Liberated and Unhappy | Hacker News Reader

Liberated and Unhappy

nytimes.com

27 pointsrobg26 comments

For one thing, who said liberty equals happiness? It may be that the animal born in captivity is happiest, knowing nothing of the world beyond its cage. That does not of course cause liberty to be pointless. Liberty may enable you to better provide for yourself and others around you, but it also stresses you by exposing you to the elements. The problem is with the persistent popular narrative that equalises the two, its falsity rendering observations paradoxical.

how does it follow from this then, that men are happier?

Here's one possible explanation:

Apparently, women are happy with their lot earlier in their lives, whereas men have bigger financial goals and tend to be unfulfilled during their 20s, both financially and in their family lives, which makes them miserable.

But by middle age, men have fulfilled their financial and family life goals and have cheered up, whereas women are more likely to be unfulfilled and unhappy.

The authors think a major factor underlying this is the shift in the proportion of men and women in relationships: men are more likely to be single in their 20s, and women are more likely to be alone in middle age.

They admit that this rests on the assumption that being married actually makes people happy, but they point out that if marriage is something you really want (and they found that 90% of both genders did), then being single might get you down.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2008/07/a...

No surprise there. Being 19 and male is miserable, except for the few who are lucky enough to find a soulmate that early, and the low-quality sort of man who tends to be more generally successful at that age, but I'd much rather be a single 40-year-old man than a single woman at that age.

I wonder how these findings play out for people who are in long-term stable relationships. I'd bet that there isn't a huge gender disparity or "cross-over" for them, since their happiness depends largely on the health of the relationship, and the number of alternatives isn't really relevant.

"Being 19 and male is miserable, except for the few who are lucky enough to find a soulmate that early"

I get the impression that you didn't enjoy college. Who wants a soulmate so early? Seriously. Only weak and / or disabled people need someone else to look after them at the age of 19.

I need an automatic Ross Douthat filter.

He knows so much about women.

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point--"Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered--"You know, I'm on the pill..."

From his book Privilege, page 184.

See: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/fear-of-reese-withersp...

This is a simple issue: awareness of opportunity cost leads to unhappiness. The expanded perception of individual potential ("you can be anything you want!"), and the Feminism movement that has given that sentiment extra appeal ("you can have everything that men have, and more!") makes the awareness even more acute.

When your appetite is grossly inflated, you will be constantly hungry and dissatisfied, almost by definition.

I vaguely remember research that finds perception of opportunity cost giving the same brain response as the loss of a physical object (70% sure; I'll be gladly corrected). If this is the case, it's even more amusing: you can nearly create limitless unhappiness, because there is an unlimited number of "phantom things" that you can tell people that they "are capable of owning" but it is mathematically impossible for them to do so.

The source cited by this article only indicates that women's happiness has declined, but not that it is actually lower than that of men. In fact I recall reading a report recently that men are still less happy overall.

Another possible explanation for the observed decline is that women, no longer expected to be so docile and submissive, are less inclined to pretend to be happy when they really aren't.

From the article: "Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

Yes, I believe the last sentence is false.

The first thing that comes to mind reading this is the emphasis Americans tend to place on skinny, Barbie like figures. We see it everywhere from the checkout counters at the grocery stores to the commercials on TV. Most women will never look like the covermodels, yet they're made to believe thats what it means to be beautiful. No wonder women are generally more unhappy now than they were a few decades ago.

(But as the author states, it's probably not so simple.)

Another reading of the same results: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1456

So despite the fact that single motherhood has no apparent effect on happiness[1], his solution to the "happiness gap" is instituting a social stigma against sex, to prevent single motherhood.

[1] > A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

Well, yeah - the author's a religious conservative (hired recently to keep some representation of Team Red in the NYT editorial pages), and he's shamelessly grabbing random data and trying to make them support his political goals.

[citation needed]

Citation available at the linked site. :)

Women's liberation since the 60s has only indirectly made women unhappy. Contraception has made women unhappy, and men happy.

Women instinctively want to date and marry up. The recent economic equality discussed in the article has made that mathematically impossible. Just a thought.

> Women instinctively want to date and marry up.

On what basis do you make that claim? And doesn't the same hold true for men? (Maybe along a different axis, e.g. physical attractiveness - see "trophy wife")

Yes, research surveys seem to indicate this although I can't remember the source. It's going to be an interesting future with a bunch of desperate housewives around wondering why reality is different from the Bridget Jones movie :)

So much ado about nothing...

Lacking a rigorous and universal definition of what happiness is, all this talk is pretty much pointless. Maybe the whole feminist movement fed women with unrealistic expectations and their misery stems from the reality-expectation mismatch. Anyways, who cares?

In the social sciences, it's usual to use an operational definition [1]. For many variables are constructs [2] and they cannot be observed directly.

The authors of the above paper seem to have used different operational definitions, and they all point in the same direction. So one can state with reasonable certainty that women's happiness declined in the last 30 years.

A discussion about potential explanations for the phenomenon can hardly be called pointless.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_(philosophy_of_scienc...

"Social sciences" is an oxymoron. Everyone with a functioning brain knows that....

women were so "happy" 40 years ago they decided to march in the streets for the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). women were so happy 40 years ago they were burning their bras for equality. women were so happy 40 years ago they made far less than their male counterparts and sex discrimination was open and readily accepted in business. yep, women sure were happy 40 years ago. the author is a nut!

Modern womankind has, over the past decades, increasingly rebelled against the natural order of things as instituted by the God many claim doesn't exist and now, faced with the results of that decision they appear to want sympathy.

It occurs to me that 'seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you' would be a response that gets to the nub of the problems demonstrated here.

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