I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to lo

I agree completely. When I say "you need counseling", I'm not trying to be flip. Seriously: If you're having a crisis, you need counseling. You don't need to look all over the world for some sort of grand, sweeping, half-baked objective theory for your unhappiness ("information technology is making my life miserable"). Instead you need to look much closer. You need to talk to friends, loved ones, psychologists, career counselors, priests... whatever. Unhappiness is not an easy problem to solve, logic won't solve it for you, and the answer is as likely to be something trivial and personal as it is something grand and sweeping. My writing appears to be a total failure today, not surprisingly. [1] I'm not trying to offer up objective reasons for why one should be happy because I expect them to convince anyone to be happy. Of course that won't work! Happiness doesn't work that way. I'm offering them up as a counterexample to the idea, implicit in the original essay, that one's unhappiness at age 50 is necessarily related to some large-scale objective trend. It isn't. Because, I'd argue, large-scale objective trends suggest that a healthy middle-class American 50-year-old should be on top of the world. And yet many of them are unhappy anyway. I'm sorry about that, but I see no reason to believe it's Google's fault. --- [1] I should note, for the record, that I'm fighting the swine flu, and I'd have a 102-degree fever right now if it weren't for the awesome power of modern drugs. ;)