Ask HN: If technology is so good for the world, why are we becoming less happy?

I would like to point out that technology is driven by a market of consumer apatites, not for the purpose of well being.

This is a tricky one, because the answer is so simple you may refuse to accept it, or it is made meaningless by its banality.

People are their own problem. Before we had to take more time to ourselves, we had to work out our problems and have some patience. That didn’t work for everyone either, though you can see life has been abstracted away from living somehow. It affects our self satisfaction.

Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.

Technology is only an extension of ourselves.

Are we really more unhappy? Or is it more that we don't know what happiness is nowadays?

To me the biggest problem is the over-financialization of almost all aspects of our lives. Our financial sector is much larger now than it was during WWII, when we were facing a national emergency. The emphasis is always on money and double-digit profits; whether it is our health care system, which always weighs our health against investor returns (and are happy to medicate our resulting mental distress, for a nice profit); our jobs, which are structured for "maximum efficiency"--for the owners, of course, at the expense of workers, who get low pay, low satisfaction, and burnout; all the products which we "buy" but don't own; automakers who have "innovated" new ways to squeeze every penny they can out of customers (subscribe to heated seats!).

Tech is not at all exempt from this. If anything tech is more affected by this phenomenon than most other industries due to the nature of its products, which are particularly susceptible to enshitification. Tech has no shame in actively manipulating its users to their ends, as we have seen with social media, and now with this phenomenon of AI psychosis. Further, tech leaders and investors are much more interested in the next unicorn than in meeting real needs and providing genuine user satisfaction. So yes, this is a hot mess. And it is driving people mad. To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?

We (the general population, not so much us decently-paid software developers) have no money. Technology is not the cause or solution here, people are becoming increasingly less able to afford things by the day.

I have a book recommendation for you: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.

Read it. You will find some answers and some actionable steps to alleviate your problems.

I’d like to posit a scenario that I’ve often thought on. Imagine you and 100 people all working together to say build a road. These are your friends, some family and other local community members many of whom you also care for and have known for many years.

As a group you work a 5 day week, 40 hours laying roads together.

There’s an especially hard part of the process, and you’ve been thinking on it and realise that with a new approach it can save 20% of the total effort.

To whom do you want the benefit to go. All to the boss, as they pay everyone and run the business? All to you as it was your idea. Or alternatively it could mean that everyone works 20% less, translating into that now everyone can do a four day week and have that extra day back to do and help with other things.

Consider less how it’s split now, and more how you’d want it to be split.

The big idea of yours is like the tech, consider also if others had come up with the improvement.

I’d be interested in what folks saw as fair splits and why. Boss, inventor, the collective.

Less happy compared to some earlier time period, but which one is the question. The 1950's, 1960's perhaps when single income was enough to afford a middle class life style? Likely less happy than our boomer parents. But are we less happy when compared to the gilded age when workers toiled 12 hours daily? Definitely not.

The answer lies not only in technology/social media but as other commentators have pointed out, but perhaps in inflation and cost of living crisis. Family breakdown due to one income not being sufficient could be a major factor.

Capitalism makes the world worse faster than technology makes it better. It's like Andy and Bill's Law.

Because inflationary fascism rules the world.

Here's my list of things making it worse: cities designed for cars, no third spaces, poorly designed public space, hostile architecture, no social safety net, replacing social relationships with parasocial relationships, filling every moment of idle time with glacing at your phone, smaller families/smaller extended families, low access to nature, needing a second job (or low free time), too much screentime.

Technology is not one thing, it includes many things that are good for the world and many things that are bad for the world. Over the last generation or two it's trended from empowering the poor to empowering the rich.

Almost all people live in places where there is a division between ruled and ruler, or something close to it. Technology enables rulers to do ruler-type things easier, so that's why it stays. The rulers are probably happy even if they put on a show of unhappiness to the ruled, and whether or not the ruled are unhappy are immaterial to the rulers. It's not that the rulers are evil, it's just that the rulers are ones to take care of themselves, so when the ruled are unhappy, they perceive it as their fault.

The Internet was weird in that for a brief second it really looked like it was the great leveler and a place where all humanity to stand on equal footing, at least to the ruled under the current major players on the world stage at that time. But of course, maybe that was just post fall-of-the-Soviet-union zeitgeist. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Time to stop relying on the Internet and get back to building in-real-life networks.

I'm definitely not in the ruler class, but I'm happy. Media isn't real, and I've decided to limit my consumption of media I don't like, including "news", and fill my time with things I do like.

Also I'm getting tired of this recent overarching attempt to make concern over birth rates a thing. If the rulers were worried about birth rates they'd start paying people to have and raise kids. Because they have all the money so they can do that if they want. Until they do, it's not something I'm going to care about.

The question you need to ask yourself are:

- what exactly is “technology”?

- what is the difference between a screwdriver and Twitter? In other words, what are tools, and are they all equal?

- what is the end goal of a technological society focused on ever-increasing shareholder revenue?

Neil Postman has good books on this topic.

> This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?

Everyone afraid of indictment has either sold their stock or died.

The cause is not technology, it's fossil fuels. The abundance of fossil fuels has made it possible to produce more and more. There are multiple counterparts:

1. Global warming, which is a direct consequence of fossil fuels. This has an impact on happiness, given that kids today are likely to die because of it, and society is not remotely addressing the problem; we're making it worse every day.

2. Biodiversity loss. Our increased productivity means more pesticides, more artificialisation of soils, more deforestation, more tourism, more fishing. All that contributes to the mass extinction we're living now. We are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs. We've lost 80% of insects in 20 years. That has an impact on happiness.

3. Geopolitics. We all rely heavily on fossil fuels and globalisation (which requires fossil fuels), and fossil fuels are not unlimited. The world geopolitics will become more unstable every year. That has an impact on happiness.

Look at the news: record fires every year, and we know that those are smaller than the ones that will come next year and the year after.

To improve happiness, technology should be used to do the same with less and in many cases just do less with less. Instead we want to do more with more, and this is killing us.

Technology is just a tool. It can be great, it can be very bad. What can of technology are we investing in ?

If you look at top US companies, half of top 10 is investing tens of billions $ trying to get people addicted to screens. That's reflected in the metrics you're seeing. It's an unfair game. Hell, even the richest guy in the world got his brain rotten recently (arguably with a solid help from drugs) and is spending his days posting soft anime porn AI generated images and videos.

It's just really all about the incentives. Everybody would like the world to be a better place, but who among top technologist, which are in big numbers here, are willing to work for 1/10 of what he can make at a big co, to make it happen ?

> If technology is so good for the world

What makes you take it as axiom? Technology is not good for the world and never was, few applications excluded.

Its so good for market and it's puppets, for tech bozos, for government.

One reason (and certainly not the only reason) is that our governments are using economic growth, specifically GDP growth as a primary measure of success. That naturally leads to under spending on education, health, police, infrastructure, programs for disadvantaged, etc.

It's also justified the destruction of workers rights, which has led to a huge number of people being paid less in insecure jobs forcing them to work longer hours.

There was a time when ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" and trickle-down economics justified focusing economic success but increasing inequality has shown that it's not true.

Edit: And of course technology has enabled a lot of this.

Human happiness is extremely elastic and subjective once the basic needs of life and essential safety from obvious, imminent, extremely visible threats are reasonably well covered.

This makes it easy to understand why many people self-report as unhappy despite having all measurable metrics of their material and fundamental existential well-being protected like at no time in human history.

Couple this with the bias in reporting on their subjective experience of unhappiness without ever having lived the harder kind of life that was normal in the past, for the sake of perspective.

Add to both the tediously demoralizing (unless you're resilient to it) effect of other social media-using humans trying to paint their lives as wonderful through selective reporting on a constant basis and all of this being visible for everyone else to see.

Also include in a moderate flow of (paradoxically) being saturated via media and social media with exaggerated, pathological over-focus on the dangers of generally uncommon problems and threats in life and the world.

The resulting pastry from all these ingredients: One very dubious notion of us haivng many more reasons to be unhappy today than before. We may think we have many reasons to be unhappy, but that's only because for the most part, we haven't seen what real reasons for deep unhappiness look like.

Obviously, i'm generalizing here. Not every unhappy person is unhappy due to frivolous things. There still exist many threats in life and many things that can bring on genuine misery, but they're more a minority now for more people than ever in the broad strokes of history.

One final point from all of the above: We're the source of our unhappiness. Technology is with rare exceptions just a tool, that we can use to interpret the world however we do, whether for bad or good.

>And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it

From what I understand, important factors to happiness are family, friends, sense of belonging, sense of purpose, and then more immediate factors such as stress and work/life balance.

Technology is arguably a negative influence on some of these factors like meaningful in person relationships. Also, much of this has more to do with society as a whole (having kids, having close extended families, being in meaningful long term partnerships) than technology in particular.

Let's look at the obvious, social media, which is some of the most impactful technology used everyday by real people. It's been discussed to exhaustion, but these arguably aren't tools that contribute to factors that promote happiness. They optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not happiness. Dopamine hacking =/ happiness boosting.

One problem is that we're, on average, fatter than before, and while tech isn't the primary cause, it's a contributor. Being overweight can cause sleep apnea, which in turn can cause depression and anxiety because it turns out you get pretty anxious in your sleep when you can't breathe.

Technology isn’t good or bad, it all depends on what is done with it.

The shift to the attention economy moved a lot of the major platforms from social media to an entertainment slot machine. Without being very intentional about how you use devices and seeking out actual connection, it is very easy to get sucked in while time slips away.

It seems like what happens is the more choice - not less - is what makes being unhappy more probable, at least for some people. Maybe it is a sense of being overwhelmed with all the opportunities that the world provides.

The connectedness then also made it easier to see what others leverage the opportunities for, which constantly forces one to compare. It is of course, well-documented that these comparisons, almost by design, make it seem like one falls behind.

It is notable that poorer countries score pretty high usually on metrics trying to quanity happiness.

Maybe the purpose of Life is not for happy, There are other more important purpose!

Technology has created more complications and lead to less need for others, eroding the social fabric of communities. While it has been beneficial to certain subgroups or specific circumstances, overall it seems to a social negative.

Technology has also lead to less reliance on others, less real interaction, and disconnected cause and effect. So our jobs and lives seem less impactful than the past.

This might be an area the Amish get right. They generally seem like a content, if not happy, group. They have family and community with jobs they can see the impact of. It may be a simpler life filled with more hard work, but it seems wholesome.

I think the technology that has had the most impact on modern humans is the computer (in whatever size and format). Our lives aren't worse because of technological development in agriculture, manufacturing and so on.

I think that computers are simply too good for us. They are incredibly useful tools which fill in for gaps in our own human abilities (memory, processing, analysis), but are largely misused by most of the population (including myself).

We shouldn't be staring at glowing artificial screens filled with unnatural colours and designs, especially not for several hours a day. We shouldn't be consuming as much media as we do. We shouldn't be swapping real life socialisation for a sub-par digital rendition. We shouldn't be bombarding ourselves with so much easily acquired information every day.

Sure, there's many people who do moderate well, but they are a complete minority (getting ever smaller). If you use computers for work, for study, for entertainment, for hours every day, they are rewiring your brain. The best thing anybody can do is to reclaim their life. Use computers (including phones) sparingly, where they boost your abilities, and try to minimise the harmful effects of them.

I cannot even imagine how the brains of young people (I am 30) growing up today are developing with constant and very early onset exposure to computers, the internet and media, and the changes in the real world to reflect the online world. It's not natural, in any format. You can't truly adapt to it.

This question is so multifaceted and psychological (personally, and in the end, collectively), that it cannot be answered satisfyingly.

And as a book recommendation, I would suggest Unabomber manifesto, by Theodore Kaczynski. Its very short and concise, written decades ago but reflecting modern society in a very uncanny way.

Go outside, touch grass and trees.

The internet, smartphones, social media, all want your attention by bombarding you with information. Too much information to process.

You need to go outside in nature, go hiking, do some sports outside, read a book, have a picnic.

Everything in life is about balance, even with technology consumption.

”The modern labourer…becomes an appendage of the machine” Marx

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” Einstein

“Our souls have become corrupted as our sciences and arts have advanced toward perfection” Rousseau

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” Thoreau

And on and on. Who said technology is good? The simple things in life are the best.