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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34770 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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How do we know that there has been a general decline in overall happiness over the period you have in mind?

I could point to surveys of self-reported happiness, rates of substance abuse, mental illness, suicide, crime, divorce rates.... but generally, I'm skeptical that there's actually a way to determine the answer to this question in any sort of rigorous fashion. If you see it, you see it. If not, feel free to dismiss the above argument out of hand. After all, "I'm happy. I'm happy every day."

Yeah, I don't want to be annoying about asking for evidence about these things, but I haven't seen a partic vivid trajectory personally except for unhappiness having to do with recent Covid issues of course. I just don't attach much weight to this personal impression given that I am in a relatively well-off context.

I do think one can easily support claims about general unhappiness in terms of objective statistics for 'obviously bad things that make people unhappy', like poverty, drugs, crime, etc (although it is tricky with regard to people taking say, happiness drugs, as they could have been unhappy before and just not taken drugs, when there is a recent pervasive marketing of them). Maybe there are indicators one can find elsewhere in culture, media that more unhappy people are liable to consume to see their feelings reflected back at them.

Never be afraid to ask for evidence here.

I just don't attach much weight to this personal impression given that I am in a relatively well-off context.

An entirely sensible position, I think. I'm in a relatively well-off context as well, but I was in a much worse one for quite a while, which probably shapes my views on such things.

And yeah, the question is itself really tricky. You can ask people "are you happy", but what you're really asking them is "do you want a specific kind of change". People can be very unhappy, and still be unwilling to embrace changes they don't like.

I think the truly happy, CONTENT people are harder to detect because they're just out there enjoying life and not complaining.

But the rates of drug abuse, suicide, and all the other ills you mentioned are really hard to ignore as social red flags.

That's my thinking as well, but the reality is that there's no answer to sheer denial, because we have no unbiased access to others' internal state, and the question is too loaded for honesty to work at scale. The first step is admitting you have a problem, because that's not something people, generally, are inclined to do. So it goes.

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