With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive.
My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.
When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment.
I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.
At least as measured by suicide rates in the US your grandmothers likely generation new quite well what depression was even if the word didn’t matter. Between the 1920s and the end of WW2 the suicide rate per 100000 was lowest at 15 but reached almost 22.
The pandemic rate which caused (rightly) lots of angst and introspection was 14.3.
We should investigate what is causing increased levels of depression currently but we shouldn’t assume it was absent in other generations when we do it.
> At least as measured by suicide rates in the US your grandmothers likely generation new quite well what depression was even if the word didn’t matter.
They knew what suffering was, and arguably did more of it. But very few of them thought of it as a primarily medical problem, one requiring intervention by professionals, medicine, and so on. People who think of their problems in this newer way handle them differently, and not always better.
I think there is a lot to unpack in your anecdote about the baker vis-a-vis happiness vs proliferation of depression in modern life.
If I had to summarize my own thoughts about it, it’s ownership, community/relationships, and hardships/challenges that can be overcome through hard work.
Modern technology counter intuitively gives us very little agency everything is owned by faceless/soulless corporations, technology “connects us” in unparalleled ways but also isolates us, and while life has and likely will always be hard for the majority there is a feeling of invisible prisons enabled through technology that no amount of hard work can overcome.
I remember my mother, in the 1980s, getting a parking ticket. So she had to go to the local police officer. We were a tiny town, a village almost. But there was a police station. And the officer was in charge of this case. He talked to my mother. She explained. And he ended up saying that in this case, he’d be willing to make an exception.
Fast forward to today. I drive to school in the morning. There’s a van at the side of the road. It’s not even police; some kind of contractor. Out on the road, there’s a fancy radar/speed trap thing. They probably paid €100,000 of taxpayer money for it, plus a servicing contract. Were probably promised that it’s gonna pay for itself within two years. And now the two dudes sit inside the van. The machine is doing the work. Tickets are being sent out automatically by a computer system. And there is literally nobody who owns the process.
It is an abstract machinery, turning citizens into objects.
My mother and the policeman, as a result of the encounter, had reached an understanding. They became partners in the higher principle. There was a true connection between the citizens and the state. The state had a face, and there was a local representative who was in charge.
Today, the state has no face. Even the judges in the legal system just act as tiny wheels in the machinery. It’s hard to find anyone whoever owns anything. Much less owns up to anything.
The opening scene of American Gangster Denzel Washington’s character is the driver/right hand man for Bumpy Johnson. They go into a store and Bumpy has a heart attack, Denzel calls for help, and Bumpy just says “forget it frank, there’s no one in charge.”
And so it is when PayPal or coinbase accounts get frozen, or social media accounts get suspended without notice or explanation, Gmail accounts get hacked or deleted in freak occurrences. Good luck getting any help, there’s no one in charge, the best you can hope for is social media shamming which only works when you already have influence.
I think there are 2 aspects to the anecdote about your grandma.
Firstly, no one spoke about depression, because it as a condition was not recognized. It doesn't mean people didn't feel depressed.
Secondly, this time supporting your argument, perhaps when people go through terrible things in their childhood, they grow resilient towards adversity. If you know things can get a lot worse, you don't really worry about minor things.
Maybe it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?
Or phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not).
That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking.
None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too.
A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire.
You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?
Historically, the people taking up arms certainly did NOT distribute wealth if they won. Rather, the leaders of any successful rebellion just became the new elite and the poor remained the poor but with new leadership.
The war leaders certainly didn't literally distribute wealth to the conscripted people. Instead you had plundering, with the winners simply taking things and the dead were ... Well, outta the picture, consequently the survivors had the opportunity to become skilled craftsman and marry after their return, as most didn't survive (even if their side won).
Let's say a farmer family's children were all conscripted. 5 left and 2 returned. Before the war, 4 had few prospects.
After the war, both will have prospects, one to succeed the farm and the other one as the husband to another farm that didn't have anyone return.
That’s not how it was among the Germanic peoples at least. They followed people who were called “gold-giver”. It was seen as the responsibility of the leader to bring wealth to his followers in exchange for their loyalty and courage. I think Christianity changed that expectation to some degree.
> It was seen as the responsibility of the leader to bring wealth to his followers in exchange for their loyalty and courage.
Replace the word wealth with prosperity and the same applies for your later example. The leader is just someone you can’t see, touch, or hear so is harder to displace.
While I agree with what a lot of what you said, there is a lot of survivorship bias in a single anecedote. My Grandma also has a very similar story, born in 1920s, fled from the Russians, no depression. But there is family from the same time period that committed suicide. Then for every one suicide there were 10 people that lived out of the bottle. So even though no one talked about depression it was there.
Is she still alive? I can recommend interviewing her about the past and recording it. There may come a time where you will be glad to have those recordings. Or your children/grandchildren. Also, given the right prompting, you may learn things about her that you have never seen before.
They don’t have to be perfect. With Wisper and LLMs it’s easy to later filter out the interesting parts. Or even to turn it into some kind of personal memoir booklet.
> With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest <...> generation alive.
Only if you think that wealth is what makes people happy, but we just need to take a look at all the unhappy wealthy people all around us to see that that is not the case. Poverty can make people unhappy of course, especially the stress that comes from uncertainty. But prosperity alone is not sufficient for happiness. Generations of social researchers and philosophers have thrown themselves at this problem.
Where did you get the "amount of technology" = "wealth" from parent's comment?
With the current amount of technology we could put a roof over people's head, provide clean water and safe foods and medicines. This has nothing to do with owning a Lamborghini or eating a Michelin star restaurant, which would indeed count as superfluous wealth that doesn't actually improve happiness.
Technology makes possible things cheaper and impossible things possible, which is a form of wealth. At any rate, both money and technology can make us materially comfortable. But the reason “money can’t buy happiness” is that a large part of happiness comes from connections with people, to society, and perhaps even to nature. Another large part comes from one’s meaning or purpose. Neither of those can be bought or technologied.
Except that money DOES buy time. When I have money, I can convert it to time to do things I enjoy. When I don't have money, I need to spend my time to get money in order to survive. I find the statement that "money can't buy time" something that only a fairly wealthy person would believe, and not at all accurate in practice.
> I find the statement that "money can't buy time" something that only a fairly wealthy person would believe, and not at all accurate in practice.
Most people with money are old, because that's how you get money in general: provide value over a long period of time. But they would probably all trade that money for being 22 again, and having a lifetime ahead.
I would agree with the statement that money can't buy time that has already passed, because nothing can do that. Money can definitely buy time in the present moment, though.
Someone asked a substitute teacher if she would make that trade, and she said she wouldn’t, not unless she could retain what she knew now. So, buy a renewed youth? Sure. But do 22 again as a 22 year old? Nope.
Now that I’m “over the hill”, I see what she meant. Being 44 is similar to the difference between 11 and 22; not as drastic, but the stuff I understand about life I would not even be able to communicate to 22 year old me. Definitely would not want to relive my 20s.
“Life starts at 40” is not just cope, there’s some truth in there, too.
Maybe this is just because we culturally overvalue the individual. Maybe technology helps us survive and have 'more' on a macro level but causes problems on a micro level, and maybe we are more geared 'naturally' than we believe to sacrifice our micro for a good human macro. I think about ants that sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony, surely without the same reasoning we would do something similar for[1].
Just like the winegrowers, who, living in a garden not cultivated by them, had to understand and feel that they were in immeasurable debt to the landlord, people must also understand and feel that from the day of their birth until their death, they are always in immeasurable debt to someone: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those yet to come; to that which was, is, and will be the beginning of everything. They must understand that with every hour of their life, as they accept life, they reinforce this obligation that binds them to life and its origin, and that therefore, the person who denies this obligation and lives for themselves, in trying to preserve their personal life, ultimately destroys it.
This is precisely what Christ repeated many times.
The true life is only that which continues the past life and contributes to the salvation of the present and future life.
Actually I remembered that wrong, ants aren’t identical, in fact they may be less related than siblings because the queen could have mated with more than one male. Sorry!
There is an evolutionary biology and game theory perspective on this but it’s more complex than the case of genetic clones.
Difficult to calculate, with inflation and everything. But I do remember from the 1980s that a roll of bread was ~2 Euro cents (5 Pfennig), nominally. And now it’s ~20.
With industrial baking, modern fertilizers, farming automation, global container shipping, and all of that, one would reasonably expect it to have gotten significantly cheaper.
This is overly simplistic thinking. Of Course increases in technology isn't the only factor determining aggregate societal well being or happiness or whatever. But it would be naive and disingenuous to suggest anything other than it being monotonic at the very least.
This also asks for a search for better social technology, as opposed to asserting that we must slow down the search for better physical technology because the social technology isn't keeping up.
With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive.
My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.
When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment.
I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.