COMFY, GRUMPY PEOPLE
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INTRODUCTION
The dream that we may one day establish a world free from hardship and poverty is very old indeed. Europeans of the Middle Ages imagined a utopia they called 'Cockaigne', a land where any food you desired was there for the taking, where there were rivers of wine, and nobody had to work anymore. The Roman poet Virgil spoke for humanity's longing for paradise when he described 'Arcadia', an idealised country where violence and disease were abolished, material needs met with minimal effort and the people free to occupy themselves with dancing, drinking and relaxation.
A fabled land where there is such an abundance of goods most people may expect material luxuries that were once available only to the most privileged? It sounds both wondrous and impossible.
Or is it? Could it not be said that the Utopias of Cockaigne or Arcadia seem a lot like the reality of daily life in first world countries? If so, it could then be argued that our ancestors were right in some respects but wrong in others. They were right to believe that there could one day be civilisations capable of reaching such high levels of productivity that even the poor would be well-off by the standards of previous generations. But they were wrong to think such a situation would bring about universal happiness.
I think the evidence shows that the latter assumptions are correct: Utopia as imagined by our ancestors more or less exists for inhabitants of first world countries, but this has not made us happy.
THE GREAT PROSPERITY
Ok, I admit that we have not quite succeeded in eliminating toil. Nor have we achieved total victory in the war against disease. But what we have achieved is the ability to provide an incredible range of goods and services with remarkably little labour required from each of us individually. To see this is so, just visit any supermarket or shopping centre and imagine being a 16th century peasant suddenly teleported to such a temple to consumerism with a couple of hundred pounds in today's money. What a bounty would lay before you! You would find more varieties of bread, and in greater quantities, than you had ever before encountered. You would find row after row of wine, the cheapest of which would be of superior quality to those enjoyed by royalty in your day. And then there would be the products that simply did not exist in the 16th century. King Henry VIII suffered from a leg wound that became infectious. In any supermarket there is a pharmacy selling treatments that provide relief that King Henry, with all his fortune, could not have purchased.
The change that has occurred in living standards for the average person in first world countries is quite remarkable. Just a century ago, poor families in cities like New York were crammed into tiny, windowless apartments. Today, overcrowding (which housing experts generally define as more than one person per dwelling room) is down to 33% of the US population. Not only do more of us enjoy more personal space, our dwellings are also a good deal more luxurious. Two generations ago, only 15% of Americans had centrally-heated homes. Now, 95% do. Pretty much nobody had air conditioning in our grandparent's generation, and now 78% of households have it.
Thousands of private aircraft are owned by people who are by no means mega-rich, and millions of Americans own a second home, enjoy foreign vacations and various other kinds of lifestyle that was once the exclusive preserve of only the most affluent in society.
In short, if you are fortunate enough to live in the States or a European country, and particularly if you have achieved at least a lower-middle standard living, you can consider yourself to be living more comfortably than 99% of humanity throughout history. Charts and statistics bare this out. You can take almost any objective indicator of social welfare, and you will find it has trended upwards over the past two generations.
With one exception: Happiness. The trend line for happiness has remained flat these past fifty years. Today, roughly 25% of Americans and Europeans can expect to suffer at least one bout of depression in their lives. It may well be important to note that only unipolar depression has increased in the postwar era, while bipolar depression has not increased. Bipolar depression is now considered to have a chemical origin, whereas unipolar depression is not seen as a physical disease, but rather one that is caused by something within society or within our own minds. We see no rise in unipolar depression in the developing world, which seems to suggest that living in societies quite close to the 'land of milk and honey' type Utopias imagined by our ancestors actually leaves us less happy, not more.
But why should that be? How come we, who now enjoy the fruits of great material comfort that our ancestors worked so hard to establish, reward their efforts with such dissatisfaction?
NOT EVOLVED TO BE HAPPY
One reason may be to do with how our minds work. We have brains that were shaped by the kind of evolutionary pressures encountered by ancestors who lived in dangerous environments. In such conditions, it may actually be beneficial to have an anxious mind, tuned to negative outcomes. If you are easy-going, merrily smelling the flowers, such lack of attention to the dangers around you could result in your falling foul of predation or some other misfortune that removes your genes from the genepool. On the other hand, the ultimate biological reward of passing on one's genes may well have favoured those ancestors who were inclined to assume the worst and who felt no contentment regardless of how much they had managed to obtain. As Bruce McEwen, whose expertise is in the biology of stress, said:
"Stressed-out people are wary of circumstances and plan obsessively to avoid dangers, whereas happy-go-lucky people may not notice they are walking into a trap".
If evolutionary psychology is right in saying that some mental states are more transmissible than others, and if it is true that assuming the worst was about to happen was a more favourable survival strategy for our ancestors, we would then have at least one reason why we persist in feeling like things are not going well when, by any objective measure, they have never been better.
KNOWING THE PAINS OF THE WORLD
On a personal level, most individuals living in first world countries encounter far fewer and less dramatic causes of anxiety than our ancestors. But, as stress researcher Joseph LeBoux pointed out, "people of the past were stressed by things they encountered personally, that were in the limited field of vision. Now, everybody knows everything going wrong in the world". This is made possible, of course, by global communications and media networks that broadcast bad news almost as soon as it happens right into our homes. As we shall see later, there is an incentive to prioritise bad news over positive happenings which must also be going on all the time. But, sticking to psychological reasons why we feel little satisfaction in our comfy lives, not only do we have minds shaped by evolutionary pressures to be alert to dangers, our stress triggers seem to have become more delicate in their settings. After all, people in modern life can be upset by issues that would have been far too small for our ancestors to even notice. A possible reason for why we are more easily stressed could be lack of sleep. For most of human history, an average of ten hours sleep per night was probably the norm, whereas now the average is down to seven hours. Cortisol, a hormone involved in stress, stops production during sleep so by getting less of it we are perhaps denying ourselves suitable rest from the stress response.
Another reason why we feel little satisfaction on a personal level was uncovered by research conducted by Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University. According to this research, people tend to judge their well-being not based on how things are now, but rather whether they are likely to improve in the future. The more our standards of living are raised, the harder it becomes to imagine further increases in prosperity to come. At the same time, as we have already touched upon, we have media eager to tell us that things are about to get worse, perhaps because of economic meltdown, ecological collapse or countless other impending calamities.
IT'S BAD NEWS WEEK
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So why is there such a preference for bad news? The dictates of fundraising are one reason. As Greg Easterbrook explained in 'The Progress Paradox', "a clear lesson of modern life is that money awaits on the extremes of an issue, but not at the consensus centre". So fundraisers are incentivised to broadcast messages that things are about to go to hell unless something (IE donating money) is done about it, and quickly. Similarly, political parties have an incentive to paint life under the government as all doom and gloom.
For the elites of society, there is an additional incentive for emphasising bad news, because in general it is during times of crisis that we turn to our leaders for their advice. On the other hand, when things are going well the elite classes are considered to be less important. So, the extent to which there are problems may well be exaggerated by elites who gain stature during times of crisis.
I think a few of things support the hypothesis that the elites of society emphasise bad news so as to maintain their importance. Firstly, there is the sheer number of issues that are deemed to be worthy of the word 'crisis'. Seems like every problem affecting the world today is a crisis. Trains running late? Crisis! Price of Marmite gone up? Crisis! And then there is the respect given to authors who write books like 'the Population Bomb' (Paul Ehrlrich) or 'The Decline Of The West' (Oswald Spengler), which predict a catastrophic collapse of Western civilisation. Such works are held in high esteem by intellectual elites, and continue to be revered even when the future has arrived and, far from becoming the hell predicted by those doom-Sayers, the West has actually become richer, freer and more secure than ever.
FEAR SELLS
To be an elite in today's world means being positioned near the apex of a system that is geared toward consumption. The rock star Marilyn Manson suggested a link between fear and consumption, saying:
"You're watching TV, your're watching the news, you're being pumped full of fear. There's floods, there's AIDS, there's murder. Cut to commercial. Buy the Acura. Buy the Colgate. If you have bad breath, they're not gonna talk to you. And it's just...it's a campaign of fear and consumption. And that's just what I think it's all based on, is the idea that, 'keep everyone afraid and they'll consume'".
Even if you think Manson is exaggerating the link between fear and consumption, what is harder to deny is the link between dissatisfaction and a consumer-orientated way of life. After all, to be satisfied is to be content with your life as it is, not exactly a state of mind open to change. So today we are surrounded by advertisements designed to foster a feeling of dissatisfaction in order to sell us solutions to problems real and imagined.
What drives consumerism is not so much survival anxiety as 'status anxiety'. Feeling anxious about how one is viewed by society is not new. As far back as the 18th century, Adam Smith observed that, while nobody needs linen shirts for protection from the elements, nevertheless a need for such garments does exist if one lives in a society that pours scorn on those dressed inappropriately. Another form of socially-driven angst is 'reference anxiety', in which one's life compares unfavourably to others. The writer David Brooks compared towns like York, Pennsylvania (where residents had median incomes) to affluent suburbs like Montgomery County, Maryland. For residents of modest communities, most of what is available is more or less affordable. But, for higher-income residents of affluent areas, it was by no means unusual to pass by palatial homes and stores selling big-ticket merchandise only the richest can afford: constant reminders of how lacking your own life is.
UNSATISFIABLE WANTS
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Plagued with status anxiety, reference anxiety, and fed a constant stream of problems real and imagined, we are lead into a trap of emotionally-driven consumerism, encouraged to live beyond our means. But wants (unlike needs) can never be satisfied, particularly when living in consumer-orientated societies geared toward increased growth. The very abundance that has blessed us with the ability to live comfortable lives brings so many things to market it can feel like there is a never ending succession of things to covet. That's no doubt better than genuine scarcity but hardly an ideal if all it really achieves is to keep us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. A clear indication that runaway consumerism can be considered a genuine ill can be seen in studies suggesting shopaholicalism can be treated with antidepressants. As Easterbrook said, "if an antidepressant relieves the condition, this tells us that consumerism and depression are linked. That is not good news for a society grounded in consumerism".
Can our scrambling for more stuff be attributed solely to living in societies geared toward a consumer lifestyle and perpetuating status and reference anxiety? I think that's only part of the reason. There is also what I would call the 'opposing fallacy', or the idea that if something is bad its opposite must therefore be good. Where wealth is concerned, too little of it invariably purchases misery. It may therefore seem obvious that the more wealth you accumulate the happier you will become. But that's not what studies show. Instead, we see a correlation with rising income and rising happiness only up to the point where the ascent takes one out of poverty and into a middle-class lifestyle. Beyond that, money decouples from happiness. Indeed more and more affluence may even exaggerate the conditions that lower quality of life. As Easterbrook put it, "steadily smaller households, made possible by prosperity, mean steadily less human interaction...the idealised images of romantic partners in entertainment and advertising can make...a life with an admirable but not extraordinary person seem a disappointment rather than a privilege".
Advertising encourages us to believe that happiness can be bought with money, or at least to suppose that there is a correlation between happiness and the acquisition of consumer goods. If adverts are to be believed, choosing the right soft drink makes the difference between being in with the right crowd, or an excluded outsider; owning the right car can lead to romance. These are false promises cynically designed to keep us chasing after shiny baubles in a hopeless quest to recover lost meaning.
OUR RESPONSIBILITY
But the blame cannot be attributed exclusively to advertising and consumerism. If there is a lack of satisfaction in our lives, that may also be due to the fact that we have not learned to recognise true paths to happiness. After all, one can always turn off commercial TV and not pay attention to billboard advertisements. A significant obstacle to fulfilment in one's own life comes in the form of things that distract us from that which can make us truly happy, or cause us to focus too much on things that bring dissatisfaction. Comparing oneself to others is an example of a focus that can foster disappointment. It need not necessarily leave us feeling unhappy: If people compared themselves to most other people, they would probably find their daily struggles were shared with plenty others. But no, people compare their lives to those they imagine to be far happier than they: Celebrities, movie stars, Facebook profiles of attractive, smiling, successful people. Helen Telushkin reckoned, "the only happy people I know are people I don't know well". If we could keep her words in mind and not compare our lives to strangers who we imagine to have such wonderful lives, we would have one less cause of dissatisfaction distracting us from the true path to happiness.
The reason why celebrities' lives are the yardstick by which we judge our own lives is because they seem so successful, and many people think achieving success is a guaranteed path to happiness. Unfortunately, this is not the case, or at least it isn't if you pursue success because you think happiness depends upon it. Success alone cannot bring happiness, if only because whatever level of success you achieve, there is always a higher level to strive for. How much success is enough?
Success's inability to be the sole-determinant of happiness is made worse by the fact that whenever somebody is said to be successful, it is almost always because they have accumulated great wealth, significantly more than the the point were income and happiness decouple from one another. There are of course sound reasons to work to obtain money in a capitalist society. With money you can buy security and financial peace of mind that could put you in a position to pursue deeper, more meaningful goals. Just don't expect money itself to buy happiness, because it can't.
Another distraction from happiness is fun. We go on social media sites and find endless posts from people having a better time than we are. Of course they are happy- look at how much fun they are having! According to Dennis Prager (author of 'Happiness Is A Serious Problem') people's attitude toward fun and happiness can be expressed in the equation H=nf or 'the amount of happiness equals the number of fun experiences'. But the pursuit of fun and and of itself is not sufficient to bring happiness. Fun is best thought of as the spice of life. Just as the right amount of spice can really liven up a meal, but can never be a meal by itself, so too can fun never be a substitute for true happiness.
FREE TO CHOOSE
All these things- money, fun- can perhaps be incorporated into a larger mistaken assumption that circumstances are What determine a person's level of happiness. In other words, how happy we are is to fall foul of what Jean-Paul Sartre called 'Bad Faith'. Sartre believed that people are reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which they are free. It is more comforting to deny freedom, thereby offloading responsibility for the state of one's life to some external cause. An example of what Sartre called bad faith would be the belief that circumstances dictate whether we are happy or sad. "Of course I am feeling miserable, such and such has happened". In actual fact, we can always find the discipline to choose for ourselves how we will feel, and there is actually not much correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are.
The most persuasive evidence supporting this claim comes from positive psychology studies of quadriplegics and lottery winners. I dare say that if most people were asked which of those two groups generally had a higher sense of well-being, they would choose the group who had won a fortune over the group who had lost their limbs. But no, as a group, quadriplegics have a higher sense of well-being. Thinking about why this should be so, Prager supposed:
"The winners, we could guess, were swept up in materialism and betrayed by it, while the quadriplegics had to adjust to their conditions, and in so doing learned to appreciate the fact of being alive".
I think a more accurate explanation would be to say that the lottery winners, as a group, fell foul of the mistaken assumption that there is a quick and easy path to happiness. This is not the case. As the 19th century essayist John Lubbock said, "happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin". To achieve and sustain happiness requires constant thought and reflection. It requires the self-discipline needed to overcome natural inclinations to indulge in what feels good in the moment over what might purchase greater happiness in the future. And the path to happiness is not a straightforward one but rather a maze through routes that only lead to dissatisfaction. This is particularly true in today's consumer-driven world where we are constantly reminded that life is full of problems, a victim culture perpetuated by interest groups whose power and prestige depends upon people feeling sorry for themselves. Seeing yourself as a victim (perhaps assuming a victim identity because you happen to belong to a group that is or was victimised) can only lead to unhappiness. And happiness, unlike its fulfilling opposite, is a quick and easy path to take.
CONCLUSION
When Thomas More coined the term 'Utopia', he intended it to mean two things. It means 'perfect place' but it also means 'no place'. As we move further and further into a world of material abundance where even the poor may expect lives of comfort, we will not have escaped from all problems, all reasons to feel discontented. Absent of a world in which everyone has gained the wisdom not to be distracted from the pursuit of happiness, all we can really expect from paradises like Cockaigne and Arcadia are societies of comfy, grumpy people.
REFERENCES
“Happiness is A Serious Problem” by Dennis Prager
“Abundance” by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
“The Progress Paradox” by Greg Easterbrook
