isn't real, and I've decided to limit my consumption of media I don't like, including "news", and fill my time with things I do like.

Also I'm getting tired of this recent overarching attempt to make concern over birth rates a thing. If the rulers were worried about birth rates they'd start paying people to have and raise kids. Because they have all the money so they can do that if they want. Until they do, it's not something I'm going to care about.

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