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Why does culture get less happy year after year?

erikhoel.substack.com

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Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#61

Post by scythe »

corrral wrote: post #8
rossdavidh wrote: post #2

Missing the obvious hypothesis: people in the past had real problems, like living through a war (by fighting in it or having it fought where you were, not by seeing it on TV), or the Great Depression, or other real, actual threats to life and limb. Something happy was a counterbalance. Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living (for each one who can, many try a…

I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed. Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state. If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having…

A crisis is acute and inherently short-term. But despite mountains of marketing meant to make it a series of deadlines and checkpoints, climate change is a fundamentally continuous, long-term problem that grows a little more every day.

The Ukraine situation by contrast had the contours of a crisis, and so did COVID-19 in the beginning. And in both cases we in the "developed" world watched our leaders squabble and foible and generally reveal their total unpreparedness. I can see how that's depressing.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#62

Post by briga »

groby_b wrote: post #53
briga wrote: post #40

The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick…

Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women. It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet. It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two…

Like I said, there were still issues back then. You're right, happiness is individual, not cultural. But one culture can be happier, on average, than another. And if I'm not just romanticizing the past it does genuinely seem like people were happier back then. The economy was booming. The United Nations seemed to promise global peace. We were taking our first steps into space. It seemed like there was a whole world of possibilities back then, not just economically but in the arts as well.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#63

Post by jareklupinski »

eunoia wrote: post #28
corrral wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frankly feel kinda great in a crisis. The more serious, the better. All the dumbest parts of my brain shut down and I do what has to be done. Squeamishness, fear, anxiety, second-guessing, rumination—all shoved in a closet and the door slammed. Gotta be an acute crisis I can do something about, though. "Climate change" or whatever doesn't trigger that state. If not for being pretty happy with being alive and having…

I have a very similar crisis reaction. Acute crisis bring out the best in me. Unfortunately conversely, long slow simmering ones without agency break me over time. Anectdote: I was very into “extreme” sports as a kid and into adulthood. I eventually took up skydiving and had quite a bit of fun with it. Met a lot of old timers with a lot of jumps under their belt. An observation really struck me talking to them: the p…

> the people at the top of “extreme” sports are not really adrenaline junkies, but control freaks.

survivor's bias? :P

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#65

Post by [deleted] »

groby_b wrote: post #53
briga wrote: post #40

The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick…

Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women. It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet. It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two…

[deleted]

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#66

Post by Apocryphon »

briga wrote: post #62
groby_b wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women. It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet. It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two…

Like I said, there were still issues back then. You're right, happiness is individual, not cultural. But one culture can be happier, on average, than another. And if I'm not just romanticizing the past it does genuinely seem like people were happier back then. The economy was booming. The United Nations seemed to promise global peace. We were taking our first steps into space. It seemed like there was a whole world o…

> Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women.

Or people outside of North America. Really, the main cause for the '50s seeming like a golden age was that the U.S., protected by two oceans with its massive industrial capacity and population, emerged from WWII as accidental global hegemon. So it was easy to be optimistic when not only did America win the war, it was very prosperous and on its way to running the world. A decade after the Great Depression, American capital was helping to rebuild old Europe. All of the domestic cultural changes were just second order effects from this situation.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#68

Post by godshatter »

vitiral wrote: post #37
danjoredd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but I also think the romanticization of depression is a factor as well. Just look at "Doomer" culture on the internet, or "black pill" types. Watch one of those videos on youtube, and all of a sudden you get a deluge of those types of vids. That is what I fear for future generations. When depression is seen as an aesthetic, some people(mostly teenagers) try to identify with it and accidentally end up depressed…

You can (and IMO should) disable youtube suggestions based on your past browsing. You can also have it only store 3 months worth of tracking (in case you ever turn the suggestions back on). It definitely lowers the quality of the suggestions... but that's kind of the point.

I take it one step farther and only watch YouTube in a private session and don't log in. When the recommendations get strange, I close the window and open a new one.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#69

Post by mdp2021 »

Very curious coincidence, an article just appeared at OurWorldInData.org - and by very Max Roser:

'The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better - We need to see that [these three statements] are all true to see that a better world is possible'

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

Proposed example: "4.3% of children globally - 5.9mil/year - die before the age of 15; BUT: in the past it was 50%; YET: in the EU the current value is 0.45% [HENCE: progress is possible, goals are available]".

...Which is more times relevant: difficulties are increasingly topical, but complications in dealing with them are in public conscience, and an approach to make them increasingly present is explainable in more branches of said conscience.

Re: Why does culture get less happy year after year?

#70

Post by Apocryphon »

uncomputation wrote: post #48

I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (tod…

To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones.

I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.

I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.

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