Technology: Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy.
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kk.org
Well, just think for a minute about the results being produced by the brand-new science of paleopathology. Now that we can do autopsies on 5000 year old Egyptian mummies, we know that [1]:
- malaria, tuberculosis, severe ear infections, a variety of intestinal worms and kindred parasites, silicosis (a lung disorder caused by inhaling sand over a long span of time) [were all widespread], as well as perhaps smallpox, polio, and gout...
- severe tooth loss, common to all classes ... resulting from the infiltration of windblown sand into granaries and kitchens. The teeth of pharaohs and commoners alike were steadily worn down, often nearly to the gums, leading to ... CHRONIC TOOTH AND GUM INFECTIONS THAT COULD IN SOME CASES BE FATAL.
- bone growth patterns disclose a chronic pattern of malnutrition...
- [besides schistosomiasis, one specimen's] body was a beehive of various parasites ... had he lived on into EARLY ADULTHOOD, he might well have contracted such degenerative diseases as ARTERIOSCLEROSIS and ARTHRITIS. We tend today to associate these with middle or old age...
[1] Hollister & Rogers, Roots of the Western Tradition. Emphasis is mine.
Look at the number of people who complain that our president is corrupt, politics is doomed, the world is falling apart, etc. Politically speaking, things are more transparent now than ever before in history. Fewer people are being persecuted for their beliefs than ever before. On the whole, everybody is happier now than they were ten years ago, or ten years before that.
I'm usually guilty of being overly critical of things, and while I think that criticism has its place, there's a line between being critical of things to make it better and hating something because it doesn't reach a standard that couldn't have possibly existed even a year ago. A lot of people would be a lot happier if they could back off a little bit and see things for how they are rather than how they wish they were.
I knew this happiness after coming back from a deployment to Afghanistan. The people there had nothing, usually not even power, and our own accommodations weren't exactly... modern. I swore that I'd never forget how good I had it here, and indeed I didn't for a long time -- I even came to severely resent "Westerners" for a while.
During my "time of appreciation" lets say, I was very happy. I found joy and worth in the simplest of things, from showering with clean water to drinking a beer. Unfortunately, over time I once again became acclimated to my environment and now likely take things as much for granted as I did a few years ago.
I've found it takes a large amount of conscious effort to not fall into this same trap. It seems to be very much a case of "out of sight, out of mind"; the things I saw and experienced are mere vague memories now and somehow life has a way of blinding me from what I was once acutely aware: that no matter how bad I have it, others have it worse than I used to be able to imagine.
My daily walk with my dog is a real treasure to me now. Definitely couldn't have said such a thing about myself ten years ago.
http://longevity.stanford.edu/mymind/mentalhealthandemotiona...
“Human minds don’t process information like a computer,” says Carstensen, who was one of the first researchers to discover that older people tend to be happier. “We process what is relevant to our goals.”
And as we age, our goals tend to change — toward achieving emotional well-being, she says.
My favorite part of this article is this paragraph:
Further studies that showed a similar positivity effect in young people whose expected life spans were cut short by cancer or AIDS led to Carstensen’s current “shorter life span” explanation for the positivity effect.
This suggests that maintaining an awareness of your own mortality is a useful way to improve your happiness -- by encouraging yourself to focus on the positive -- and, paradoxically, that pretending you are going to live forever may be a recipe for unhappiness.
I find that contemplating death has a very similar effect, -- not the way you'll die necessarily, just that you will, go in the ground, rot, and everybody and everything will move on without you.
It's very good for the ol perspective muscle, once you get over the initial freak-out of contemplating The End of You.
The Budoshoshinshu at Google Books:
1. General personality; he believes most people are either "generally happy" or "generally unhappy" with regard to how they interpret both extreme (death) and everyday (sunset) events.
2. How emotionally confident one is that they've "found their place in the world" and the feelings that contribute to that peace (sense of accomplishment, etc.)
When I finally escaped our hometown, moved to Boston, and began this adventure that became a company, I soon started seeing beauty in everything. I was finally happy with where I was at that moment and nothing else mattered. I could not be upset.
Naively, I thought that might last forever; it didn't. Though not nearly as restless as I was a few years ago, it has crept back slowly and I no longer have that feeling of nirvana, if you will. I hope it comes back, though; I miss the beauty of those sunsets.
That's one of the central messages in Buddhism, FWIW. It's what "desire is the root of suffering" refers to.
I suspect there's a degree of evolutionary pressure in this. An individual who is never satisfied is more likely to be successful than one who is easily satisfied. Without our ability to dwell on the negatives and forget the positives, we wouldn't have invented half the things we have.
I also suspect that, given a century or two, we'll have discovered ways of spreading the risk of catastrophic events. Perhaps by regularly downloading our consciousness and distributing backups across the solar system, perhaps even a few sent to neighbouring stars: "Alpha Centuri Backups - Just In Case Some Jackass Blows Up The Sun".
But we ignore the good stuff that's happening right now and focus on the bad stuff.
I think this explains why people always think things were better 10, 20, 30 years ago.
I generally agree with you though.
Recently, my brother-in-law (who's from a different country) came to visit. He saw the small differences that having the internet in your pocket can make - get a map of downtown right away, figure out the best route to that lot you parked on, figure out the phone number and closing time of that restaurant two blocks away, find out that it's not going to snow tomorrow so you can plan accordingly, all while having coffee at some corner store.
Is it life changing? No. But it's that incremental step that just makes some things a little bit easier, a bit more convenient.
Yes, the goal posts keep moving. And all of us here want to create the next thing that moves it just a bit more once again.
In many places, these same technologies are lifechanging. Here's an "I love technology. I love capitalism. I love technocapitalism" story for you: many 3rd world fishermen lead a close to subsistence existence by catching fish and then having to take it to market. Market conditions at towns A, B, and C vary on a day to day basis. If you pick the wrong town to deliver your catch to, you lose out on earnings and some other town loses out on cheap fish. In the worst case, you may be unable to sell your fish at all, in which case the fish rot while someone else starves.
But now, you have a cell phone.
So you can call ahead to towns A, B, and C and ask them "Hey, what is the going price for fish today?" Then you head to the one that reported the highest price. Problem solved.
This means that you can sell your catch, every day, and never go home to the family empty handed. It also means that no one ever goes to the market and comes home saying "Sorry kids, no fish today."
All because of a little technical doohickey that is practically disposable in the Western world these days.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/qjec.122.3.8...
It reminds me of the quote by Bertrand Russell: "To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."No doubt in a few hundred years people will wonder how we ever got along happily in the era we live in now. They may think it inconceivable that we could be happy under such circumstances.
sudo shutdown -h now.
People forget that for thousands of years we were hard wired to kill those attacking us, hunt for food, and protect our family. We struggled through disease, famine, lived in every condition this world can throw, and now we only use our brain and our bodies become confused when the genes tell them one thing and we do another.
Its probably going to be a while until our bodies catch up to our brains(maybe never).
It is a near impossibility to define quality of life, a deeply personal set of values, judgements and emotions. But in recent years there have been breakthroughs, a new sense of empowerment, a new degree of functionality for our tools: Research is now immensely powerful, fast, cheap and enjoyable, it used to be a slow, painful and expensive chore. To have the entirety of Britannica, Wikipedia, millions of pages of writings of all ages, find answers to almost any question in seconds, view them on a huge sharp window-to-the-world screen: a pure joy to "work".
Images: memories can be frozen in time, at any occasion, in beautiful detail, collected by the hundreds of thousands. The few cineastic masterpieces mankind produced, among the wretched majority of trashy abyss, one can now own & watch, rerun & freeze-frame. Music: all I ever cherished at my direct disposal, tens of thousands of pieces. Bach's lifetime oeuvre, 160 CDs worth, in my pocket even! Consider that just a few generations ago?
A perfect cup of tea, the right bread with great jam, the Berlin Philharmonic plays NOW, just for ME, exactly THAT ....and will even pause when I pee! What more does anyone need ??
Billions of our predecessors would have spontaneously combusted with "instant happiness overdose syndrome" given all these wonderful means, and I am not even mentioning heated rooms, lit at night, clean showers, safe food, ubiquitous mobility or dentists with anaesthesia.
...
No need to invoke grand sweeping forces, momentous upheaval, those armies of nano-tech, gene-spliced A.I. robots...
Let's embrace the peace and quiet of keeping things just as they are for a while. Bring them to the rest of the planet. Taking the time to truly enjoy them, milking the moment for all it has, really watching, listening, smelling and tasting it all.... ...that stasis..... that changed everything.
(I believe this one has more than one dupe)
It's a good article, though. People naturally gravitate towards a feeling of unhappiness. I believe that if you look at most religions over the years, instead of finding out about religion, you end up finding out about the natural emotional state of man, i.e. that people are hard-wired to feel certain ways and they'll find some way of feeling them no matter what the age is.
Overall, this is a good thing -- drives innovation, keeps societies from stagnating, etc. In fact, hell would be a society in which everybody was perfectly at peace all the time. It seems we are designed to struggle and perform our best when we are struggling.
It's like eating straw all day long: at the end you are full of nothing (really important).