Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

CHAPTER 18 HAPPINESS

But are we any happier? If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be. An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure. He or she can spend that leisure time reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, Skyping with friends and relatives, or dining on Thai food instead of Spam fritters.

But if popular impressions are a guide, today’s Americans are not one and a half times happier (as they would be if happiness tracked income), or a third happier (if it tracked education), or even an eighth happier (if it tracked longevity). People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever, and the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are happy has remained steady for decades. Popular culture has noticed the ingratitude in the Internet meme and Twitter hashtag #first worldproblems and in a monologue by the comedian Louis C.K. known as “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy”:

When I read things like, “The foundations of capitalism are shattering,” I’m like, maybe we need some time where we’re walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides. . . . ’Cause now we live in an amazing world, and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots. . . . Flying is the worst one, because people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. . . . They’re like, “It was the worst day of my life. . . . We get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for forty minutes.” . . . Oh really, then what happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn’t even conceive how they fuckin’ put air in them? . . . You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now! . . . People say there’s delays? . . . Air travel’s too slow? New York to California in five hours. That used to take thirty years! And a bunch of you would die on the way there, and you’d get shot in the neck with an arrow, and the other passengers would just bury you and put a stick there with your hat on it and keep walking. . . . The Wright Brothers would kick us all in the [crotch] if they knew.¹

Writing in 1999, John Mueller summed up the common understanding of modernity at the time: “People seem simply to have taken the remarkable economic improvement in stride and have deftly found new concerns to get upset about. In an important sense, then, things never get better.”² The understanding was based on more than just impressions of American malaise. In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.³ Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.

The Easterlin paradox was explained with two theories from psychology. According to the theory of the hedonic treadmill, people adapt to changes in their fortunes, like eyes adapting to light or darkness, and quickly return to a genetically determined baseline.⁴ According to the theory of social comparison (or reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation, which we examined in chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by how well they think they are doing relative to their compatriots, so as the country as a whole gets richer, no one feels happier—indeed, if their country becomes more unequal, then even if they get richer they may feel worse.⁵

If, in this sense, things never get better, one can wonder whether all that economic, medical, and technological so-called progress was worth it. Many argue that it was not. We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion. That is why, one often reads, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have been soaring, and why Sweden, that secular paradise, has a famously high rate of suicide. In 2016 the activist George Monbiot prosecuted the cultural pessimist’s time-honored campaign against modernity in an op-ed entitled “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness. That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” The tag line was, “Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s time to ask where we are heading and why.” The article itself warned, “The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”⁶

If all those extra years of life and health, all that additional knowledge and leisure and breadth of experience, all those advances in peace and safety and democracy and rights, have really left us no happier but just lonelier and more suicidal, it would be history’s greatest joke on humanity. But before we start walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides, we had better take a closer look at the facts about human happiness.

At least since the Axial Age, thinkers have deliberated about what makes for a good life, and today happiness has become a major topic in social science.⁷ Some intellectuals are incredulous, even offended, that happiness has become a subject for economists rather than just poets, essayists, and philosophers. But the approaches are not opposed. Social scientists often begin their studies of happiness with ideas that were first conceived by artists and philosophers, and they can pose questions about historical and global patterns that cannot be answered by solitary reflection, no matter how insightful. That is especially true for the question of whether progress has left people happier. To answer it, we must first assuage the critics’ incredulity over the possibility that happiness can even be measured.

Artists, philosophers, and social scientists agree that well-being is not a single dimension. People can be better off in some ways and worse off in others. Let’s distinguish the major ones.

We can begin with objective aspects of well-being: the gifts we deem intrinsically worthwhile whether or not their possessors appreciate them. At the top of that list is life itself; also on it are health, education, freedom, and leisure. That is the mindset behind Louis C.K.’s social criticism and, in part, behind Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s conceptions of fundamental human capabilities.⁸ In this sense we can say that people who live long, healthy, and stimulating lives are truly better off even if they have a morose temperament or are in a bad mood or are spoiled idiots and fail to count their blessings. One rationale for this apparent paternalism is that life, health, and freedom are prerequisites to everything else, including the very act of pondering what is worthwhile in life, and so they are worthy by their very nature. Another is that the people who have the luxury of failing to appreciate their good fortune make up a biased sample of lucky survivors. If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits. These dimensions of well-being have been the topics of the preceding chapters, and the verdict on whether they have improved over time is in.

Among these intrinsic goods is freedom or autonomy: the availability of options to lead a good life (positive freedom) and the absence of coercion that prevents a person from choosing among them (negative freedom). Sen gave a shout-out to this value in the title of his book on the ultimate goal of the development of nations: Development as Freedom. Positive freedom is related to the economist’s notion of utility (what people want; what they spend their wealth on), and negative freedom to the political scientist’s notions of democracy and human rights. As I mentioned, freedom (together with life and reason) is a prerequisite to the very act of evaluating what is good in life. Unless we are impotently lamenting or celebrating our fate, then whenever we assess our condition we are presupposing that people in the past could have chosen otherwise. And when we ask where we should be heading, we presuppose that we have choices about what to pursue. For these reasons, freedom itself is inherently worthy.

In theory, freedom is independent of happiness. People can surrender to fatal attractions, crave pleasures that are bad for them, regret a choice the morning after, or ignore advice to be careful what they wish for.⁹ In practice, freedom and the other good things in life go together. Whether assessed objectively through a democracy index for a country as a whole, or subjectively through people’s ratings of whether they feel they have “free choice and control over their lives,” the level of happiness in a country is correlated with the level of freedom.¹⁰ Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.¹¹ Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way. People can even value autonomy over happiness: many who have gone through a painful divorce, for example, would still not choose to return to a time when their parents would have arranged their marriages.

What about happiness itself? How can a scientist measure something as subjective as subjective well-being? The best way to find out how happy people are is to ask them. Who could be a better judge? An old Saturday Night Live skit has Gilda Radner in a postcoital conversation with a nervous lover (played by Chevy Chase) who is worried she didn’t have an orgasm, and she consoles him by saying, “Sometimes I do and I don’t even know it.” We laugh because when it comes to subjective experience, the experiencer herself is the ultimate authority. But we don’t have to take people’s word for it: self-reports of well-being turn out to correlate with everything else we think of as indicating happiness, including smiles, a buoyant demeanor, activity in the parts of the brain that respond to cute babies, and, Gilda and Chevy notwithstanding, judgments by other people.¹²

Happiness has two sides, an experiential or emotional side, and an evaluative or cognitive side.¹³ The experiential component consists of a balance between positive emotions like elation, joy, pride, and delight, and negative emotions like worry, anger, and sadness. Scientists can sample these experiences in real time by having people wear a beeper that goes off at random times and prompts them to indicate how they are feeling. The ultimate measure of happiness would consist of a lifetime integral or weighted sum of how happy people are feeling and how long they feel that way. Though experience sampling is the most direct way of assessing subjective well-being, it’s laborious and expensive, and there are no good datasets that compare people in different countries or track them over the years. The next best thing is to ask people how they are feeling at the time, or how they remember having felt during the day or week before.

This brings us to the other side of well-being, people’s evaluations of how they are living their lives. People can be asked to reflect on how satisfied they feel “these days” or “as a whole” or “taking all things together,” or to render the almost philosophical judgment of where they stand on a ten-rung ladder ranging from “the worst possible life for you” to “the best possible life for you.” People find these questions hard (not surprisingly, since they are hard), and their responses may be warped by the weather, their current mood, and what they were asked about immediately beforehand (with questions to college students about their dating life, or to anyone about politics, having a reliably depressive effect). Social scientists have become resigned to the fact that happiness, satisfaction, and best-versus-worst-possible life are blurred in people’s minds and that it’s often easiest just to average them together.¹⁴

Emotions and evaluations are, of course, related, though imperfectly: an abundance of happiness makes for a better life, but an absence of worry and sadness does not.¹⁵ And this brings us to the final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose. This is the quality that, together with happiness, goes into Aristotle’s ideal of eudaemonia or “good spirit.”¹⁶ Happiness isn’t everything. We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.

Though no mortal can stipulate what really makes a life meaningful, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues probed for what makes people feel their lives are meaningful. The respondents separately rated how happy and how meaningful their lives were, and they answered a long list of questions about their thoughts, activities, and circumstances. The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored. But other things can make lives happier while leaving them no more meaningful or even less so.

People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.

We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy, we cherish the status quo. Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative occupants of the uniquely human cognitive niche. We consider goals that are rooted in the distant past and stretch far into the future, that affect people beyond our circle of acquaintance, and that must be ratified by our fellows, based on our ability to persuade them of their worth and on our reputation for benevolence and efficacy.¹⁷

An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.

Let’s agree that the citizens of developed countries are not as happy as they ought to be, given the fantastic progress in their fortunes and freedom. But are they not happier at all? Have their lives become so empty that they are choosing to end them in record numbers? Are they suffering through an epidemic of loneliness, in defiance of the mind-boggling number of opportunities to connect with one another? Is the younger generation, ominously for our future, crippled by depression and mental illness? As we shall see, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no.

Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ. Eighty-six percent of those who are asked about their happiness in the World Values Survey say they are “rather happy” or “very happy,” and on average the respondents in the 150-country World Happiness Report 2016 judged their lives to be on the top half of the ladder from worst to best.¹⁸ Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.¹⁹

What about the historical trajectory? Easterlin identified his intriguing paradox in 1973, decades before the era of big data. Today we have much more evidence on wealth and happiness, and it shows there is no Easterlin paradox. Not only are richer people in a given country happier, but people in richer countries are happier, and as countries get richer over time, their people get happier. The new understanding has come from several independent analyses, including ones by Angus Deaton, the World Values Survey, and the World Happiness Report 2016.²⁰ My favorite comes from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and may be summarized in a graph. Figure 18-1 plots ratings of average life satisfaction against average income (on a logarithmic scale) for 131 countries, each represented by a dot, together with the relationship of life satisfaction to income among the citizens of each country, represented by an arrow impaling the dot.

Figure 18-1: Life satisfaction and income, 2006

Source: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a, fig. 11, based on data from the Gallup World Poll 2006. Credit: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.

Several patterns jump out. The most immediate is the absence of a cross-national Easterlin paradox: the cloud of arrows is stretched along a diagonal, which indicates that the richer the country, the happier its people. Bear in mind that the income scale is logarithmic; on a standard linear scale, the same cloud would rise steeply from the left end and bend over toward the right. This means that a given number of extra dollars boosts the happiness of people in a poor country more than the happiness of people in a rich country, and that the richer a country is, the more additional money its people need to become happier still. (It’s one of the reasons that the Easterlin paradox appeared in the first place: with the noisier data of the era, it was hard to spot the relatively small rise in happiness at the high end of the income scale.) But with either scale, the line never flattens out, as it would if people needed only some minimum amount of income to see to their basic needs and anything extra made them no happier. As far as happiness is concerned, Wallis Simpson was half-right when she said, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.”

Most strikingly, the slopes of the arrows are similar to each other, and identical to the slope for the swarm of arrows as a whole (the dashed gray line lurking behind the swarm). That means that a raise for an individual relative to that person’s compatriots adds as much to his or her happiness as the same increase for their country across the board. This casts doubt on the idea that people are happy or unhappy only in comparison to the Joneses. Absolute income, not relative income, is what matters most for happiness (a conclusion that’s consistent with the finding discussed in chapter 9 on the irrelevance of inequality to happiness).²¹ These are among a number of findings that weaken the old belief that happiness adapts to ambient conditions like the eye, returns to a set point, or remains stationary as people vainly stride on a hedonic treadmill. Though people often do rebound from setbacks and pocket their good fortune, their happiness takes a sustained hit from trials like unemployment or disability, and a sustained boost from gifts like a good marriage or immigrating to a happier country.²² And contrary to an earlier belief, winning the lottery does, over the long term, make people happier.²³

Since we know that countries get richer over time (chapter 8), we can think of figure 18-1 as a freeze-frame in a movie showing humanity getting happier over time. This increase in happiness is yet another indicator of human progress, and among the most important of all. Of course this snapshot is not an actual longitudinal chronicle in which people all over the world are polled for centuries and we plot their happiness over time; such data do not exist. But Stevenson and Wolfers scoured the literature for what longitudinal studies there were, and found that in eight out of nine European countries, happiness increased between 1973 and 2009 in tandem with the country’s rise in GDP per capita.²⁴ A confirmation for the world as a whole comes from the World Values Survey, which found that in forty-five out of fifty-two countries, happiness increased between 1981 and 2007.²⁵ The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).

Happiness, of course, depends on much more than income. This is true not just among individuals, who differ in their life histories and their innate temperaments, but among nations, as we see from the scatter of dots around the gray line in the graph. Nations are happier when their people are in better health (holding income constant), and, as I mentioned, they are happier when their citizens feel they are free to choose what to do with their lives.²⁶ Culture and geography also matter: true to stereotype, Latin American countries are happier than they should be given their income, and the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe are less happy.²⁷ The World Happiness Report 2016 found three other traits that go with national happiness: social support (whether people say they have friends or relatives they can count on in times of trouble), generosity (whether they donate money to charity), and corruption (whether they perceive the businesses in their country as corrupt).²⁸ We cannot conclude, though, that these traits cause greater happiness. One reason is that happy people see the world through rose-tinted glasses, and may give generous assessments of the good things both in their lives and in their societies. The other is that happiness is, as social scientists say, endogenous: being happy might make people supportive, generous, and conscientious rather than the other way around.

Among the countries that punch below their wealth in happiness is the United States. Americans are by no means unhappy: almost 90 percent rate themselves as at least “pretty happy,” almost a third rate themselves as “very happy,” and when they are asked to place themselves on the ten-rung ladder from the worst to the best possible life, they choose the seventh rung.²⁹ But in 2015 the United States came in at thirteenth place among the world’s nations (trailing eight countries in Western Europe, three in the Commonwealth, and Israel), even though it had a higher average income than all of them but Norway and Switzerland.³⁰ (The United Kingdom, whose citizens place themselves at a happy 6.7 rungs up from the worst possible life, came in at twenty-third place.)

Also, the United States hasn’t gotten systematically happier over the years (another decoy that led to the premature announcement of the Easterlin paradox, because the United States is also the country with happiness data that stretch back the farthest). American happiness has fluctuated within a narrow band since 1947, deflecting in response to various recessions, recoveries, malaises, and bubbles, but with no consistent rise or fall. One dataset shows a slight decline in American happiness from 1955 to 1980, followed by a rise through 2006; another shows a slight decline in the proportion saying they are “very happy” starting in 1972 (though even there the sum of those who say they are “very happy” and “pretty happy” has not changed).³¹

The American happiness stagnation doesn’t falsify the global trend in which happiness increases with wealth, because when we look at changes in a rich country over a few decades we’re peeping at a restricted range of the scale. As Deaton points out, a trend that is obvious when you look at the effects of a fiftyfold difference in income between, say, Togo and the United States, representing a quarter-millennium of economic growth, may be submerged in the noise when you look for the effects of, say, a twofold difference in income within a single country over just twenty years of economic growth.³² Also, the United States has seen a greater rise in income inequality than the countries of Western Europe (chapter 9), and its growth in GDP may have been enjoyed by a smaller proportion of the populace.³³ Speculating about American exceptionalism is an endlessly fascinating pastime, but whatever the reason, happyologists agree that the United States is an outlier from the global trend in subjective well-being.³⁴

Another reason it can be hard to make sense of happiness trends for individual countries is that a country is a collection of tens of millions of human beings who just happen to occupy a patch of land. It’s remarkable that we can find anything in common when we average them, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find that as time passes, different segments of the population go in different directions, sometimes jerking the average around, sometimes canceling each other out. Over the past thirty-five years African Americans have been getting much happier while American whites have gotten a bit less happy.³⁵ Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women. In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.³⁶

The biggest complication in making sense of historical trends, though, is one that we came across in chapter 15: the distinction between changes across the life cycle (age), in the zeitgeist (period), and over the generations (cohort).³⁷ Without a time machine, it’s logically impossible to disentangle the effects of age, cohort, and period completely, to say nothing of their interactions. If, for example, fifty-year-olds were miserable in 2005, we couldn’t tell whether the Baby Boomers had a hard time dealing with middle age, the Baby Boomers had a hard time dealing with the new millennium, or the new millennium was a hard time to be middle-aged. But with a dataset that embraces multiple generations and decades, together with a few assumptions about how quickly people and times can change, one can average the scores for a generation over the years, for the entire population at each year, and for the population at each age, and make reasonably independent estimates of the trajectory of the three factors over time. That in turn allows us to look for two different versions of progress: people of all ages can become better off in recent periods, or younger cohorts can be better off than older ones, lifting the population as they replace them.

People tend to get happier as they get older (an age effect), presumably because they overcome the hurdles of embarking on adulthood and develop the wisdom to cope with setbacks and to put their lives in perspective.³⁸ (They may pass through a midlife crisis on the way, or take a final slide in the last years of old age.)³⁹ Happiness fluctuates with the times, especially the changing economy—not for nothing do economists call a composite of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate the Misery Index—and Americans have just dug themselves out of a trough that followed the Great Recession.⁴⁰

The pattern across the generations also has ups and downs. In two large samples, Americans born in every decade from the 1900s through the 1940s lived happier lives than those in the preceding cohort, presumably because the Great Depression left a scar on the generations who came of age as it deepened. The rise leveled off and then declined a bit with the Baby Boomers and early Generation X, the last generation that was old enough to allow the researchers to disentangle cohort from period.⁴¹ In a third study which continues to the present (the General Social Survey), happiness also dipped among the Baby Boomers but fully rebounded in Gen X and the Millennials.⁴² So while every generation agonizes about the kids today, younger Americans have in fact been getting happier. (As we saw in chapter 12, they have also become less violent and less druggy.) That makes three segments of the population that have become happier amid the American happiness stagnation: African Americans, the successive cohorts leading up to the Baby Boom, and young people today.

The age-period-cohort tangle means that every historical change in well-being is at least three times as complicated as it appears. With that caveat in mind, let’s take a look at the claims that modernity has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness, suicide, and mental illness.

To hear the observers of the modern world tell it, Westerners have been getting lonelier. In 1950 David Riesman (together with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) wrote the sociological classic The Lonely Crowd. In 1966 the Beatles wondered where all the lonely people come from, and where they all belong. In a 2000 bestseller the political scientist Robert Putnam noted that Americans were increasingly Bowling Alone. And in 2010 the psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz wrote of The Lonely American (subtitle: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century). For a member of gregarious Homo sapiens, social isolation is a form of torture, and the stress of loneliness a major risk to health and life.⁴³ So it would be another joke on modernity if our newfound connectivity has left us lonelier than ever.

One might think that social media could make up for whatever alienation and isolation came with the decline of large families and small communities. Today, after all, Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie could be Facebook friends. But in The Village Effect the psychologist Susan Pinker reviews research showing that digital friendships don’t provide the psychological benefits of face-to-face contact.

This only heightens the mystery of why people would be getting lonelier. Among the world’s problems, social isolation would seem to be one of the easier ones to solve: just invite someone you know for a chat at a neighborhood Starbucks or around the kitchen table. Why would people fail to notice the opportunities? Have people today, especially the ever-maligned younger generation, become so addicted to digital crack cocaine that they forgo vital human contact and sentence themselves to needless and perhaps lethal loneliness? Could it really be true, as one social critic put it, that “we have given our hearts to machines, and are now turning into machines”? Has the Internet created, in the words of another, “an atomized world without human contact or emotion”?⁴⁴ To anyone who believes there is such a thing as human nature, it seems unlikely, and the data show it is false: there is no loneliness epidemic.

In Still Connected (2011), the sociologist Claude Fischer reviewed forty years of surveys that asked people about their social relationships. “The most striking thing about the data,” he noted, “is how consistent Americans’ ties to family and friends were between the 1970s and 2000s. We rarely find differences of more than a handful of percentage points either way that might describe lasting alterations in behavior with lasting personal consequences—yes, Americans entertained less at home and did more phone calling and emailing, but they did not change much on the fundamentals.”⁴⁵ Though people have reallocated their time because families are smaller, more people are single, and more women work, Americans today spend as much time with relatives, have the same median number of friends and see them about as often, report as much emotional support, and remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as their counterparts in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days. Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends (though a bit less face-to-face contact), and they feel that the electronic ties have enriched their relationships. Fischer concluded that human nature rules: “People try to adapt to changing circumstances so as to protect their most highly valued ends, which include sustaining the volume and quality of their personal relationships—time with children, contact with relatives, a few sources of intimate support.”⁴⁶

What about subjective feelings of loneliness? Surveys of the entire population are sparse; the data Fischer found suggested that “Americans’ expressions of loneliness remained the same or perhaps increased slightly,” mainly because more people were single.⁴⁷ But surveys of students, a captive audience, are plentiful, and for decades they have indicated whether they agree with statements like “I am unhappy doing so many things alone” and “I have nobody to talk to.” The trends are summarized in the title of a 2015 article, “Declining Loneliness over Time,” and are shown in figure 18-2.

Since these students were not tracked after they left school, we don’t know whether the decline in loneliness is a period effect, in which it has become steadily easier for young people to satisfy their social needs, or a cohort effect, in which recent generations are more socially satisfied and will remain so. What we do know is that young Americans are not suffering from “toxic levels of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.”

Together with “the kids today,” the perennial target of cultural pessimists is technology. In 2015 the sociologist Keith Hampton and his coauthors introduced a report on the psychological effects of social media by noting:

For generations, commentators have worried about the impact of technology on people’s stress. Trains and industrial machinery were seen as noisy disruptors of pastoral village life that put people on edge. Telephones interrupted quiet times in homes. Watches and clocks added to the dehumanizing time pressures on factory workers to be productive. Radio and television were organized around the advertising that enabled modern consumer culture and heightened people’s status anxieties.⁴⁸

Figure 18-2: Loneliness, US students, 1978–2011

Source: Clark, Loxton, & Tobin 2015. College students (left axis): Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, trend line across many samples, taken from their fig. 1. High school students (right axis): Mean rating of six loneliness items from the Monitoring the Future survey, triennial means, taken from their fig. 4. Each axis spans half a standard deviation, so the slopes of the college and high school curves are commensurable, but their relative heights are not.

And so it was inevitable that the critics would shift their focus to social media. But social media can be neither credited nor blamed for the changes in loneliness among American students shown in figure 18-2: the decline proceeded from 1977 through 2009, and the Facebook explosion did not come until 2006. Nor, according to the new surveys, have adults become isolated because of social media. Users of social media have more close friends, express more trust in people, feel more supported, and are more politically involved.⁴⁹ And notwithstanding the rumor that they are drawn into an anxious competition to keep up with the furious rate of enjoyable activities of their digital faux-friends, social media users do not report higher levels of stress than non-users.⁵⁰ On the contrary, the women among them are less stressed, with one telling exception: they get upset when they learn that someone they care about has suffered an illness, a death in the family, or some other setback. Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes.

Modern life, then, has not crushed our minds and bodies, turned us into atomized machines suffering from toxic levels of emptiness and isolation, or set us drifting apart without human contact or emotion. How did this hysterical misconception arise? Partly it came out of the social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic: Here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis. But partly it came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but in more co-workers. They are less likely to have a large number of friends but also less likely to want a large number of friends.⁵¹ But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social.

Suicide, one might think, is the most reliable measure of societal unhappiness, in the same way that homicide is the most reliable measure of societal conflict. A person who has died by suicide must have suffered from unhappiness so severe that he or she decided that a permanent end to consciousness was preferable to enduring it. Also, suicides can be tabulated objectively in a way that the experience of unhappiness cannot.

But in practice, suicide rates are often inscrutable. The very sadness and agitation from which suicide would be a release also addles a person’s judgment, so what ought to be the ultimate existential decision often hinges on the mundane matter of how easy it is to carry out the act. Dorothy Parker’s macabre poem “Resumé” (which ends, “Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live”) is disconcertingly close to the mindset of a person contemplating suicide. A country’s suicide rate can soar or plummet when a convenient and effective method is widely available or taken away, such as coal gas in England in the first half of the 20th century, pesticides in many developing countries, and guns in the United States.⁵² Suicides increase during economic downturns and political turmoil, not surprisingly, but they are also affected by the weather and the number of daylight hours, and they increase when the media normalize or romanticize recent instances.⁵³ Even the innocuous idea that suicide is an assay for unhappiness may be questioned. A recent study documented a “happiness-suicide paradox” in which happier American states and happier Western countries have slightly higher, rather than lower, suicide rates.⁵⁴ (The researchers speculate that misery loves company: a personal setback is more painful when everyone around you is happy.) Suicide rates can be capricious for yet another reason. Suicides are often hard to distinguish from accidents (particularly when the cause is a poisoning or drug overdose, but also when it is a fall, a car crash, or a gunshot), and coroners may tilt their classifications in times and places in which suicide is stigmatized or criminalized.

We do know that suicide is a major cause of death. In the United States there are more than 40,000 suicides a year, making it the tenth-leading cause of death, and worldwide there are about 800,000, making it the fifteenth-leading cause.⁵⁵ Yet the trends over time and the differences among countries are hard to fathom. In addition to the age-cohort-period snarl, the lines for men and women often go in different directions. Though the suicide rate for women in developed countries fell by more than 40 percent between the mid-1980s and 2013, men kill themselves at around four times the rate of women, so the numbers for men tend to push the overall trends around.⁵⁶ And no one knows why, for example, the world’s most suicidal countries are Guyana, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Lithuania, nor why France’s rate shot up from 1976 to 1986 and fell back down by 1999.

But we know enough to debunk two popular beliefs. The first is that suicide has been steadily rising and has now reached historically high, unprecedented, crisis, or epidemic proportions. Suicide was common enough in the ancient world to have been debated by the Greeks and to have figured in the biblical stories of Samson, Saul, and Judas. Historical data are scarce, not least because suicide, also called “self-murder,” used to be a crime in many countries, including England until 1961. But the data go back more than a century in England, Switzerland, and the United States, and I have plotted them in figure 18-3.

The annual suicide rate in England was 13 per 100,000 in 1863; it hit peaks of around 19 in the first decade of the 20th century and more than 20 during the Great Depression, plunged during World War II and again in the 1960s, and then fell more gradually to 7.4 in 2007. Switzerland, too, saw a decline of more than twofold, from 24 in 1881 and 27 during the Depression to 12.2 in 2013. The United States suicide rate peaked at around 17 in the early 20th century and again during the Depression before falling to 10.5 at the turn of the millennium, followed by a rise after the recent Great Recession to 13.

Figure 18-3: Suicide, England, Switzerland, and US, 1860–2014

Sources: England (including Wales): Thomas & Gunnell 2010, fig. 1, average of male and female rates, provided by Kylie Thomas. The series has not been extended because the data are not commensurable with current records. Switzerland, 1880–1959: Ajdacic-Gross et al. 2006, fig. 1. Switzerland, 1960–2013: WHO Mortality Database, OECD 2015b. United States, 1900–1998: Centers for Disease Control, Carter et al. 2000, table Ab950. United States, 1999–2014: Centers for Disease Control 2015.

So in all three countries for which we have historical data, suicide was more common in the past than it is today. The visible crests and troughs are the surface of a churning sea of ages, cohorts, periods, and sexes.⁵⁷ Suicide rates rise sharply during adolescence and then more gently into middle age, where they peak for females (perhaps because they face menopause and an empty nest) and then fall back down, while staying put for males before shooting up in their retirement years (perhaps because they face an end to their traditional role as providers). Part of the recent increase in the American suicide rate can be attributed to the aging of the population, with the large cohort of Boomer males moving into their most suicide-prone years. But the cohorts themselves matter as well. The GI and Silent generations were more reluctant to kill themselves than the Victorian cohorts that preceded them and the Boomers and Gen-Xers that followed them. The Millennials appear to be slowing or reversing the generational rise; adolescent suicide rates fell between the early 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century.⁵⁸ The times themselves (adjusting for ages and cohorts) have become less conducive to suicide since the peaks around the turn of the 20th century, the 1930s, and the late 1960s to early 1970s; they dropped to a forty-year low in 1999, though we have seen a slight rise again since the Great Recession. This complexity belies the alarmism of the recent New York Times headline “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High,” which could also have been titled “Despite the Recession and an Aging Population, U.S. Suicide Rate Is a Third Lower Than Previous Peaks.”⁵⁹

Together with the belief that modernity makes people want to kill themselves, the other great myth about suicide is that Sweden, that paragon of Enlightenment humanism, has the world’s highest suicide rate. This urban legend originated (according to what might be another urban legend) in a speech by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 in which he called out Sweden’s high suicide rate and blamed it on the country’s paternalistic socialism.⁶⁰ I myself would have blamed the bleak existential films of Ingmar Bergman, but both theories are explanations in search of a fact to explain. Though Sweden’s suicide rate in 1960 was higher than that of the United States (15.2 versus 10.8 per 100,000), it was never the world’s highest, and it has since fallen to 11.1, which is below the world average (11.6) and the rate for the United States (12.1) and in fifty-eighth place overall.⁶¹ A recent review of suicide rates across the world noted that “generally the suicide trend has been downward in Europe and there are currently no Western European welfare states in the world top ten for suicide rates.”⁶²

Everyone occasionally suffers from depression, and some people are stricken with major depression, in which the sadness and hopelessness last more than two weeks and interfere with carrying on with life. In recent decades, more people have been diagnosed with depression, especially in younger cohorts, and the conventional wisdom is captured in the tag line of a recent public television documentary: “A silent epidemic is ravaging the nation and killing our kids.” We have just seen that the nation is not suffering from an epidemic of unhappiness, loneliness, or suicide, so an epidemic of depression seems unlikely, and it turns out to be an illusion.

Consider one oft-cited study, which implausibly claimed that every cohort from the GI Generation through the Baby Boomers was more depressed than the one before.⁶³ The investigators reached that conclusion by asking people of different ages to recall times when they had been depressed. But that made the study a hostage to memory: the longer ago an episode took place, the less likely it is that a person will recall it, especially (as we saw in chapter 4) if the episode was unpleasant. That creates an illusion that recent periods and younger cohorts are more vulnerable to depression. Such a study is also hostage to mortality. As the decades pass, depressed people are more likely to die of suicide and other causes, so the old people who remain in a sample are the mentally healthier ones, making it seem as if everyone who was born long ago is mentally healthier.

Another distorter of history is a change in attitudes. Recent decades have seen outreach programs and media campaigns designed to increase awareness and decrease the stigma of depression. Drug companies have advertised a pharmacopoeia of antidepressants directly to consumers. Bureaucracies demand that people be diagnosed with some disorder before they can receive entitlements such as therapy, government services, and a right against discrimination. All these inducements could make people more likely to report that they are depressed.

At the same time, the mental health professions, and perhaps the culture at large, has been lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness. The list of disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association tripled between 1952 and 1994, when it included almost three hundred disorders, including Avoidant Personality Disorder (which applies to many people who formerly were called shy), Caffeine Intoxication, and Female Sexual Dysfunction. The number of symptoms needed to justify a diagnosis has fallen, and the number of stressors that may be credited with triggering one has increased. As the psychologist Richard McNally has noted, “Civilians who underwent the terror of World War II, especially Nazi death factories . . . , would surely be puzzled to learn that having a wisdom tooth extracted, encountering obnoxious jokes at work, or giving birth to a healthy baby after an uncomplicated delivery can cause Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”⁶⁴ By the same shift, the label “depression” today may be applied to conditions that in the past were called grief, sorrow, or sadness.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have begun to sound the alarm against this “disease mongering,” “concept creep,” “selling sickness,” and “expanding empire of psychopathology.”⁶⁵ In her 2013 article “Abnormal Is the New Normal,” the psychologist Robin Rosenberg noted that the latest version of the DSM could diagnose half the American population with a mental disorder over the course of their lives.⁶⁶

The expanding empire of psychopathology is a first-world problem, and in many ways is a sign of moral progress.⁶⁷ Recognizing a person’s suffering, even with a diagnostic label, is a form of compassion, particularly when the suffering can be alleviated. One of psychology’s best-kept secrets is that cognitive behavior therapy is demonstrably effective (often more effective than drugs) in treating many forms of distress, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, insomnia, and the symptoms of schizophrenia.⁶⁸ With mental disorders making up more than 7 percent of the global burden of disability (major depression alone making up 2.5 percent), that’s a lot of reducible suffering.⁶⁹ The editors of the journal Public Library of Science: Medicine recently called attention to “the paradox of mental health”: over-medicalization and over-treatment in the wealthy West, and under-recognition and under-treatment in the rest of the world.⁷⁰

With the widening net of diagnosis, the only way to tell whether more people are depressed these days is to administer a standardized test of depressive symptoms to nationally representative samples of people of different ages over many decades. No study has met this gold standard, but several have applied a constant yardstick to more circumscribed populations.⁷¹ Two intensive, long-term studies in rural counties (one in Sweden, one in Canada) signed up people born between the 1870s and the 1990s and tracked them from the middle to the late 20th century, embracing staggered lives that spanned more than a century. Neither found signs of a long-term rise in depression.⁷²

There have also been several meta-analyses (studies of studies). Twenge found that from 1938 to 2007, college students scored increasingly higher on the Depression scale of the MMPI, a common personality test.⁷³ That doesn’t necessarily mean that more of the students suffered from major depression, though, and the increase may have been inflated by the broader range of people who went to college over those decades. Moreover, other studies (some by Twenge herself) have found no change or even a decline in depression, especially for younger ages and cohorts and in later decades.⁷⁴ A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no. The authors explain, “Public perception of an ‘epidemic’ may arise from heightened awareness of a disorder that was long under-diagnosed by clinicians.”⁷⁵ And the title of the biggest meta-analysis to date, which looked at the prevalence of anxiety and depression between 1990 and 2010 in the entire world, did not leave readers in suspense: “Challenging the Myth of an ‘Epidemic’ of Common Mental Disorders.” The authors concluded, “When clear diagnostic criteria are applied, there is no evidence that the prevalence of common mental disorders is increasing.”⁷⁶

Depression is “comorbid” with anxiety, as epidemiologists morbidly call the correlation, which raises the question of whether the world has become more anxious. One answer was contained in the title of a long narrative poem published in 1947 by W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety. In the introduction to a recent reprint, the English scholar Alan Jacobs observed that “many cultural critics over the decades . . . have lauded Auden for his acuity in naming the era in which we live. But given the poem’s difficulty few of them have managed to figure out precisely why he thinks our age is characterized primarily by anxiety—or even whether he is really saying that at all.”⁷⁷ Whether he was saying that or not, Auden’s name for our era has stuck, and it provided the obvious title for a meta-analysis by Twenge which showed that scores on a standard anxiety test administered to children and college students between 1952 and 1993 rose by a full standard deviation.⁷⁸ Things that can’t go on forever don’t, and as best we can tell, the increase among college students leveled off after 1993.⁷⁹ Nor have other demographic sectors become more anxious. Longitudinal studies of high school students and of adults conducted from the 1970s through the first decades of the 21st century find no rise across the cohorts.⁸⁰ Though in some surveys people have reported more symptoms of distress, anxiety that crosses the line into pathology is not at epidemic levels, and has shown no global increase since 1990.⁸¹

Everything is amazing. Are we really so unhappy? Mostly we are not. Developed countries are actually pretty happy, a majority of all countries have gotten happier, and as long as countries get richer they should get happier still. The dire warnings about plagues of loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety don’t survive fact-checking. And though every generation has worried that the next one is in trouble, as younger generations go the Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape, happier and mentally healthier than their helicoptering parents.

Still, when it comes to happiness, many people are underachievers. Americans are laggards among their first-world peers, and their happiness has stagnated in the era sometimes called the American Century. The Baby Boomers, despite growing up in peace and prosperity, have proved to be a troubled generation, to the mystification of their parents, who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and (for many of my peers) the Holocaust. American women have become unhappier just as they have been making unprecedented gains in income, education, accomplishment, and autonomy, and in other developed countries where everyone has gotten happier, the women have been outpaced by the men. Anxiety and some depressive symptoms may have increased in the postwar decades, at least in some people. And none of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become.

Let me end this chapter with a reflection on these happiness shortfalls. For many commentators they are an occasion to second-guess modernity.⁸² Our unhappiness, they say, is payback for our worship of the individual and material wealth and for our acquiescence in the corrosion of family, tradition, religion, and community.

But there is a different way to understand the legacy of modernity. Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. Though no one gave happiness questionnaires to the people who lived in the close-knit communities that were loosened by modernity, much of the great art composed during the transition brought to life their dark side: the provincialism, conformity, tribalism, and Taliban-like restrictions on women’s autonomy. Many novels from the mid-18th to the early 20th century played out the struggles of individuals to overcome the suffocating norms of aristocratic, bourgeois, or rural regimes, including works by Richardson, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Fontane, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Alcott, Hardy, Chekhov, and Sinclair Lewis. After urbanized Western society had become more tolerant and cosmopolitan, the tensions were played out again in popular culture’s treatment of small-town American life, such as in songs by Paul Simon (“In my little town I never meant nothin’ / I was just my father’s son”), Lou Reed (“When you’re growing up in a small town / You know you’ll grow down in a small town”), and Bruce Springsteen (“Baby, this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, a suicide rap”). It was played out yet again in the literature of immigrants, including works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud and then by Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

Today we enjoy a world of personal freedom these characters could only fantasize about, a world in which people can marry, work, and live as they please. One can imagine a social critic of today warning Anna Karenina or Nora Helmer that a tolerant cosmopolitan society isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that without the bonds of family and village they’ll have moments of anxiety and unhappiness. I can’t speak for them, but my guess is they’d think it was a pretty good deal.

A modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom. It is another word for the vigilance, deliberation, and heart-searching that freedom demands. It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness. In earlier times, women’s list of responsibilities rarely extended beyond the domestic sphere. Today young women increasingly say that their life goals include career, family, marriage, money, recreation, friendship, experience, correcting social inequities, being a leader in their community, and making a contribution to society.⁸³ That’s a lot of things to worry about, and a lot of ways to be frustrated: Woman plans and God laughs.

It’s not just the options opened up by personal autonomy that place a weight on the modern mind; it’s also the great questions of existence. As people become better educated and increasingly skeptical of received authority, they may become unsatisfied with traditional religious verities and feel unmoored in a morally indifferent cosmos. Here is our modern avatar of anxiety, Woody Allen, playing out the 20th-century generational divide in a conversation with his parents in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986):

MICKEY: Look, you’re getting on in years, right? Aren’t you afraid of dying?

FATHER: Why should I be afraid?

MICKEY: Oh! ’Cause you won’t exist!

FATHER: So?

MICKEY: That thought doesn’t terrify you?

FATHER: Who thinks about such nonsense? Now I’m alive. When I’m dead, I’ll be dead.

MICKEY: I don’t understand. Aren’t you frightened?

FATHER: Of what? I’ll be unconscious.

MICKEY: Yeah, I know. But never to exist again!

FATHER: How do you know?

MICKEY: Well, it certainly doesn’t look promising.

FATHER: Who knows what’ll be? I’ll either be unconscious or I won’t. If not, I’ll deal with it then. I’m not gonna worry now about what’s gonna be when I’m unconscious.

MOTHER [OFFSCREEN]: Of course there’s a God, you idiot! You don’t believe in God?

MICKEY: But if there’s a God, then wh-why is there so much evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level. Why-why were there Nazis?

MOTHER: Tell him, Max.

FATHER: How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.⁸⁴

People have also lost their comforting faith in the goodness of their institutions. The historian William O’Neill entitled his history of the Baby Boomers’ childhood years American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960. In that era, everything seemed great. Belching smokestacks were a sign of prosperity. America had a mission to spread democracy around the world. The atom bomb was proof of Yankee ingenuity. Women enjoyed domestic bliss, and Negroes knew their place. Though much about America was indeed good during those years (the economic growth rate was high; rates of crime and other social pathologies were low), today we see it as a fool’s paradise. It may not be a coincidence that two of the sectors that underperform in happiness—Americans and Baby Boomers—were the sectors that were most set up for disillusionment in the 1960s. In retrospect we can see that a concern with the environment, nuclear war, American foreign-policy blunders, and racial and gender equality could not be put off forever. Even if they make us more anxious, we are better for being aware of them.

As we become aware of our collective responsibilities, each of us may add a portion of the world’s burdens to our own worry list. Another icon of late 20th-century anxiety, the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), opens with the baby-boomer protagonist sharing her angst with a psychotherapist:

Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just . . . I’ve gotten real concerned over what’s gonna happen with all the garbage. I mean, we’ve got so much of it. You know? I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually. The last time I started feeling this way is when that barge was stranded and, you know, it was going around the island and nobody would claim it.

“That barge” refers to a 1987 media frenzy over a barge filled with three thousand tons of New York garbage that was turned away by landfills up and down the Atlantic coast. The therapy scene is by no means fanciful: an experiment in which people watched news stories that had been doctored to have a positive or negative spin found that “participants who watched the negatively valenced bulletin showed increases in both anxious and sad mood, and also showed a significant increase in the tendency to catastrophize a personal worry.”⁸⁵ Three decades later I suspect that many therapists are listening to patients sharing their fears about terrorism, income inequality, and climate change.

A bit of anxiety is not a bad thing if it motivates people to support policies that would help solve major problems. In earlier decades people might have offloaded their worries to a higher authority, and some still do. In 2000, sixty religious leaders endorsed the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which addressed the “so-called climate crisis” and other environmental problems by affirming that “God in His mercy has not abandoned sinful people or the created order but has acted throughout history to restore men and women to fellowship with Him and through their stewardship to enhance the beauty and fertility of the earth.”⁸⁶ I imagine that they and the other 1,500 signatories do not visit therapists to air anxieties about the future of the planet. But as George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

Though some amount of anxiety will inevitably attend the contemplation of our political and existential conundrums, it need not drive us to pathology or despair. One of the challenges of modernity is how to grapple with a growing portfolio of responsibilities without worrying ourselves to death. As with all new challenges, we are groping toward the right mixture of old-fashioned and novel stratagems, including human contact, art, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, small pleasures, judicious use of pharmaceuticals, reinvigorated service and social organizations, and advice from wise people on how to lead a balanced life.

The media and commentariat, for their part, could reflect on their own role in keeping the country’s anxiety at a boil. The trash barge story is emblematic of the media’s anxiogenic practices. Lost in the coverage at the time was the fact that the barge was forced on its peregrination not by a shortage of landfill space but by paperwork errors and the media frenzy itself.⁸⁷ In the decades since, there have been few follow-ups that debunk misconceptions about a solid-waste crisis (the country actually has plenty of landfills, and they are environmentally sound).⁸⁸ Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

And speaking of panics, what do you think are the greatest threats to the human species? In the 1960s several thinkers advised that they were overpopulation, nuclear war, and boredom.⁸⁹ One scientist warned that although the first two might be survivable, the third definitely was not. Boredom, really? You see, as people no longer have to work all day and think about where their next meal is coming from, they will be at a loss as to how to fill their waking hours, and will be vulnerable to debauchery, insanity, suicide, and the sway of religious and political fanatics. Fifty years later it seems to me that we have solved the boredom crisis (or was it an epidemic?) and are instead experiencing the (apocryphal) Chinese curse of living in interesting times. But don’t take my word for it. Since 1973 the General Social Survey has asked Americans whether they find life “exciting,” “routine,” or “dull.” Figure 18-4 shows that over the decades in which fewer Americans said they were “very happy,” more of them said that “life is exciting.”

Figure 18-4: Happiness and excitement, US, 1972–2016

Source: “General Social Survey,” Smith, Son, & Schapiro 2015, figs. 1 and 5, updated for 2016 from https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/projects/15157/variables/438/vshow. Data exclude nonresponses.

The divergence of the curves is not a paradox. Recall that people who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry.⁹⁰ Consider as well that anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adult responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them.⁹¹ Perhaps that is emblematic of the challenges of modernity. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”