The Great Happiness Stagnation

A Moderately Progress-Skeptic Manifesto

Ah, the glorious modern age, with technology that has lit up the globe, conquered the elements and nature, and summoned AI demons! Exponential growth lines that point in promise to an ever more glorious future! An unprecendented era of personal liberties, of freedom for self-expression, of limitless choice!

But, the progress-pessimist may demand, are humans¹ actually any better off for it?

Okay, fine. In some respects, the answer is obviously yes.

I do like to indulge the fantasy that I might have been happier had I been born in the early Palaeolithic, before I had to worry about the state appropriating my crops, being sold to a Dickensian poorhouse, or being rendered obsolete by AI. But I have to give progress its due. The world has become consistently richer since the Late Middle Ages, and in the process humanity has banished many of the causes of our own suffering. We’ve massively reduced conflict, poverty, deaths in childbirth and communicable diseases. Except for the desperately poor, most of the world now has enough to eat, access to vaccines, clean water, antibiotics, and basic pain treatment.

Although this is mainly a story of going from poverty to affluence, many would make a similar case for more recent progress, in rich countries. There’s a very common optimist perspective that looks like this (from the FT, referring to the UK):

Crime is lower than it was in, say, 1980, the range of entertainment wider, the sexual freedom greater, the medical science more advanced, the great cities no longer depopulating, the Iron Curtain no longer drawn. Yes, a house in E8 will cost you now, but if you think that outweighs the invention of the hepatitis B vaccine, you might investigate the option of growing up a bit.

Although there’s also no shortage of qualitative anecdotes and quantitative data on seemingly happy traditional societies bucking these trends, from the Pirahã to the Amish, quantitative research tends to support a mainstream narrative of people reporting gradually higher happiness and life satisfaction over time. For example, the World Database of Happiness has aggregated surveys across 75 years, and points to an increase in self-reported happiness in 50 out of 80 countries since data was first collected (which varies by country, confusingly).

So I buy the progress narrative, right?

Not really, and not just for farmed animal welfare, environmental, and existential risk reasons. Between the virulently anti-progress narratives of the de-growthers, and the enthusiastic techno-optimism of Silicon Valley, I think there’s an under-told story of stagnation in human well-being. A few reasons:

Firstly, the data for richer countries doesn’t look too positive—in sources like World Database of Happiness you need to squint a little to see any positive change in the last half-century. If we look more closely at the countries that have experienced happiness jumps, we see economic miracles (South Korea), ex-dictatorships (Spain), and recoveries from communist nightmares (Poland). If you want to arbitrarily limit to Anglophones, or our European Protestant neighbours, you get stagnation: self-reported happiness in Canada, the US, the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, and the Netherlands has stalled or declined since the 1980s.

Second, people are living longer. Great, right? Well, not really. Tragically, we can only practically add time at the end of our lives. At the end of life, people get less happy, and are more likely to experience significant ill health, which can overshadow the positives of those extra few years. We’re also not having kids, so the average person alive at any given moment in rich countries is getting less happy.

Third, and most importantly, just look at happiness compared to everything else! GDP, world population, productivity and technological measures have seen explosive, exponential growth! Average happiness is effectively horizontal by comparison. The wonders of the modern world may have tweaked the needle of well-being, but we're so incredibly far from the exponential curves we’ve see for wealth, and technology.

Why have we failed so badly?

Why has money not bought happiness

Are richer people happier than poor people? Well, yes, usually. But this is only a tiny bit of the story.

The “Easterlin Paradox” describes a state where, within a country at a given time, rich people always tend to be happier than poorer people, but, over time, people don’t get any happier, despite getting richer. This means that the median-income British person in 1975 was as likely to be happy as the median-income British person in 2015, despite earning significant more money.

There’s lots of intellectual back-and-forth (or “debunking”) on whether this is accurate. But, in the words of its critics, it does represent a notable “non-finding” where researchers frequently fail to find an association between economic growth and well-being.

This clearly represents a real phenomenon—beyond a certain point we only see slight benefits from a country getting richer, and income is a very bad predictor of whether people in a country will be happier than another country or moment in time. Averaged across the global population, countries are only a tiny bit happier if they’re richer, and there are many countries that buck the trend.

The blue dots are countries, the red lines are ambiguous

Depression is an extreme manifestation of low mood, and should probably be weighted higher than regular life satisfaction levels. Two recent large-scale studies in Europe found that rates of depressive symptoms across Europe are actually somewhat anticorrelated with national wealth.

Adjusted depression rates across Europe, 2018–2020. Not sure what the Germans are doing wrong here.

So what’s the takeaway? Even the most convinced cases that money makes us happier tend to argue for log-linear effects (so going from $1000 income a year to $2000 a year has as much impact as going from $50,000 a year to $100,000). And a substantial part of this effect is correlation (happier people happen to be richer), and causation in the opposite direction (happiness makes you richer)!

This debate often neglects the fact that money only has instrumental value. Its connection to a more intrisic value, such as well-being, depends almost entirely on how you allocate it.

Don’t get me wrong, money really can buy happiness.

This is especially true if you don't care who gets the happiness!

In the overall market for well-being, there are some unbelievably good offers. Per the Happier Lives Institute, we can buy happiness at a rate of over 100 “well-being adjusted life years” per $1000!

As well as a moral wake-up call, this should also just highlight how ineffectively we convert money into our own happiness or those around us. This is mainly because our brains, social norms, and economies are just horrible at optimising our spending for happiness. Instead of buying happiness-optimising goods and experiences, we choose to buy things that our habits, and the ghostly hand of our economy can optimise for, which are:

Buying luxury/status signalling goods. I doubt my readers will be the types to splash out on Chanel bags and Ferraris. But, (per Robin Hanson) status-signalling goes far beyond this—if you think to yourself, “What garners respect in my community?” that’s probably what your status-signalling goods are, whether you’re an academic or a footballer’s wife. This might be getting a PhD, expensive healthcare, teaching your kids classical violin, or an organic shopping habit.

Do these things make us happy? Not usually. Because status is inherently relative, buying status goods is usually zero- or negative- sum—when everyone only cares about their relative position, no-one ends up happier and everyone ends up poorer.

Why do we want these things? Mostly because our mammalian brains still equate status with survival. In early human groups, status means access to resources, mates, and protection from ostracism, so our instincts keep pushing us to chase it. We just don’t seem to have good guardrails that tell us: “No, this status-conferring good is just ridiculous”. So we just go on spending our money on these weird status games.

Buying things we hedonically adapt to. There’s the classic Oscar Wilde quote: “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” This snappy one-liner clearly lands badly if you’re talking to a Guinean mother who wants food for her malnourished daughter—in that case, you’d be forgiven for arguing that it’s perhaps more of a tragedy to not get what you want. But it does apply well to a significant chunk of rich-world consumption.

Hedonic adaptation is probably the most well-evidenced reason for happiness stagnation after certain levels. Even if we buy something that makes us happier in the short run, we simply adapt to whatever positive conditions we have bought for ourselves. Our happiness returns to a (largely genetically determined) set point. This applies most obviously to entertainment and household goods. You’ve probably recognised this every time you go back to using an old phone or PC that you used to find perfectly functional and now seems ancient and unusable. The extreme of this is things that really hijack our hedonic system, like the comedown from an MDMA trip, but it can also apply to almost everything we spend extra money on.

I kind of think I’d prefer having a TV like that, actually…

Making bad temporal trade-offs. Money often fails to buy happiness because we buy the wrong things, but it can fail to buy happiness because we do the wrong things in exchange for money. This might be working too much as a signal of dedication, or out of habit, or holding on to a crap job because you're afraid of the uncertainty of leaving.

On the other hand, we have excellent evidence that money can be spent well in exchange for our own well-being, if allocated appropriately. A few examples of things that reliably manage this:

Getting un-fucked-up. A lot of our mental distress can be improved by going direct to the source. If you’re sensible about it, chemical stuff, like antidepressants, Ozempic and prudent pain relief are often wise investments here. On the behavioural level, a meta-study looking at rigorously tested ways to improve reported life-satisfaction found loads of high-reliability interventions, many of which were based on emotion management, such as mindfulness, gratitude and therapy.

A list of 234 interventions that improve life satisfaction

Buying well-timed experiences. There’s fairly robust evidence that experiences tend to beat stuff. A great concert or weekend away can leave you with a warm glow and nice memories, while the flashy new object just sits there getting hedonically adapted to.

Getting the big things right. Moving to the right place has a significant positive effect on your well-being—understandably, it’s things like green space, a nice climate, and social support that drive a lot of that. For selfish reasons, it’s probably worth it to invest money in your broader living environment, your life partner(s), and social group, even if it costs you. There are always big trade-offs here, but money can make it easier to make the better choice.

Buying time. Although richer people tend to also be overworked, time and money are generally interchangeable. Studies have shown that time-saving purchases, such as outsourcing tasks, gives a greater short-term happiness boost than other purchases, especially for exceptionally busy people who experience “time stress”.

The Bottom Line

The argument that I will retreat to under attack is that, after a certain level of wealth, money starts having a very marginal effect. Money only buys us happiness to the same degree that money buys us violin competency. It can be used for this purpose, and it’s difficult to achieve without any money, but neither our brains nor our societies are very good at doing so naturally, so we have to deliberately direct it to this.

Why technology hasn’t bought happiness

What money can buy is never a stable object. Getting rich in Victorian England can buy you a cellar full of deferential servants, a wonderful selection of tweed suits, a country manor, and distance from the Irish. But it can’t buy you the vaccines, e-bikes, or smartphones that even relatively poor people have access to today.

In the last century, far more advanced technological products have become available for personal consumption or mass use, people have become richer, and prices of these technological marvels have, on average, have gone down relative to income.

I hear the techno-optimist’s cry: “Even the poor can access so much more stuff today! Surely this should bring us happiness?”

Again, I raise a skeptical eyebrow.

I’m probably more inclined than most in my circles to a cautiously techno-pessimist perspective here. I confess that this partly comes from a personal bias. Doing anthropology research in my early 20s meant that I lived almost a year of my life in “pre-modern” conditions without electricity or the internet. Going from a life of mild technological distraction in my university, I suddenly thrived in these conditions, and became far more productive, despite having to work in the fields most days. Alongside research for my thesis, I wrote a short novel on pen and paper, learned an obscure language and a bunch of jungle skills, like how to use a machete and bamboo, taught a bunch of kids English, and probably socialised more widely than I ever have done in my life before. I never felt that the absence of (most) 20th century technology was an obstacle to my everyday happiness. Because of this experience, an environment with minimal tech has a huge practical and aesthetic appeal to me.

But I’m not that naive here. Like with wealth, I can acknowledge all the positive effects of tech where they exist, especially for the very poor. When I was doing my fieldwork, I also saw my fair share of horrific extreme suffering, mostly connected to a lack of modern medical care and pain relief. I recognise that technologies like vaccines, antibiotics, and effective sanitation remove obvious causes of suffering. It’s not just medical, anything that allows very poor people to get even a tiny bit richer is usually a huge comfort in terms of basic security. There is some data on roads and electricity being good for well-being in poor countries, and you can find benefits of things like broadband connectivity for older people in Europe.

But, again, when you get to the rich world, tech seems as disappointing as wealth, in much the same ways. We rarely see technological progress reliably improving any happiness metrics, especially over the last few decades. Japan’s technology explosion in the 20th century is world-renowned, but Japanese people haven’t become happier since the 1950s.

Nick Bostrom came up with the idea of the “urn of creativity” thought experiment in his Vulnerable World Hypothesis. According to this, there are some technologies that improve our lives (white balls), some that cause some risks (different shades of grey balls), and a few end up killing us (black balls). We can imagine this for well-being, where a white ball is beneficial (smallpox vaccine), a grey ball is risky (TV), and a black ball destroys our well-being (the AI super-app that finally destroys our minds).

A techno-optimist probably thinks that the majority of technology is white or nearly white. A techno-pessimist sees almost everything but life-saving technology as dark grey.

I’m pretty convinced that there’s a lot of dark grey in there, too. Ultimately, we shouldn’t really expect most technological developments to maximise well-being. Most technology is developed through economic incentives, and occasionally through government funding and intellectual curiosity. Most of these processes are agnostic to well-being. As such, they either just provide economic efficiency and growth (which translate poorly to happiness after a certain level, as we’ve seen), or fit broadly into the categories of things that money fails to buy—things we hedonically adapt to (better TVs), comparative status goods (flashy cars) and things that cause us to spend time in worse ways (smartphones).

Sometimes the economics work out way better, and the needs of governments or the market align with happiness. Lots of technology used for health and agricultural reasons seem to be unalloyed positives, from Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice, to mRNA vaccines. Sometimes the economics really don't work out, and demand is driven by our flawed impulses more than our meta-preferences. It’s difficult to read the history of opium and hard alcohol in the 1700-1800s, or their introduction to traditional and low-income communities without recognises the scourge that these early technological super-stimuli posed to vulnerable people.

Abuse of new and improved drugs continue to plague us today, with synthetic opoiods and cannibanoids, but I suspect for most readers, your drug of choice will be digital. Doomscroll algorithms, addictive gaming apps, and online gambling manipulate the worst parts of our brains to promote obviously harmful behaviour.

This all sounds a bit cliched, but it definitely matches my experience that, just like addictive drugs, most consumer technologies provide superficial “spikes” of enjoyment that often backfire. Doing things online always feels like an obviously inferior good that we choose due to convenience: socialising via WhatsApp rather than face-to-face engagement; gaming online rather than playing sports; watching porn rather than taking the time to carve a personalised erotic BDSM scenario from bamboo.

Some of us have enough self-awareness and discipline to shape our own and our family’s access to tech to optimise well-being. Some of us really don’t—and the most vulnerable probably suffer more from addictive tech like smartphones than the rest of us benefit from it.

The Bottom Line

I don't want to take this too far. Humans are probably happier and more free from suffering than most wild animals, and the main difference between us is the existence of millenia of increasingly ingenious technology. But the case that I’d make confidently is that technology has, at the very least, given us a lot of grey balls that cause us to make reliably worse choices, We don’t always have the necessary mental and social mechanisms to stop an influx of dark-grey balls that could erode our well-being further, even as we develop better technology that could revolutionise human happiness.

Why social/political trends have not brought happiness

Many people will now be thinking something along the lines of:

“Money and technology have brought amazing potential for happiness, but this has all been ruined by [insert hated political philosophy here]!”

To those of us sensitive to the bittersweet allure of politicisation, it’s a fairly appealing narrative that any trends we don’t like are to blame. It’s all atheism! Feminism! Free-market capitalism! Right-wing populism! The death (or possibly the birth, if you’re very old-school) of the nuclear family! Radical Islam! Internet-driven polarisation!

These trends are harder to measure, as cultures tend to cluster a bunch of unconnected traits together in ways that are hard to parse. But cultural membership does seem to be a strong predictor of well-being. On a macro-level, South Americans are far happier than North Africans; on the micro-level, the Pirahã are supposedly far happier than other Amazonian tribes, and rice farmers are less happy than wheat farmers.

My intuitions are that socio-cultural habits and trends shape happiness more than technology or income, except for the very poor. Most of this is too messy to get into now, but we can identify a few obvious “modernisation” trends in social organisation that might explain why we’re not getting (much) happier. It seems fairly well evidenced that the atomisation of family and community life has measurable, cross-cultural correlations with unhappiness. The World Happiness Report tells us that “…in Mexico and Europe, a household size of four to five predicts the highest levels of happiness... and couples who live with at least one child, or couples who live with children and members of their extended family, have especially high average life satisfaction.”

But of course, tighter family ties have their downsides. Back in my fieldwork days, I went from idolising small-scale societies to recognising deeply why some people want to escape them. I lived with a host who had around 30 children (with 3 concurrent wives), and there was something beautiful about the camaraderie of this tight network: spending your days helping your brothers out, legions of grandchildren playing with chickens and mud and trees, evenings chatting by the fire, etc. But you gradually start to see the cracks. The petty status games involving the village chief, the widowed woman entering old age without any social protection, the guy who was almost definitely a repressed gay in a culture that didn’t acknowledge that possibility, and the coolest, most intellectual guy in the village feeling ostracised for his nonconformity. Although it was an amazing experience for me, I’d likely have fled years ago if I’d been born there.

You’d hope that modern cultural shifts would be able to reliably take the best of both worlds without trade-offs—keeping the warmth of family connections without the ostracism, and that good-for-nothing cousin constantly sponging from you. Or keeping a free and liberal culture where you can still ask your neighbours to babysit now and again. A few groups, like the Mormons, and certain Rationalist circles, seem to have pulled off a kind of blend, blending tight-knit communities of values with a healthy level of autonomy.

But it seems that the attractor state is increasingly atomisation, which seems backed up by the (relatively damning) data. Alongside the rise in living alone, there are increasing trends in the numbers of young adults across the world reported having no one they could count on for social support, and feeling lonely.

The Bottom Line

I won’t try to turn this into a full anthropology thesis, but the broad point seems hard to escape: loads of recent social shifts have made people less happy. It wouldn’t surprise me if the main story of our stagnation is that these atomisation trends (probably intensified by certain technologies) have been the main downward pressure on well-being. Relationships and communities are the surest route to well-being but, for reasons that are both understandable and kinda stupid, we’re screwing them up.

What to do about it?

If we do enter a more “normal” world, where AI boosts economic growth without destroying us all, solving this “Great Happiness Stagnation” should be one of our biggest priorities, especially if there are more “dark grey balls”—technologies that draw us into darker, more self-destructive habits, that accompany AI progress.

I’ll aim to write a post on solutions and future pathways later in the year.

Thanks for reading, please leave comments!

1. (Obviously farmed animals aren’t, but that’s a case for another day)