Do you think humans in the future in general will be more or less happy than they are now?
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
connollystr
I think it’ll be the same. There will be new aspects in life to bring joy, and misery in counterparts.
benoau
On an individual level there's always opportunities to find happiness, but in aggregate seems like the future is pretty bleak for a handful of preventable yet unavoidable reasons and most people will be adversely impacted.
JumpinJack_Cash
Happiness is due to sudden improvement AKA going from 0 to 1 in a relatively short time. If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving. WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12 That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences. And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level
thelastgallon
No, it feels like its game over for most people. No more lives left to play. Most people whose parents went from farming --> jobs now feel their parents made a fatal mistake. There is nothing for them to fall back on. It is hard to go back to farming. Which is made worse because there is no land, the lands for sold for a pittance, which now costs a substantial amount of money.
dudul
The title and the description ask two different questions. I do not think people are optimistic about the future. Back in the late 90's/early 2000s yes, people were very optimistic. Everyone was so thrilled to get to the 21st century. Now, people seem clinically depressed, technology is no longer something designed to make you happy, or make your life easier. It is just a battle to control your attention and sell you garbage. Will people be happier in the future? Honestly I don't know. Anyone can "decide" to be happy to some degree. As a large group/society, no I don't think people will be happy.
ben_w
I think this: "این نیز بگذرد" Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass". - https://archive.org/details/quoteverifierwho00keye/page/160/... We live now in bad days. This, too, will pass.
markus_zhang
Probably more or less the same given enough to average things out. If you look back you probably think in certain ages people were really miserable, but people knows how to adapt and eventually they got used to it.
justonceokay
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era
al_borland
There will be good times and bad times in the future, just as there have always been. Those times also vary by region on a macro level, and vary still at a micro level. I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.
lanstin
I am optimistic about the future but I doubt happiness would increase so much; happiness is remarkably stable; I do think at the right time scale, humans as a group will have less sickness and brutality and more kindness and intelligence and fulfillment. But you know people in a society with 1/3 of children dieing within five years are remarkably not unhappier than one where only 0.2% die. The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn. (Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).
WarOnPrivacy
My optimism is tied to social discernment - how well society evaluates our increasingly powerful changes. The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment. However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time. When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism. But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.
martythemaniak
People in the immediate future will be far less happy simply because there are enormous resources being spent to make them so. The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.
techteach00
Deeply pessimistic. I'm of the view that the powerful are extracting less and less capital from the average person. It doesn't seem worth it to them. So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted. Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too. We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged. The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.
craftkiller
Not at all. At this point, I don't see improvement in the future; I'm just hoping I'll be able to maintain my standard of living. We are hurtling towards an economic collapse, an unemployment crisis, and the risk of major war. I thought I was safely beyond conscription age, but the war in Ukraine has shown that when push comes to shove the max conscription age is mutable.
olivierestsage
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that computer technology is morally evil
hgsocket
Depends on the individual mental health, happiness not comes from outside, it comes from our mental state
linguae
I’m not optimistic about the near future. It seems that the post-WWII order in the developed world is disintegrating. It seems that the political and business elites of America and some other developed countries have forgotten the concept of noblesse oblige , that elites have a responsibility to serve the general public. Greed and power have gone unchecked. This has negatively affected the lives of many in the developed world, and many are justifiably angry. Unfortunately, anger can either devolve into uncontrollable rage or be misdirected as a controlled weapon. Demagogues have been able to capture some of this anger and use it for their own aims, which is making matters worse by increasing the number of angry people. Rising inflation, especially in housing prices, is demoralizing, where one’s efforts to save is quickly evaporated thanks to a combination of bad fiscal/monetary policy and housing regulations that benefit existing homeowners over prospective ones. Personal computing was one of the nice bright spots of modern society. I grew up during the rise of the personal computer, the Web, and mobile computing. Computing felt liberating, empowering, and enjoyable. Unfortunately major players have been able to gain oligopoly power over computing. Enshittification is the norm in modern software, and it’s difficult for upstarts to compete against entrenched oligopolies. The generative AI boom and the massive run on the RAM and storage markets have caused massive price hikes, which now threaten to price us out of personal computing. The one area that has long resisted price inflation has succumbed to it. It seems like we are getting priced out of living.
0x20cowboy
Optimistic! There is so much to learn, invent and discover.
paulcole
Wildly optimistic about the future! Every year gets better than the one before. More technology, more opportunity! Why would I have any fun believing that things have peaked?
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Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
connollystr
I think it’ll be the same. There will be new aspects in life to bring joy, and misery in counterparts.
benoau
On an individual level there's always opportunities to find happiness, but in aggregate seems like the future is pretty bleak for a handful of preventable yet unavoidable reasons and most people will be adversely impacted.
JumpinJack_Cash
Happiness is due to sudden improvement AKA going from 0 to 1 in a relatively short time. If I were to make a comparison happiness is the sub 3 seconds 0-100 that you can achieve with your sportscar, or skydiving. WHat you are referring to is the Concorde flying at 80000ft at mach 2.12 That's impressive but won't bring about the same limbic happiness and excitement as the aforementioned experiences. And actually it's how evolution brings about improvement, everybody is trying to improve and collectively as humanity incredible progress happens over time but no individual can take joy or credit from it and thus everybody has to keep pushing to bring about personal improvement that would bring happiness that in turn on a large scale would produce large improvement at the societal level
thelastgallon
No, it feels like its game over for most people. No more lives left to play. Most people whose parents went from farming --> jobs now feel their parents made a fatal mistake. There is nothing for them to fall back on. It is hard to go back to farming. Which is made worse because there is no land, the lands for sold for a pittance, which now costs a substantial amount of money.
dudul
The title and the description ask two different questions. I do not think people are optimistic about the future. Back in the late 90's/early 2000s yes, people were very optimistic. Everyone was so thrilled to get to the 21st century. Now, people seem clinically depressed, technology is no longer something designed to make you happy, or make your life easier. It is just a battle to control your attention and sell you garbage. Will people be happier in the future? Honestly I don't know. Anyone can "decide" to be happy to some degree. As a large group/society, no I don't think people will be happy.
ben_w
I think this: "این نیز بگذرد" Attributed to Attar of Nishapur (1142-1221), who was beheaded by Genghis Kahn's Mongols. In one of Attar's fables, a powerful king gathered a group of wise men and asked them to produce a ring that would make him happy when sad, and sad when happy. After much consultation among themselves, the wise men presented the king with a ring inscribed "This, too, will pass". - https://archive.org/details/quoteverifierwho00keye/page/160/... We live now in bad days. This, too, will pass.
markus_zhang
Probably more or less the same given enough to average things out. If you look back you probably think in certain ages people were really miserable, but people knows how to adapt and eventually they got used to it.
justonceokay
Absolutely. We live in a time of unprecedented wealth, stability, health, acceptance, and knowledge. Don’t listen to the daily news, compare our situation to past generations and different times. If I had a Time Machine I would not use it to go to some earlier era
al_borland
There will be good times and bad times in the future, just as there have always been. Those times also vary by region on a macro level, and vary still at a micro level. I think there will be happy people in the future, but it won’t be a straight line, nor will everyone be happy at the same time.
lanstin
I am optimistic about the future but I doubt happiness would increase so much; happiness is remarkably stable; I do think at the right time scale, humans as a group will have less sickness and brutality and more kindness and intelligence and fulfillment. But you know people in a society with 1/3 of children dieing within five years are remarkably not unhappier than one where only 0.2% die. The right scale is not years or decades but maybe centuries. I recently read the powerhouse book “Pandemic” by Sonia Shah, among whose amazing ideas is a history of the ideas of medicine and germ theory in the last few hundred years. As idiotic as the Covid responses have been, they were way way better, not only than the European response to Plague, but to European response to cholera from 170 years ago. We are as a group slow learners, but seem to continue handling each recurrent example of a problem slightly better; our Achilles heel is slow moving disasters than just happen once, e.g. the carbon burn. (Offtopic, another fascinating idea from the book is that both sexual reproduction and death or individuals may be evolved responses to microbial attacks, mixing up the variety in the species so the microbes can’t over adapt to the genome).
WarOnPrivacy
My optimism is tied to social discernment - how well society evaluates our increasingly powerful changes. The automobile brought us mobility. Private property rights for individuals brought some security for a section of society. Awareness of children's risk from a small % of men led to some children avoiding uniquely awful mistreatment. However, car culture, trespassing culture and unwarranted stranger-danger fears have eradicated key+critical parts of childhood: Particularly free ranging and regular hours of adult-free peer time. When society examines the outcomes of this loss, they blame kids' screen time (the screens that kids use to compensate for what we took from them). This amps up my pessimism. But I also see kids rise to the challenge of our increasingly complex society. I find modern youth to be broadly more capable than my generation and far more understanding than my parent's generation (WWII vets). I draw real optimism from this.
martythemaniak
People in the immediate future will be far less happy simply because there are enormous resources being spent to make them so. The world's first trillionaire spent the day he became the world's first trillionaire celebrating by trying to incite a racial pogrom in a distant country.
techteach00
Deeply pessimistic. I'm of the view that the powerful are extracting less and less capital from the average person. It doesn't seem worth it to them. So housing and now cars are marketed to the rich and wealthy, we're losing things we took for granted. Anonymity is basically dead on the internet. Worse being they don't just want my ID to participate but scans of my face, God knows who they are selling this data too. We have less and less agency over anything. In the U.S both political parties are essentially the same. If you are an outsider like Massie, Planter or Omar they will successfully destroy your ability to represent the public. The game is rigged. The bad times will continue and worsen until a cataclysmic global event resets the system. We'll see.
craftkiller
Not at all. At this point, I don't see improvement in the future; I'm just hoping I'll be able to maintain my standard of living. We are hurtling towards an economic collapse, an unemployment crisis, and the risk of major war. I thought I was safely beyond conscription age, but the war in Ukraine has shown that when push comes to shove the max conscription age is mutable.
olivierestsage
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that computer technology is morally evil
hgsocket
Depends on the individual mental health, happiness not comes from outside, it comes from our mental state
linguae
I’m not optimistic about the near future. It seems that the post-WWII order in the developed world is disintegrating. It seems that the political and business elites of America and some other developed countries have forgotten the concept of noblesse oblige , that elites have a responsibility to serve the general public. Greed and power have gone unchecked. This has negatively affected the lives of many in the developed world, and many are justifiably angry. Unfortunately, anger can either devolve into uncontrollable rage or be misdirected as a controlled weapon. Demagogues have been able to capture some of this anger and use it for their own aims, which is making matters worse by increasing the number of angry people. Rising inflation, especially in housing prices, is demoralizing, where one’s efforts to save is quickly evaporated thanks to a combination of bad fiscal/monetary policy and housing regulations that benefit existing homeowners over prospective ones. Personal computing was one of the nice bright spots of modern society. I grew up during the rise of the personal computer, the Web, and mobile computing. Computing felt liberating, empowering, and enjoyable. Unfortunately major players have been able to gain oligopoly power over computing. Enshittification is the norm in modern software, and it’s difficult for upstarts to compete against entrenched oligopolies. The generative AI boom and the massive run on the RAM and storage markets have caused massive price hikes, which now threaten to price us out of personal computing. The one area that has long resisted price inflation has succumbed to it. It seems like we are getting priced out of living.
0x20cowboy
Optimistic! There is so much to learn, invent and discover.
paulcole
Wildly optimistic about the future! Every year gets better than the one before. More technology, more opportunity! Why would I have any fun believing that things have peaked?