This is a simple issue: awareness of opportunity cost leads to unhappiness. The expanded perception of individual potential ("you can be anything you want!"), a

This is a simple issue: awareness of opportunity cost leads to unhappiness. The expanded perception of individual potential ("you can be anything you want!"), and the Feminism movement that has given that sentiment extra appeal ("you can have everything that men have, and more!") makes the awareness even more acute. When your appetite is grossly inflated, you will be constantly hungry and dissatisfied, almost by definition. I vaguely remember research that finds perception of opportunity cost giving the same brain response as the loss of a physical object (70% sure; I'll be gladly corrected). If this is the case, it's even more amusing: you can nearly create limitless unhappiness, because there is an unlimited number of "phantom things" that you can tell people that they "are capable of owning" but it is mathematically impossible for them to do so.