The 20th century was the American century, but we got progressively less happy as the years rolled along:
The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily--and hugely--less happy. The difference in happiness of men between men of my generation, born in the 1960s, and my father's generation, born in the 1920s, is the same as the effect of a tenfold difference in income. In other words, if my father had little money compared to his contemporaries and I have lots of money compared to mine, I can still expect to be less happy. Here, curiously, the European pattern diverges. Happiness falls for the birth years from 1900 to about 1950, and generations born on the continent since World War II have gotten successively happier.
Or, as the authors of this economic study put it, "in the United States the well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time." In other words, wealth seems to have an inverse relationship with self-reports of happiness, at least once a certain threshold of income has been reached.
What accounts for the misery of the well-off? Here's a hypothesis: conspicuous consumption. The 20th century witnessed the birth of rampant consumerism. It began with the Sears-Roebuck catalog and eventually became the defining feature of American life. While I love my local shopping mall as much as the next person, I'm pretty convinced that it doesn't make me happier. The reason is rooted in a basic property of our dopamine-rich reward neurons. When someone wears a Rolex watch, they don't make themselves happy--their dopamine neurons have already adapted to the luxury good--but they do manage to raise the expectations of everybody wearing less expensive watches. These people now feel inferior, since their Timex has been devalued by the costlier item. (Such luxury items are known as "positional goods," since part of their appeal is that they signal your social position. This also makes purchasing luxury goods a zero-sum game, since you can only enjoy them only if others don't.) Multiply this same psychological phenomenon across a full range of consumer products--from clothes to cars, stereos to shoes--and you can begin to see why people in developed countries are so prone to depression. Not only do their dopamine neurons automatically adapt to their state of wealth, but those same neurons are constantly being bombarded with a new set of expectations. When these expectations aren't fulfilled--and most people can't afford a Rolex--our dopamine cells are disappointed, just like monkeys not given juice. We feel the absence of their activity, which makes us sad. As Adam Smith observed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, "Riches leave a man always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow."
So what's the solution? Is it possible to step off the hedonic treadmill? The best approach involves silencing our desires, restraining the insatiable appetite of our dopamine neurons. This is what the Amish have done. They have learned to live without modern consumerism. They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quite permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population. The Amish are content because they have learned to ignore their dopaminergic pleas for more.
Comments (15)
They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quiet permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400.
Ok, so they're happy. So what? There's a lot of research that shows happiness is negatively correlated with intelligence. Perhaps instead of consciously supressing their hedonist urges, the Amish are just disproportionately stupid?
That can't possibly be the right answer either. I think that no understanding of "personal happiness" in a social animal like humans is complete without consideration for the societal context the person lives in.
Amish society rejects the modern way of life. This may be an effective emotional shield, but it's also very selfish from the cultural perspective. They have withdrawn entirely from the larger social context. They do not contribute in any meaningful way to science, medicine, art, literature, or politics. The most valuable Amish contribution to human well-being that I can think of is that they provide a reliable source of free-range organic chicken.
So maybe they're subjectively happy- but only becuase they're willfully ignorant about the world around them. Their culture actively supresses ambition to effect change, which is more a throwback to peasant society in feudal europe than anything else in the last 500 years of human history.
Amish happiness is akin to American inaction on the genocide in Darfur- the ignorance is systemic, self-serving, and internally consistent. As long as CNN and ABC and the NYT don't run a story about it, the WSJ doesn't have to say anything either. From the inside- everything is rosy. Darfur? Where's that? If there was something going on, I'd surely read about it in the paper. And who needs cars anyway... Viewed in the larger context of world affiars, this kind of conscious isolationism is irresponsible, if not morally reprehensible.
If the price of happiness is disregard for the Renaissance and everything that has happened since, I'm more than willing to sacrifice my short-term current happiness for the chance that my uncontrolled ambition might some day allow me make the world a better place for the rest of us.
Posted by: tekel | March 16, 2007 2:41 PM