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But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relations

But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships? What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?

tarr11 5y ago
At the most basic level, life expectancy has increased everywhere [0] and so quality of life has increased for a large number of people who would otherwise be dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
- marricks 5y ago
  Life expectancy has already lowered quite a bit from the pandemic we can't put a lid on, and when (if) that settles down cataclysmic climate change will continue its work. Sorry but the future seems quite bleak.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    One human constant through history is that the future always seems bleak to most of it. This seems like an understudied thing to me.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    At any point of human history, one could convince themselves that the future is bleak. There had been pandemics and plagues, cold and hot wars, revolutions and dangerous technologies and -isms. And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right. But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign. I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead. That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.
    - minikites 5y ago
      >Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right. It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.
      - xyzelement 5y ago
        > (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving. Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not. Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life. Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending. But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end
        minikites 5y ago
        >I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life. I think it only seems overly negative -because- so many people are blindly optimistic and assume things just get better naturally with no action required on our part. That's why I have such a negative outlook, I can envision the immense work we need to do to address climate change (and many other issues) and I'm seeing such a small amount of work being done that it's basically a rounding error. Watching people reject even the small amount of work required to personally address COVID (a free shot) does not fill me with hope that we can make big changes. >But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work I think this is the disconnect between us. The future is worth the work, but we refuse to work on the future. We instead work harder to prop up the unsustainable present.
dalbasal 5y ago
"Happier and more fulfilled" is a good question to ask about a person, but I think it gets too squishy in regards to people. Too abstract. If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  I think a set of metrics would be if people's stressors have been reduced. Like Do people spend less time worrying about paying bills, job security, etc. I agree that a "happiness" metric is not great.
JackPoach 5y ago
Should we be measuring at all? Claiming that people have to be more happy over time is a weird proposition for a biologist like me. Not only happiness does not exist (see reification), the idea that it can be 'measured and improved' is silly. Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense? To me it doesn't. We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- laserlight 5y ago
  I can tell whether I am happy or not. What do you mean when you say happiness doesn't exist?
  - JackPoach 5y ago
    Do you understand the concept of reification? If not, see https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Reification%20is%20a%20complex%20idea,reification%20of%20a%20couple's%20love https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Re.... So if you feel happy (or miserable) it means just that - that you feel happy (or miserable). It doesn't mean that happiness or misery actually exist literally.
    - barneysversion 5y ago
      Reification is usually a fallacy when we take the abstraction too far. The canonical example being "the map is not the territory" where someone confuses every mark on a map with actual features of the terrain. One could argue that abstractions "actually exist literally" without being physical. Gravitational fields don't exist physically but do exist and they're a valid abstraction that's useful to measure. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon that could be useful too (though I would say to a lesser extent.) A little tangential but... even things that we would say exist physically are not on closer inspection. Does a chair actually exist or is it a platonic ideal that we apply to a collection of atoms assembled to form four legs, seat and a back?
nonameiguess 5y ago
I can't speak for "people" at broad, but improvements have certainly made a difference for my household. Gwern mentions hearing aids. They haven't just gotten smaller, but more capable. My wife couldn't have conversations with people at all in 1991. She can now. Universal subtitling opens up the full catalog of film and television that she couldn't experience. Spinal interbody fusion existed before 1991, but it wasn't very reliable. Procedure quality has improved rapidly, and that is the only reason my life right now isn't hopelessly miserable or possibly over, as the amount of pain I used to be in made death pretty tempting.
- coryrc 5y ago
  On that latter note, my friend has an electronic device implanted in his spine to reduce pain. Non-opioid, effective pain relief!
  - adammunich 5y ago
    What is it?
    - SilasX 5y ago
      Yeah ditto, I need that.
- stopnamingnuts 5y ago
  This. I think innovation real-value is spikey. A low band of timesavers bumps along the bottom but is punctuated by occasional leaps in particular domains. From what I've seen the cochlear implant can offer an amazing difference to quality of life for those that choose it. I can only imagine the difference the implant, or the improved aids, would have made to my hearing-impaired college roommate in the early 90s.
dougmwne 5y ago
I sure am! We have family and friends spread across 2 continents. We can travel freely to spend time near them, take our jobs with us wherever we go, rent a well appointed home with a tap, and when not physically present, have a video chat at a moment's notice and hop into a round of VR golf. In the old world we would have had to choose career or having relationships with our parents and extended families. No more.
- treis 5y ago
  This is definitely a marked difference. Grandma/pa get a near daily stream of pictures & video of kiddo growing up. They get video calls on a (relatively) big screen to interact on a weekly or so basis. When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.
minikites 5y ago
Our society is not structured in a way to value or measure this, our society is optimized for wealth generation and extraction. If a human activity can't be bought or sold, we don't value or measure it. For example, stay-at-home parents aren't accounted for in GDP calculations, but outside daycare providers are, so we structure society to encourage parents to work and pay for daycare instead of staying home.
jayd16 5y ago
I wonder if happiness is influenced more by some absolute level of joy or is it more influenced by the rate of improvements.
nitwit005 5y ago
No matter the improvement, including social improvements like you're suggesting, people just adjust their expectations to the new normal. We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.
jrsj 5y ago
Most HN users are going to say “yes” because we are generally much higher income earners. Have things gotten better for everyone? Definitely not. Looking at continued increase in “deaths of despair” it seems like some of the changes that have made some of us richer have also made a larger % of the population more miserable than ever. We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front. To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Indeed. We've traded cheaper better widgets for political and economic regression. Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.

tarr11 5y ago

At the most basic level, life expectancy has increased everywhere [0] and so quality of life has increased for a large number of people who would otherwise be dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

marricks 5y ago
Life expectancy has already lowered quite a bit from the pandemic we can't put a lid on, and when (if) that settles down cataclysmic climate change will continue its work. Sorry but the future seems quite bleak.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  One human constant through history is that the future always seems bleak to most of it. This seems like an understudied thing to me.
- xyzelement 5y ago
  At any point of human history, one could convince themselves that the future is bleak. There had been pandemics and plagues, cold and hot wars, revolutions and dangerous technologies and -isms. And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right. But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign. I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead. That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.
  - minikites 5y ago
    >Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right. It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.
    - xyzelement 5y ago
      > (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving. Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not. Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life. Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending. But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end
      - minikites 5y ago
        >I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life. I think it only seems overly negative -because- so many people are blindly optimistic and assume things just get better naturally with no action required on our part. That's why I have such a negative outlook, I can envision the immense work we need to do to address climate change (and many other issues) and I'm seeing such a small amount of work being done that it's basically a rounding error. Watching people reject even the small amount of work required to personally address COVID (a free shot) does not fill me with hope that we can make big changes. >But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work I think this is the disconnect between us. The future is worth the work, but we refuse to work on the future. We instead work harder to prop up the unsustainable present.

dalbasal 5y ago

"Happier and more fulfilled" is a good question to ask about a person, but I think it gets too squishy in regards to people. Too abstract. If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.

ironman1478 5y ago
I think a set of metrics would be if people's stressors have been reduced. Like Do people spend less time worrying about paying bills, job security, etc. I agree that a "happiness" metric is not great.

JackPoach 5y ago

Should we be measuring at all? Claiming that people have to be more happy over time is a weird proposition for a biologist like me. Not only happiness does not exist (see reification), the idea that it can be 'measured and improved' is silly. Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense? To me it doesn't. We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
laserlight 5y ago
I can tell whether I am happy or not. What do you mean when you say happiness doesn't exist?
- JackPoach 5y ago
  Do you understand the concept of reification? If not, see https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Reification%20is%20a%20complex%20idea,reification%20of%20a%20couple's%20love https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Re.... So if you feel happy (or miserable) it means just that - that you feel happy (or miserable). It doesn't mean that happiness or misery actually exist literally.
  - barneysversion 5y ago
    Reification is usually a fallacy when we take the abstraction too far. The canonical example being "the map is not the territory" where someone confuses every mark on a map with actual features of the terrain. One could argue that abstractions "actually exist literally" without being physical. Gravitational fields don't exist physically but do exist and they're a valid abstraction that's useful to measure. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon that could be useful too (though I would say to a lesser extent.) A little tangential but... even things that we would say exist physically are not on closer inspection. Does a chair actually exist or is it a platonic ideal that we apply to a collection of atoms assembled to form four legs, seat and a back?

nonameiguess 5y ago

I can't speak for "people" at broad, but improvements have certainly made a difference for my household. Gwern mentions hearing aids. They haven't just gotten smaller, but more capable. My wife couldn't have conversations with people at all in 1991. She can now. Universal subtitling opens up the full catalog of film and television that she couldn't experience. Spinal interbody fusion existed before 1991, but it wasn't very reliable. Procedure quality has improved rapidly, and that is the only reason my life right now isn't hopelessly miserable or possibly over, as the amount of pain I used to be in made death pretty tempting.

coryrc 5y ago
On that latter note, my friend has an electronic device implanted in his spine to reduce pain. Non-opioid, effective pain relief!
- adammunich 5y ago
  What is it?
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Yeah ditto, I need that.
stopnamingnuts 5y ago
This. I think innovation real-value is spikey. A low band of timesavers bumps along the bottom but is punctuated by occasional leaps in particular domains. From what I've seen the cochlear implant can offer an amazing difference to quality of life for those that choose it. I can only imagine the difference the implant, or the improved aids, would have made to my hearing-impaired college roommate in the early 90s.

dougmwne 5y ago

I sure am! We have family and friends spread across 2 continents. We can travel freely to spend time near them, take our jobs with us wherever we go, rent a well appointed home with a tap, and when not physically present, have a video chat at a moment's notice and hop into a round of VR golf. In the old world we would have had to choose career or having relationships with our parents and extended families. No more.

treis 5y ago
This is definitely a marked difference. Grandma/pa get a near daily stream of pictures & video of kiddo growing up. They get video calls on a (relatively) big screen to interact on a weekly or so basis. When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.

minikites 5y ago

Our society is not structured in a way to value or measure this, our society is optimized for wealth generation and extraction. If a human activity can't be bought or sold, we don't value or measure it. For example, stay-at-home parents aren't accounted for in GDP calculations, but outside daycare providers are, so we structure society to encourage parents to work and pay for daycare instead of staying home.

jayd16 5y ago

I wonder if happiness is influenced more by some absolute level of joy or is it more influenced by the rate of improvements.

nitwit005 5y ago

No matter the improvement, including social improvements like you're suggesting, people just adjust their expectations to the new normal. We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.

jrsj 5y ago

Most HN users are going to say “yes” because we are generally much higher income earners. Have things gotten better for everyone? Definitely not. Looking at continued increase in “deaths of despair” it seems like some of the changes that have made some of us richer have also made a larger % of the population more miserable than ever. We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front. To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Indeed. We've traded cheaper better widgets for political and economic regression. Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.