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With the growing emergence of technology and our busy routine, everyone is busy on their own; people are considering their lives so busy! Are we becoming less happy in this modern era of technology?

elliot svensson
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ME.
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  • Ordinary people always were busy. Thus, the answer, I guess, would be "No". – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 17:45
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    How to you measure aggregate happiness? Were people more happy when life expectancy was 30 and we got eaten by mastodons? – user4894 Nov 08 '18 at 18:57
  • @user4894 That example is not spectacular. Say, peasants who worked in the fields for 12 hours were happier. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 19:06
  • Hi, welcome to Philosophy SE. Please visit our [Help Center](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/help) to see what questions we answer and how to ask. Your post is not really an answerable question but an invitation to other users to share their thoughts. This is suitable for a forum but here is considered off-topic. We take more pointed questions that are more or less objectively answerable based on existing literature. – Conifold Nov 08 '18 at 22:14
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    @DavidBlomstrom I have unfairly maligned mastodons. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. "Today I learned." Personally I like modernity. Someone else will have to be very unappy with modern life in order to cancel out my happiness. So again, how does one quantify aggregate happiness? Maybe YOU are unhappy working 12 hours a day in a chair . Myself, back when I was working 12 hours a day in a chair, much preferred that to hunting mastodons. And how about modern medicine? I had some surgery a while back. I really enjoy anesthesia. Old days better? Not in my opinion. – user4894 Nov 09 '18 at 03:53

2 Answers2

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I suspect that happiness is pretty much what you get when you have good relationships with other people, including any people having power or authority over you. To the extent that people isolate themselves with technology, I would say that "Yes, modern technology makes us unhappy."

But I would not say that this is a purely up-to-date modern thing; after all, in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (1843), wasn't Ebenezer Scrooge's fault isolation-due-to-focus-on-things (specifically, his business)?

Likewise, Inspector Javert, the villain in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" (1862) lived a life "of privations, isolation, self-denial, and chastity—never any amusement". Javert, like us, gave his free attention to the written word: "In his leisure moments... although he hated books, he would read."

Still, these two works of literature were produced after the steam engine. I wonder if such depictions of human unhappiness, surrounded by media, have older counterparts!

elliot svensson
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  • Oh, yes, majority of those who have much money and do not need to go to work in an office (say, small business) feel themselves less happy then those who work for pennies and see collegues and boss despising themselves and each other. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 18:58
  • @rus9384, I'm afraid I don't follow. – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:18
  • You say that unhappiness is due to lack of relationships. But the post is essentially about the need to work. And I say that now people work less than in 15 century. And people from 15 century hardly could be happy working all day long, often being ill, etc. Good relationships alone are not enough. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 19:20
  • @rus9384, I think it's easy to show that bad relationships make us unhappy, and that no relationships also make us unhappy... are you essentially saying that good relationships don't make an oppressed person happy? – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:25
  • Yes, good relationships are not enough. I even say that unhappy person can't have good relationships due to passive aggresion and other things. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 19:27
  • @rus9384, I guess in my definition, oppression is categorized as a bad relationship, albeit a relationship to a person (or a group of people) in authority. I will include this clarification in my Answer! – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:29
  • I mean when you starve (or have some joyful things), when your muscles are in pain, when you are ill, etc. It's hardly an oppression. But it is a factor when we talk about unhappiness. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 19:32
  • @rus9384, do you hold that collectively improving food quality, such that inequality remains exactly as it was, would also collectively improve happiness? – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:34
  • People are not unhappy due to inequality alone. It is due to low quality of life. If we put "quality of life" instead of "food quality" your idea is impossible. There is a limit on QoL when it's enough. So, after some point those with the highest QoL could'nt improve it more, thus collective improvement would mean lessening the inequality. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 19:38
  • @rus9384, but if a person's quality of life is pretty much maximal, then how could he hope to transition from unhappy to happy? – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:49
  • @rus9384 (it seems not-too-difficult to identify unhappy people whose quality of life is pretty much maximal. That was the lesson of "Richard Cory") – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 19:52
  • @rus9384, on further reflection, it seems somehow wrong _evolutionarily_ to think that people have this thing "happiness" that is contingent on quality of life and not inequality, and which is prior to happy relationships. Evolutionarily, why would the first humans, who didn't have toilets, be unhappy about that? – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 22:07
  • I wouldn't be as well, even though I have one. I would be unhappy if I had not a toilet and I would need to go wsomewhere far to satisfy my need. But there are things that can make you happier, like good weather, chocolate (remember, serotonine) and a plenty of otger things. And evolutionary it is not wrong: some food was useful (promoted survival and allowed to have more *viable* (which means those who can take care of themselves and be reproductive) offsprings. Same for warmth: cold does not increase the chances of survival. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 22:57
  • @rus9384, Oh! I don't mean "relationships" as in, "having a boyfriend / girlfriend" (i.e. _romantic relationships_)... I just mean relationships as in, "the way I relate to, and the degree of trust I share with, any other person." – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 23:01
  • Nobly the great priest / deposits his daily stool / in bleak winter fields. -Basho – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 23:03
  • Neither do I. I just gave an evolutionary argument that happiness would not be dictated solely by interpersonal relationships. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 23:34
  • @rus9384, my thought is that evolutionarily, it is inefficient (and therefore unlikely) for us to have "unhappiness" with relation to future advances in quality of life that haven't been imagined. It's like that mopey robot in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"--- what's he so sad about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android – elliot svensson Nov 08 '18 at 23:43
  • They are not just the future. The desires for warmth, food, sex, etc. were engines of evolution. People did not live in a warm paradise full of tasty food and free partners. – rus9384 Nov 09 '18 at 00:18
  • @rus9384, my biggest point is that in a place that doesn't have toilets, you have great priests materially at peace when they poop outside. Should they be unhappy because they don't have indoor toilets? – elliot svensson Nov 09 '18 at 00:25
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Technology enables us to be wealthier (which correlates with happiness, at least up to a point) while being less busy. This is less evident in, say, the US compared to Nordic countries, due to social differences. Technology brings greater security and better health care. (I personally rely on devices to help me see, hear, walk, and sleep, and medicines for a lot more things. I'm happy.)

I'd expect technology to bring more happiness, and indeed it does appear to in many cases.

David Thornley
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  • Are Nordic countries technologically more advanced that the US? – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 18:53
  • No, but they seem to be getting more happiness than the US is. OP was talking about always feeling busy, which is more of a society thing than a tech thing, and is much more common in the US than in the European countries I'm familiar with. – David Thornley Nov 08 '18 at 22:32
  • True. That's not about technology. That's about some greedy people. – rus9384 Nov 08 '18 at 22:58
  • @DavidBlomstrom Pollution is nothing new. The form has changed, so it's no longer as much raw smoke and manure.. I've seen no evidence that genetically modified food is harmful. The crime rate and infant mortality rate are way down, and lifespans are up. Biological weapons are a threat to unleash what was relatively common before technology. Nuclear weapons aren't used. I have a lot less fear of any other human doing something bad to me or my loved ones. – David Thornley Nov 09 '18 at 14:34
  • @DavidBlomstrom So, have the inhabitants of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima foresworn technology? Nerve gas attacks aren't biological. Do you know how many people died in a well-financed nerve gas terror attack in the Tokyo subway system, when the attackers had expert advice? Twelve. I haven't heard of a single additional such attack. There's been more in war zones, but war zones have always been dangerous. Anybody worried about mass nerve gas attacks needs to look around at what real threats are. – David Thornley Nov 10 '18 at 18:50