3 ms·
I hate to ruin a good Guardian anecdotal narrative, but male happiness has been trending upward for the last 40 years. Females are the ones becoming less happy
by quantumofmalice 9y ago
I hate to ruin a good Guardian anecdotal narrative, but male happiness has been trending upward for the last 40 years. Females are the ones becoming less happy, for reasons I will leave to the reader to speculate on:
http://www.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/posts/HAP23.jpg http://www.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/posts/HAP23...
As far as why men can't ditch "the baggage" of striving to win in dominance & competence hierarchies, it is because it was necessary for hundreds of thousands of years for a male to achieve reproductive success. And, all else equal, it still is.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoAnd no matter what kind of equality we strive for women are attracted to that success.
- LeeHwang 9y agoWow, thanks for this comment. It's hugely enlightening. Its almost like female humans are the ones who desire masculinity in men to be happy more than the men need masculinity to be happy. Really mind boggling.
- imh 9y agoThat's subjective happiness, aka "Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days — would you say you’re very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy these days?” In the discussion section of the paper [0] that freakonomics post [1] is about, they talk about limitations and less straightforward interpretations of that measure and that trend. This isn't to say the guardian post is right and you're wrong, but that it isn't impossible both are correct and interesting and worthy of discussion. I don't want your post to shut down or dismiss discussion of OP. [0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 [1] http://freakonomics.com/2008/08/05/happiness-inequality-2-differences-between-groups/ http://freakonomics.com/2008/08/05/happiness-inequality-2-di...