Another thing: there are a lot of places you can go, here and now, to help you make your choices. There are official help sites. And there’s the SDMB! The IMHO forum is rich with threads about “What’s the best XYZ,” or “How do I IJK?”
I’m concerned by the complexity of the upcoming Health Care Act enrollment process. And…I’m going to get help from people who know more than I do. Just as I do when I need to find a doctor, or find an auto mechanic, or when I have a plumbing problem, or when I want to convert a data file from .midi to .mp3. Nobody can know everything they need to know in this world. Advice is much more readily available today than it was in 1963.
I don’t know why it’s so inconceivable for there to be a baseline level of happiness–a bottom threshold of collective contentment that is required for a functioning society, below which you start to see negative growth and self-destruction. I’m guessing that for most of human history, for most human societies, collective contentment has for hovered just slightly above the minimum threshold. It’s only in the last couple of centuries, with advancements in medicine and techology and the invention of leisure time, that we’ve had the luxury to talk about happiness as an actual thing, and we expect more and more of it.
I think it’s fairly recently that we’ve stopped to consider how and why we feel the way we do about anything. We have self-help books and psychotherapists who will help us with our emotions. Everything on TV and on the store shelves is designed to make us feel something. And they’re all sending out the same message: “YOU DESERVE TO BE HAPPY!” So people are much more interested in finding happiness than they used to be. That’s what we’re constantly told we should be doing.
I think the pursuit of happiness makes some people unhappy. But I don’t think this means we’re less happy than we were before.
Gotcha. My point was meant more to mean, " there is something worth examining in the OP’s position," not that one must agree with it. I am addressing those who are insisting that people are happier now because they themselves are happier than they would as time-traveling transplants to history.
I don’t think that people (which is a very broad brush) were happier at any era in the past compared to now, but I also don’t think that there’s much evidence tht we’re happier now, either.
One of the nice things about now is that all the good things from the past are still around.
Think you’d be happier with fewer choices, old-fashioned clothes, without aircon or TV or a car? You can do any or all of that right now. And without foregoing any of the other advantages of a modern lifestyle.
To me the OP sounds analogous to asking whether we are happier as children or adults.
We have more choices as adults, but more stress.
It’s a tough call for me to say when I was more happy…but certainly once you’ve been in a situation with many options, there’s no going back.
Having too many choices can indeed be stressful and voluntarily limiting your choices can be helpful in that regard. The key here is “voluntarily.”
I think a large part of the popularity of Trader Joe’s is that the choices are more limited there. There are several types of tomato sauce there. There aren’t 10 brands, each with several types to sort out. I don’t want to do a full analysis of 50 tomato sauce options. I just want to grab something to put on my spaghetti and get outta there. Trader Joe’s is good for that. That said, I still have the option of going to the Shop-Rite to get one of the other 50. My choice. In the “good old days” I would have only had a few options to choose from regardless. I’d rather have the option of too many options.
And if you were a gay black woman, you were really confused about whether you should be in the closet or kitchen.
The marriages generally weren’t happier back then. There were an awful lot of estranged couples, ranging from couples who shared a house but were really no more than housemates to situations where one or the other just packed up and left, sometimes going back home to parents, sometimes without leaving a forwarding address. The divorce rate was low because the requirements for a divorce were very, very stringent. I remember reading that to get a divorce, one partner had to prove that the other one was either unfaithful or mentally ill. That’s it. An abused wife couldn’t get a divorce from her husband, for instance. Those were marriages, but not what I’d call happy marriages by any means. Nowadays, we can get a divorce in most countries if we just are not suited for one another. I’d say that overall, a person is happier being divorced than in a bad marriage.
If you were a gay black woman, you were supposed to be in the pantry, silly!
Sure, there were plenty of choices! Work on a dirty, dangerous farm. Head off to the big city to work in a dirty, dangerous factory. Maybe head off to Europe to fight the Keiser!
We were once visiting an open air museum, where they had reconstructed houses as they would’ve been 150 years earlier. We were standing in a bare, cold room, with one wooden chair and a rag rug on the floor, when someone in the room said ‘ah, but they were happier then’. My mum turned round and said ‘well, you might’ve been, but I bloody well wasn’t’.
I don’t think the kind of choice we’re talking about here has a big impact on happiness. A lot of people in the past had much stronger social bonds than we have now. Sure, we may have hundreds of Facebook friends but we tend to have fewer close friends we can confide in and turn to when in crisis than people did even fifty years ago.
I’ve read a book on that called “The Paradox of Choice.” Maybe the author was who did the TED Talk. It was interesting. Like for example, some researchers set up a table at a grocery store (or something like that) with jars of jam and samples of the jam. When there were just six choices of jam, people bought more jars than when there were 24 choices of jam. It just becomes overwhelming comparing all the different choices and then people just aren’t able to make any choice.
Their are more places to get advice, but if you start looking up advice for all your choices you’ll never make decisions. When you bought a car 60 years ago, I’m guessing you’d find out information by word of mouth, and maybe some consumer report type stuff in the newspaper or magazines. But now you can find thousands of reviews and ratings on websites and blogs for the car, as well as advice on what dealership to go to, what are the best times to buy, how to negotiate, and tons of other information. This can all be helpful, though a lot of it is contradictory. That much information can be paralyzing and make it much harder to make a decision.
It doesn’t have to be paralyzing though, you just have to decide what things are important to you when making your choice, and realize that you’ll be happiest if you try to make a choice that’s good for you, instead of spending a huge amount of time and energy making a choice that’s perfect for you.
I once knew an older man that told me a story of travelling around during the Depression to find work. He spent some time working as a plow hand on a large wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle. He described how they each would hook up a team or horses (or mules) at one end of the field and plow to the other other by mid-day. I assumed they were breaking new gound, given that pace. At mid-day, they would eat lunch and then switch to a fresh team and plow their way back.
I’ve spent a few hours plowing with a team. It’s physically demanding and excrutiatingly mind-numbing. I cannot imagine being faced with the choice of doing that for 10-12 hours a day verses going hungry. At the end of each day, you could look forward to doing it again the next day.
No, thank you. I do not suffer from any longings for the goodness of the “olden days”.
If you ever have a chance to see this wonderful movie about one-room schoolhouses, DO! Last time I checked, it wasn’t available on Netflix, but it’s been shown on many PBS affiliates. Most of the interviewees had positive experiences, but it does address incompetent or abusive teachers, inadequate materials, and unsafe buildings, and one man describes “an older boy who was a bully” who sexually assaulted smaller children, presumably including him, at knifepoint. :eek: He added, “We didn’t have the courage to tell our parents, or the vocabulary to do so.” For that reason alone, I would not recommend it for pre-teens.
My paternal grandmother, who died in 2007 at the age of 91, remembered her father doing this. When her youngest sister was diagnosed with mild mental retardation in the early 1930s, her parents were advised to institutionalize her and forget about her, which they refused to do. Grandma was also a teenage mother who later got divorced, something people nowadays think never happened, but it did, all the time.
My mother grew up in a house abutting railroad tracks, and hoboes would sometimes knock on the door and ask for food. Grandma would make toast, eggs, and coffee, and offer them a cigarette if they wanted it, but would never allow them into the house no matter how bad the weather was. My mother wondered why no women ever stopped by and asked for food (Andy Rooney wrote that he wondered the same thing) but they didn’t know. I can guess, however; it was not safe for women to ride the rails, and I have heard that there were teenage girls who did this, but they would travel in big groups and often brought their brothers with them. Actually, women who fell on hard times could return to their families, if they had them, but men were pretty much on their own.
I think this is the real issue. I think people are more mobile today and more in their own anti-social bubbles than they used to be; I don’t really know my neighbors, but my grandparents and parents did/do. The older generations are much more family-oriented than I am; my cousins, with the exception of 2 of them, are a bunch of knuckleheads that I don’t have much in common with other than genetics, and I wouldn’t spend time with them at all if they weren’t part of my family.
Jobs used to be more long-term, and I think those relationships helped people; the idea of “work friends” didn’t just mean someone you’re friendly with at work, but forget about when you switch jobs 2-3 years later.
All this means that people back in the day were better supported, especially relative to a lot of people in towns where they don’t know many people or have many friends. This can cause stress and feelings of alienation, and decrease people’s happiness.
As for more choices causing unhappiness, I can think of several examples where choice went up(beer, wine, TV channels, local ethnic restaurants, car types, etc…), and my happiness went up as a result. I can’t think of a case where I had more choices and it was a problem than less; maybe if I was some sort of indecisive ninny, I’d have an issue with it, but generally speaking, I follow the same process for determining what I want- research, narrow to short list, get the best choice (dependent on what I value for it- reliability, performance, low cost, styling, etc…).
(aside: I was trying to explain to my nephew the other day while playing video games that there was no “Best” character or weapon in the game we were playing, because it depended on what you planned to do. He didn’t get it, and I fear he’s setting himself up for a lot of frustration by having the mindset that he has to have the best or find the best solution, when things aren’t that cut and dried in the real world.)
Having less choice usually means a sub-optimal solution in most cases.
I have had the opportunity to travel to several 3rd world countries, the last 2 years to the same village in a remote part of Haiti. Life there today is roughly on par with life in the developed world 150 to 200 years ago - no electricity, no plumbing, 1-2 room huts with dirt floor. Water is carried by hand from the nearest creek. Everyone lives via subsistance farming or working a trade (mason or carpenter mainly). A trip to town is a big undertaking and most people have never been to the capital city 90 miles away. The only piece of modern life that has made its way here is the cell phone.
The people are just as happy there as here in the US. They face a different set of daily issues than we do, but humans are pretty good at dealing with familiarity. So long as the issues are familiar to us, we grow used to dealing with them. Where I see the most discontent is among people who once had more (or must interact often with people who have substantially more) but now must make do with less - be it choices, amenities, lifestyle, etc.
For that reason alone, I would not recommend it for pre-teens.