I think the reasons people think they are unhappy (jobs, spouse, family, etc.) are rarely the reasons they are unhappy. And so, even if they follow these “dreams” and quit the things they think are making them unhappy, it doesn’t have the long term result of them being less unhappy, because they didn’t address the true reasons of their unhappiness.
Hence the phrase, “wherever you go, there you are”
Probably the very high rates of depression and anxiety.
The problem with these self-report surveys is they often fail to give the context in which they collected their data. People tend to be swayed pretty dramatically by whatever information they are primed with. If, for example, you ask people to rate their current relationship, and then ask them if they are generally satisfied with life, their answer about their overall life satisfaction is going to correlate highly with their feelings about their relationship.
Thus in many cases, it’s not that hard to get the result you want on a survey if you know the right question to ask.
I don’t doubt that many people are satisfied with their lives. My feeling of the general vibe of my own cohort is “extremely fucking stressed out, but generally okay.” I am in fact extremely fucking stressed out but generally okay. Stress doesn’t ruin my life or anything, but people definitely seem to be having issues with stress management, which is impacting health, which is creating more stress, and it’s increasingly difficult for people to take care of themselves given the demands on their time.
The problem is there’s no real way to escape from that. There’s no kind of lifestyle or place you can go, short of joining a monetary, but I know many Zen monks who will tell you even that’s not an escape from your problems. Wherever you go, there you are.
This is both something society does to us and something we do to ourselves. We can’t necessarily control the former but we might make some progress on the latter. That’s where I put my efforts, anyhow.
I 
'd you 
I saw that! 
As long ago as Freud the idea was around that the strictures of modern society grate upon the demands of the id and the ego, ultimately producing neurotic behavior. Hence this quote from 1919:
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series
So in a sense this is nothing new.
My guess is that the rise in anxiety and depression diagnoses has more to do with the fact that we care more about mental health nowadays.
Obviously this is a different context, but consider PTSD. Melee fighters on an ancient or medieval battlefield are doing truly gruesome work. The carnage left over after these battles boggles the mind. Were they made of monumentally sterner stuff than we are today? Probably not. Then why don’t we hear about their awful PTSD? Because no one gives a shit about how battered or broken the mind of a peasant is as long as he can still hold a spear or pull a plough.
I’m sure that is true, but it also applies to surveys that show that people are unsatisfied with life.
I’m pretty sure the idea goes back to Ancient Greece if not earlier.
Hell, The Epic of Gilgamesh fits the mold described in the OP to a tee.
There are actually quite a few historical references to PTSD, so it wasn’t unknown even then.
That said, I think we are probably increasingly more neurotic as a society, not because of some increased awareness of mental health, but because we’re trying to cope with a lot of stuff that we were not evolved to cope with, and the tools we’ve been given to cope are pretty shit.
Etienne Balibar claimed that the modern capitalist state is "expressly organized as the State of pre-emptive counter-revolution.”
Including the aformentioned Epic of Gilgamesh
And actually Man vs. Society as a literary conflict is probably as old as society and literature.
I don’t know that I agree. Yes, the 21st century experience is not what humans evolved for. But humans didn’t evolve to live in any agrarian or industrial society. We evolved for an existence not unlike that of modern savanna dwelling chimpanzees, like in Senegal.
The gap between savanna apes and the Roman Empire is much larger than the gap between the Roman Empire and us. And life was much harder and more stressful in ancient Rome. A far higher portion of the population was food insecure, for example. Far more people died violently, or of illness.
We have far more capacity to shape the world to suit our needs today than we did at any other point in history.
I just don’t buy that our comfortable modern existence is so much worse for us than the horrific reality of life throughout much of history.
That’s not to say that evolution isn’t relevant. I think we are often unsatisfied even as we live like kings compared to our ancestors, because it is evolutionarily beneficial to not be easily satisfied and to see to better one’s lot no matter how well one is already doing.
That’s one possible reason why a socialist revolution hasn’t already happened, ushering in the end of history and a utopian stateless classless system, as Marx believed.
Another possible reason is that Marx’s predictions were in fact wrong.
I see no good reason to believe the former over the latter.
Oh, no argument there. A full expounding of the many ways I think Marx was wrong would be a hijack of this thread.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
French philosopher Blaise Pascal,1654
And The Odyssey.
The entire quote – usually you find it truncated – is,
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
A fantasy about protecting innocent children. More benign than some of the other life-choices you’ve listed.
Or perhaps more broadly, protecting imbeciles from making disastrous mistakes.
Isn’t the whole point of narcissistic sociopathic hedonism to acquire lots of nice things?
And who you calling “narcissistic”? 
I often wonder what life was actually like in ancient times. I assume living in ancient Rome or the Middle Ages wasn’t not-stop warfare and sword fights any more than living in the 21st Century is represented by a John Wick movie. It looks a lot worse to us because they didn’t have our technology and comforts. But they wouldn’t know they were missing out on Netflix, running water, and penicillin.
Regardless of how the past was, I think modern day society does create a lot of stress and anxiety that we didn’t have before. I don’t have the studies to verify if it’s true, but anecdotally the consistent narrative I hear is a combination of economic fears, isolation, uncertainty about the future, and really a lack of clear purpose or direction:
- High student debt
- High housing costs
- Inability to find a romantic partner
- Inability to form friendships
- Inability to form meaningful careers
- Layoffs and industry distruption
- Social division
I suppose a lot of the anxiety is caused by the combination feeling trapped in a man-made system that is beyond their control where the rules of navigating successfully are often unclear and constantly changing, while being constantly bombarded by a constant stream of social media fear mongering and portrayals of idiots living fantastic lives of affluence.
I think there are things about ancient living that were not so bad for the average person. I think there are things that none of us would trade our current life to experience. But whether we think one is objectively worse than the other, I think we can all agree that what we’re experiencing now is qualitatively different. We have conditions affecting our biology that didn’t exist back then (pollution, micro plastics, etc). We have technology that clearly has a direct impact on our neurology in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. We have a treasure trove of addictive and quasi-addictive substances which each impacts us in their own way. Many of us rarely see green spaces. We don’t even follow the cycle of the sun in terms of when we go to bed and wake up. Our sleep is almost certainly worse.
And then there’s the reality of drinking from a firehose of information all of the time. (YT link, NSFW.)
It would be crazy to expect none of this would have an effect on us. We don’t have to call it worse to define a kind of suffering that is substantively different than what we’ve seen before. And because the nature of that suffering is different, the solutions have to be different, too.