Some People Might Be Just Too Hard To Satisfy

 

As I argued a few years ago in my blog about the Easterlin Paradox, individual happiness is fairly hard to measure, and global happiness is prohibitively hard to measure. Here are a few things, however, that my experience tells me are obvious. It's better to be rich enough to have the basic necessities for survival, comfort and pleasure than it is to be in poverty. Happiness can increase as income increases, but there will be a point at which this levels off. While richer people may find greater thrills in their status-mongering and individual accomplishments, less wealthy individuals who are not driven by status to the same extent may be happier in their relationships and internal motivations. 

The upshot is, if by magic we had a perfect measuring device for happiness, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who registered the highest levels of happiness were people who were (in no particular order) 1) reasonably well enough but not extremely rich, 2) pretty smart, 3) in a loving relationship, 4) involved in good inter-personal relationships, 5) in a relationship with God.

I mention this not as another philosophical commentary on the nature of happiness, but to probe another avenue of consideration. Are people unreasonably hard to satisfy? And is that especially true of people who are more left-leaning? That is to say, despite the financial difficulties of the past few years, and how admittedly dire politics is at present, if you measure over a much longer distance, then the economic growth and increased standard of living for UK citizens in the past 150 years has been so astounding that if you were transported from the Victorian age to the present day to see the astronomical progress we've made, you might justifiably expect there to be far fewer people always going on about how bad things are. I'm working on the almost certainly justifiable presumption that we all agree that being well off materially is preferable to being badly off materially. I know this on account that just about everybody behaves as though this is true, even though they are free to make decisions that support the alternative view.

What's been happening, it seems, is that the better off the UK has become, the more things people find to be angry at - and that seems to be because our enhanced standards of living afford us the luxury to complain about things our forebears would have been too poor to complain about. Today we think of people in hardship who our forebears would perceive as abundantly blessed. It's as though the better off we've become, the worse not being better off is relative to our advancements. Think of it like this; Geoff, who drives a Ford Sierra, is still using a 1990s phone, a VHS video player and portable colour television would seem to be struggling compared with the majority of the population who have better cars, a digital phone, and an HD smart television with access to hundreds of channels and thousands of films and programmes. But to a Victorian, Geoff's life would look absolutely amazing. We get unhappy about Geoff's life only because our fantastic increase in living standards has made his life seem worse than the expected average.

Look at how our lives have been enriched by technology, by increased knowledge, by supermarkets, by millions more jobs than ever before, by more leisure time than ever before, and by the countless ways that machines and devices now do things for us in seconds that once would have taken us minutes, sometimes hours, in the past. We can buy things cheaply (tax add-ons excepted), we can do most things without having to travel or make phone calls, and we have access to more knowledge, information, other people, goods and services than ever before. For most of us, our lives are economically and socially blessed (at least compared with the alternatives that have plagued our forebears, and still continue to plague many people in developing countries) - yet so many people fail to give this the proper regard.

Now, I'm not saying that none of the following deserve any of our complaints or calls for improvement at all - but I believe that everyone can be more enhanced by adopting a much better sense of perspective and gratitude. Supermarkets have revolutionised the shopping industry, saving us millions of pounds each year, yet many just want to complain about CEOs' pay. Amazon is the world's greatest ever shopping experience, saving us billions of pounds each year, yet so many complain about its tax contributions. And then there are social media platforms like Facebook, which enable us to socialise, organise events, share experience, have good discussions, meet people around the world we'd otherwise never meet. Skype lets us speak face to face with anyone in the world in a way that would seem like science fiction to people of 100 years ago. YouTube gives us access to pretty much everything that's ever been filmed - interviews, debates, films, music, education, and extraordinary moments across the world captured on camera, from the absurd to the shocking to the dangerous to the hilarious - it's fantastic. 

And then there's Google - giving us access to just about anything we could ever want to know. Here's the remarkable thing - every online product I just mentioned is provided free of charge: endless socialising, endless knowledge, endless entertainment - all readily accessible at no financial cost to just about all of us. And all that aside from the immense benefits that such enrichment confers to the wider world in terms of outside investment, access to trade and opportunity to develop. Yet when many think of Facebook and Google, they are so often preoccupied with wealth inequality and access to their data - when a few years ago they had no platform on which to have any data and to use those free services. 

There are, of course, justifiably grave concerns about big tech - especially the negative effect social media is having on young people. Although that does not mean its overall effect is net negative. I see it as a bit like alcohol; excessive use generally correlates with negative outcomes, whereas balanced, assistive, creative, relational use generally correlates with positive outcomes. 

Given the extent to which humans are hard to satisfy anyway, it seems to me that in the case of the vast majority of people regularly complaining about so much (especially on the left), they are unreasonably hard to satisfy. Even if we magically flicked a switch and wiped out all their current so-called 'injustices', they would probably just carry on coming up with more and more complaints - because, like Parkinson's Law, where work expands to fill the time available for its completion - I believe it's quite possible that the human tendency to complain expands to fill the space left by material progression and higher living standards.