I think people were happier (or at least more contented) in the “olden days” i.e., 100-200 years ago. Speaking for myself, it seems as if there is just too much of everything these days, too many choices, etc. and that, of course, causes additional stress. Way back when, there were probably two or three choices for health and beauty aids, food products, etc., and now we are overwhelmed. In addition, even when selecting a mate, we have so many choices especially if we are doing on-line dating. More choices doesn’t seem to make us happier, as the divorce rate is still high. Were folks just more satisfied with less back then, and appreciated what they did have? Any comments and/or opinions?
Are you 150 years old?
I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and there were plenty of choices, most of them bad. I have no desire whatsoever to go back to the “good old days.”
Well, you better try to get all of your happiness and content concentrated as soon as possible given that, 200 years ago, if you are not part of the topmost layers of society, your chances of surviving childhood are not exactly fantastic; you would be at the whim of the weather and the harvests (and if the harvest has been bad, get ready for lower chances of making it through the winter); you would be exposed to dozens of illnesses that nowadays are curable but at the time would have been life-threatening… Your chances of making it alive to the ripe old age of 60 are substantially lower than nowadays.
So, you better get your happy going because otherwise you won’t get to enjoy it given the limited time you’d have 
I watched a TED Talk about the paradox of choice. Even though it’s usually better to have more choices, it can lead to increased stress trying to find the absolute best from among similar choices, and grass-is-greener kind of regrets for the choices you didn’t go for.
Online dating is especially bad. It tries to predict who you will be able to live with your whole life based on vague details in your profiles, which are probably meaningless … even the few that are actually true. Also, a mate isn’t a product. You have to choose each other, and increased choices works both ways. As my friend used to say, “I spent my life looking for the perfect woman, and when I finally found her … dammit … she was looking for the perfect man.”
More than once, elderly people have told me, “There was NOTHING good about the ‘good old days’.”
As for the OPs statement about divorce, I don’t think there are more unhappy marriages; it’s just that people can more easily do something about it now.
Ah, the “good old days”-
Women knew their place
Blacks knew their place
Gays stayed deep in the closet
Yeah, that sounds like paradise :rolleyes:
I graduated with a degree in history and focused on race. Yeah. I’d much rather be middle class now than fabulously wealthy even fifty years so.
When it comes to dating and mating: on the one hand, the bigger pool of “applicants” you have to draw from, the more likely you are to find someone who’s a good match for you. But on the other hand, the more different people you encounter and the further you move from where you grew up, the less likely you and the people you meet are going to have similarities of background, expectations, values, etc. that make for a smoother marriage.
I wouldn’t even want to go back 25 years, much less 100-200 hundred. I love my computer and my I-pod and my big TV that plays in beautiful HD. Yep, I like now just fine, thank you very much.
If I had to romanticize about the past, I’d say that the olden days were probably less stressful in a lot of ways than they are now.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” is an anxiety-inducing question, and yet that’s the first thing we ask kids when they begin to talk. There are so many options and choices available to us, and we’re expected to have it all figured out. There’s pressue to do well in school, pick the right major, go to the right college, score the right internships, etc. There’s a rat race everywhere you look, where skills shift every day and everyone constantly immersed in information and technology. Social pressure is everywhere. Our expectations for everything are in the stratosphere. And it’s a stressful life.
But I can’t see how people back in the day were happier. Not with death and illness and abuse being so much more rampant.
I think that much of the problem is that while our choices have increased, our ability to make those choices hasn’t improved nearly as much. All too often it amounts to making a stab in the dark and hoping we get lucky.
Me neither; but of course, people back then didn’t miss what they never even imagined having.
My own theory is that a person’s level of happiness depends less on the amount of prosperity they have (standard of living, health, wealth, cool stuff, etc.) than on the “first derivative”—whether those things are increasing or decreasing over the course of the person’s life.
I think your happiness is dependent on how well you’re doing compared to others.
You’re going to be less happy if you’re at the bottom of the totem pole than if you’re at the top, especially if 1) the pole is really tall and 2) the top is rubbing their riches and wealth in your face all the time.
Putting it all another way, we’ve made many mistakes as a society and as nations… but on the whole, we have definitely progressed in terms of individual wealth, comfort and options. Longing for a few largely imaginary idyllic aspects of some “golden time past” because things aren’t perfect now is not reasonable or rational.
Hell, I’d rather be poor now than wealthy 100 years ago!
Unless you believe that everyone back 50, 100, 150, etc years ago was progressively more unhappy that the younger generation following, leading to a state of universal misery at some point in the past, then there must be some validity to the OP’s conclusion.
Granted, if you find yourself in a minority class in any age, that might lead to a greater likelyhood of being less happy than the average bear.
I think this was well addressed in fake Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp review of Ikea.
[QUOTE=Yelping with Cormac]
I’ve had to make a lot of tough calls in my life and some of them I still wake up thinking about. But I never waffled and just chose my way and stuck with it. I guess that’s the way I am. But if you’d of asked me to pick a chair I’m not sure I could of.
Doctors told us my daughter in law is depressed on account of the baby but I think it’s cause of the chairs. And ever other damn thing in that store. So many things to decide on and not a one of them matters. Hell, it was enough to give me the depression and I was only in that store for three godforsaken hours.
[/QUOTE]
False dichotomy.
Oh, that explains it.
A false dichotomy is, roughly, the argument that there are only two options when in fact there are many.
You said, again roughly, ‘Unless you believe A, you must believe B’
In reality, there are a myriad of other tenable positions. So I say, false dichotomy.