4 ms·
Destroying happiness
- Goladus 18y agoAny happiness related to interpersonal human relationships have not likely changed much over time. Did Hamlet's unhappiness have anything to do with his standard of living? If someone asked me why people today aren't happier, then, after pointing out the hidden presumption that is at best a huge oversimplification and at worst completely wrong (are "people" really not any happier now than in 17th century France?), I'd say it's probably because people are still selfish and cruel to each other.
- sh1mmer 18y agoI'm curious how journalist measure happiness over time. Especially how they assess the happiness of people who lived in a time before social anthropologists to study the well-being of a society.
- cousin_it 18y agoGood insight. Surprisingly deep when you start thinking: it shows that sometimes marketing becomes a negative-sum game due to externalities. Will it lead Seth to question his career choice?
- gasull 18y agoHe said that marketers that focus on maintaining market share remind us that we are happy. He proposes to focus on maintaining a market share, in the long tail, instead of mass marketing and making everybody unhappy unless they have the last piece of fancy crap.
- cousin_it 18y agoWhat proportion of ads you see are for things you already use? It doesn't balance out. I guess most things are not used by more than 50% of the ad's audience.
- gasull 18y agoObviously you don't usually read Seth Godin. He is against advertisement as we know it. Marketing is more than advertisement. Take a look at his main posts and his Wikipedia page.
- anamax 18y agoI predict that if Obama wins, happiness will increase. Why? Because the current "things are horrible" news reporting will be replaced by "things are getting better" even if said things don't change at all. We saw this at the beginning of Clinton's first term. "We're in a recession" became "we're in a recovery" after Clinton took office even though the recovery started well before said election.