My opinion on the issue.
Technology has one purpose, and one purpose alone - to make money for the people selling it. We’re convinced by advertising that, not only will it make us happier, we can’t be happy without it.
Happiness = Consumption. Or that’s what our society is based on, at least. I personally don’t believe it to be self-evidently true.
I like this question because it ties into what most Americans think will make them happy. The typical mindset (even of me) is that the more things we have, the happier we will be. Eventually it becomes more about getting the next best thing, and then the next best thing, and is a never ending cycle. I just hope that people figure out that “things” do not satisfy sooner, rather than later.
Technology doesn’t create happiness, nor should anyone expect it to.
It’s great, though, at alleviating misery. I don’t really care if my 1905 counterpart was any happier than me. It’s more important to know that he’s far more likely to die of cholera or influenza because he lacks access to the technology of sanitation.
And history, like a citywide scabies infestation, bites.
High tech toys are spinoffs from other technology. I don’t think my kids were any more or less happy than I was. Now that they’re living away I think we’re all more happy since we’re more connected. My daughter, for instance, sent us a picture of her new apartment from her cell phone to ours.
But forget about toys, let’s talk medicine. My father, who is near 90, got a shunt with a local, and was in the hospital only 2 days. 45 years ago, when he was a lot younger and healthier, he was in for weeks. If he had a general this time it would have wiped out his mind. I think we’re all happier.
My wife just had major eye surgery, using about every technological trick in the book. Not going blind in one eye sure made her happier.
I’d bet a good many of us would be dead several times over without technology. On the whole, I’ll take technology over what we had when I was a kid.
I know a couple of 10-year-old girls(neither one is fat, though). One of them could sit in front of a TV 24 hours a day, watching cartoons and playing video games, and be perfectly happy. The other girl is involved in all kinds of activities that require little or no technology…girl scouts, karate, riding horses, and the like. She seems pretty happy, too. I think the difference is parental involvement–each girl has found a way to be happy in the world that their parent has provided for them, high-tech, or no-tech.
As for me, I can spend time here, reading and making the occasional smart-alec remark, and enjoy myself immensely. But, it’s not the same kind of happiness I derive from hiking in the redwoods, or seeing a redtail hawk fly overhead. If I never logged on to a message board again, it would be a drag, but if I never got to spend time in the natural world again, it would be a tragedy.
So, after that rather long-winded remark, my answer would be something rather lame, like “happiness is wherever you happen to find it”.
So, if your counterpart was happier, but lived a shorter life (on average) you think we have it better?
Do you think that it’s better to live longer, no matter what? I’m not sure if you believe this, but you did say you don’t care at all if your counterpart was happier than you.
The general level of happiness is, I would think, the average of individual levels.
I’ll take lame but true over trendy but false.
As I said above, look at adults around you. Do they look happier than adults did a generation ago?
**I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all. - Leo Rosten
It is important to be happy in life, but the purpose of life is not to be happy. A life devoted exclusively to your own happiness is inevitably doomed to failure and hedonistic excesses. If we can say that life has a purpose at all then it has to include some sense of purpose outside the self.
And in exactly the same way technological advances are not there just to improve happiness, they are there to improve opportunity. Maybe you don’t believe that these technological advances have helped American children, but try doing a comparison of Bangladeshi children between the 1950, 1980s and today. Things still aren’t real great in Bangladesh but at least today better than half the children are surviving to adulthood, nobody is left crippled due to polio, nobody is hideously disfigured from smallpox and so forth.
Or perhaps you might like to consider the state of the environment in the 1950, 1980s and today. Air is cleaner, water is safer, forest cover is increasing and so forth
Or maybe consider the economic system of the 1950s, built in large part upon economic interests in third world nations or US aid to Europe, but with the inevitable consequence of such nations becoming increasingly wealthy and destroying the very US prosperity they supported. Inherently unsustainable.
Maybe the measures of happiness I gave, and there are many more, didn’t figure in a major way on the happiness of a child growing up in the US suburbs, but that doesn’t mean that those things aren’t real measures of happiness. Particularly things like environmental improvements wouldn’t have made any impact on your father as suburban US children. But that’s because he was living on borrowed time while remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact. He had a pretty good life precisely because of unsustainable degradation occurring in the places that produced that good life.
And this is where the real use of technological advancement comes to the fore. Anyone can have a good standard of living for a week or a couple of centuries if they are prepared to mortgage the future as the western world did. But we need to ask if that is a reasonable standard of happiness. If me and my kids will be happy at the expense of my grandchildren living in conditions worse than those of a Calcutta slum dweller then is that a meaningful measure of happiness? Shouldn’t happiness also need to factor in happiness into the future?
And this is where all those technological advances have come into play. The thing about the technology you mentioned, internet, computer, digital media, is that the form you see them is largely a toy application of a powerful tool developed for another purpose. You have them because they were developed, and their development in itself did indeed increase happiness. . All this technology has given us far more options and a far greater ability to respond than we have ever had before. Unlike every other period in human history we are no longer constrained to producing solely from destruction and resource depletion. We have options. With few if an any exceptions we can continue essentially as we are now forever. That is unique in the history of human development, and it is possible because technology marches on. We and our parents are the first generation that hasn’t been mortgaging the happiness of future generation to sustain our own happiness.
Or to summarise, the reason that happiness hasn’t changed much in the last 3 generations is precisely because technology has improved and allowed it to be sustained. Rest assured that if technology had stalled 3 generations ago your children would not be living at anywhere near the same standards as your father did. Saying that technology has improved but you’re still not perfectly happy is like noting that you eat meals every day yet you still get hungry. The system is in a constant state of decay. You need to run just to stand still, but that doesn’t mean that if you had stopped running three generations ago things wouldn’t be a lot worse.
Happiness is a state of transition. It evolved as a reward for doing the right thing, and by its very nature it can not be sustained or increased. IOW you can’t be constantly happy any more than you can be eternally surprised. What you need to look at is the effect of technology on contentment, not happiness. The effect of technology has certainly been to increase contentment. Again, maybe not for a suburban middle-class American but for the vast majority of the world’s population without a doubt. Ask the average poor worker what he wanted in the 1950s and he would probably say he wanted medicine to save a dying family member. Ask him now and he probably wants a bigger TV, or a shorter working week. His level of happiness may not have increased, but his level of contentment certainly has insofar as what he would change now is only trivial compared to the way things actually are.
Hard to say; I don’t know if I could tell. But if I agreed they were not, I still wouldn’t know why not.
I think, barring any evidence for an after-life and an eternal soul, that what one should do on this earth is to do what makes them happy (without hurting others).
If writing novels makes you happy, do it. If helping others and making a difference makes you happy, do it.
Overall, some very good points in your post.
I would say, though, why restrict ourselves to just three generations ago?
Are we more happy than the ancient Greeks? The Romans? We may have no way of knowing, but from the historical writings, it seems they were having quite a lot of fun.
Their technology and medicine were far behind ours, and yet they were happy.
I think it is because, no matter the environment a human may find oneself born into, the brain adjusts itself and defines “normal” to be whatever the current environment is. And then, whatever happens that is better than that “normal” makes you happy for a while. People who have more than their fair share of better-than-normal events are happy.
I’d say, for the most part*, technology increases happiness but not in the way most people think. It increase happiness by increasing free time. Technology has allowed people to do more in less time. That enables people to do more things that they enjoy.
For example today I did my banking, checked on some investments, shopped for some chairs, re-wrote and printed my resume. All from home in a short period of time. In the past the trip to the bank would have taken at least 30 minutes, the shopping a couple hours, the resume an hour or so instead of 5 minutes(typewriters don’t have that handy backspace key or spell checkers). I got all that done in about an hour, I figure I saved at least 3 hours over doing all that without my computer.
I guess it depends on what people do with that free time. If they choose to sit in front of the TV and do nothing it is possible that they might be happier if there wasn’t a TV and they did something else.
Basically, it depends on how people use the tech.
Slee
I do believe it, for the same reason other posters have pointed out: happiness is completely subjective. Misery, though, in the form of starvation, disease, suffering from excess heat or excess cold, etc. are fairly good indicators that one person’s life sucks more than another’s.
Gadgetry is the just the tinsel of technology. The real substance has allowed us to live longer lives than our ancestors, made us far less subject to random disease, allow us to moderate extreme heat or cold through air-conditioning or electric heating, allowed us access to broader ranges of foods and time of the year and allowed us to travel long distances on a whim. Occasionally (not often), historical movies get it right when they point out how the simple things we take for granted were unheard of in times past. From Hell, set in 1888, shows a man enticing a London streetwalker with grapes which to her must have seemed incredibly luxurious and exotic. In an age before huge-scale rapid international shipping (cargo ships running on less-efficient coal rather than modern diesel), refrigeration and hydroponics, grapes would be amazingly expensive to anyone who didn’t live in a grape-producing region. Similarly, a character in Gangs of New York (set in 1863) describes her plan to start a new life in California. The quickest route is by ship, all the way down the coast to the tip of South America and all the way North again.
Nowadays, if you want grapes, you wander down to the supermarket and get them. Prices vary by season, but they’re never so expensive that they’re out of reach. Similarly, one can fly from New York to San Francisco in less than a day, and it will not bankrupt anyone with even a small income. Our ancestors not only had shorter lives, then spent a lot of their fewer years working toward goals we casually accomplish, be it saving up for a favourite food or travelling long distances.
Debating if 1905 counterparts were happier is pointless because for every guy you can find living life to the full in his brand new Stanley Steamer, there may be a thousand women who died in childbirth, five thousand children who died of cholera, ten thousand people dead of tuberculosis and twenty thousand dead of pneumonia/influenza.
If you’re going to say my 1905 counterpart might have been happier than me, please allow me to point out that he had thousands of contemporaries whose lives I’ll bet any amount were a heck of a lot less so. I’ll take an expected lifespan of 80 years over one of fifty anytime, and I’ll spend those extra three decades finding out just what will make me the happiest. Cheap nostalgia for a past that never existed will get you no points, here.
Yes, but so what? She lived in a world where this was the normal duration of the trip. I don’t think she thought it was outrageous.
If, in the future you can get from New York to California in, say, 5 minutes, people might be thinking, “Oh, my God, those poor people from 2006, they had to spend SIX HOURS on a plane just to get from New York to LA. That must have been horrible”.
Yet, because we live in a world where it does take 6 hours, we don’t think it’s unbearable, it’s just a mild inconvenience.
Yes, but today we have other things which are considered incredibly luxurious and exotic, and which are as expensive to us as grapes were in the past. So, we both get to pay a lot of money for something we consider exotic and luxurious.
There is no “cheap nostalgia for a past that never existed”.
In the OP I mentioned “A lot of technology does decrease human suffering and relieve manual labor (e.g. better medicine”, so it’s not like you’re telling me something I don’t know.
I’d also like to point out that three generations ago or back in Roman times your class would be very different. I am going to assume that you are middle class. You are part of a substantially large middle class. This didn’t exist 100 years ago or 2000 years ago. Likely your counterpart 100 years ago worked in a factory. If he was middle class like yourself, then he might have kept the books for that factory. If he was not middle class he couldh ave lost some fingers or toes in that factory. You have to remember that the poor class was a lot higher percentage then than it is now, and the poor at that time didn’t have any luxuries analogous to a car or a playstation. Back in Roman times they had a slave class. We don’t have a slave class here in America. So middle comparatively back in Roman society you might be a Roman Citizen who was having trouble maintaining employment because all the Patricians were importing slaves from Gaul rather than hiring Roman Citizens who were more expensive. So your counterpart in prior generations was probably far poorer materially than you are now. You also have the added benefit of a freedom to pursue your emotional satisfaction than you had back then. You don’t have to worry about arranged marriage or dealing with a small pool of marriageable candidates to choose from. You can meet people on the internet, in a bar, and it’s socially acceptable. 100 years ago if you met your wife in a bar, she’d be considered a hussy. So the likelihood that you will happier is really up to you, but there are less restrictions on how you aquire that happiness now than ever before.
Erek
I don’t know why you polluted your otherwise sensible post with this glurge. It’s nice to be nice. This is supposed to be news?
Yes, but now you have to deal with issues that most people in the past wouldn’t have had to deal with.
Passwords are a good example of this- I’m pretty sure most people in 1956 didn’t have to remember even one password. Now most of us have several that are not dictionary words, have numbers and letters, and so on and so forth. And once upon a time, many people might not have been expected to lay out their own resumes. They would have a secretary or someone else to do that for them, and they would have no need to do it or even to know how to do it.
On the other hand, there are things that people in the past dealt with that we don’t have to now. We don’t need to be able to use a slide rule, for example, or to make our own quill pens. I think the availability of cheap, portable calculators is making doing arithmetic in your head go this way, too.
I think there’s a balance between technology making some tasks easier or unnecessary, and making some tasks more complex or adding new tasks to be done.
The problem is that you are now contradicting your own OP. You explicitly assume that life has a purpose in the OP, now you are simply claiming that you should do what makes you happy because it makes you happy, and not for any purpose at all. If we accept that life has a purpose, which I had assumed was axiomatic based on the OP, then simply doing what makes you happy isn’t it.
Because that was what you restricted yourself to in the OP. We can certainly go back further, it becomes even more obvious that technology has increased contentment.
Wrong. It seems like the people who did the writing, or at least the people who ordered the scribes to write, were having a bit of fun. But those people were the elite, the nobility. They were less than one in 100 of the general population and as such can be largely discounted.
Were they? Was an infant who’s parents died when he was 5 happy? Was he happy when he was enslaved and raped daily form the age of 7? Was he happy when he was tortured to death over a period of several hours as entertainment? Such people had lives of unmitigated misery, humiliation and pain incomparable with anything experienced in the US in the last 50 years. If a person is happy about being raped daily and tortured then it can only possibly be because they have taken refuge in total insanity, which I hardly think counts… Yet such lives were far more common than the lives of the nobility who were, according to you, having a lot of fun raping and torturing children.
Of course most people were neither nobility nor sex slaves. Most people were peasant or merchant women. A typical life consisted of hard physical work from the age of 5 or 6, a forced marriage and marital rape from the age of 13 or so. The life or death of the children was entirely in the husband’s hands, which in practice meant that half your children would be killed as soon as they were born. You would be suffering constant pain from arthritis, tooth decay and unset broken bones your entire life. When you became to old to sustain constant heavy labour you would be cared for by your children if you were lucky. If you weren’t lucky you begged until you starved to death. Do you really believe these people were as happy as even the average welfare recipient in the US even if they avoided major unusual tragedies like war?
Yes, I went into this above. Happiness is a transition event, it can’t be sustained. And I believe this is where you go wrong, in measuring happiness as opposed to contentment. Happiness is misleading. You could make slave happy by saying you won’t rape her at all that day, that does not mean the slave is content with her lot or is better off than if she were free.
What technology does is increase contentment. In our society people don’t want to not be raped or not be disfigured by disease or not starve to death. Technology has solved all those problems so they aren’t things people fundamentally crave. However people are still more content because they don’t starve to death, aren’t disfigured and don’t get raped regularly.
When that woman went to California, chances are that she would never see her family again. When we moved to California, we can see my wife’s parents frequently. When our kids moved away to college and jobs, we can see them a couple of times a year. Maybe her trip wasn’t horrible (if she survived, that is) but our opportunities for staying in touch with our loved ones are better. When I went to college I could call my parents once a week, because of the expense. (I got my own phone, and could do it more often later.) My kids call us all the time on our cellphones effectively for free. No, taking six hours to get across the country is not intolerable, but taking five minutes for less money would open up still more opportunities. Saying that current technology makes us happier implies that future technology can make us happier still.