The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.
On the personal level, when I got my first cell phone, I was thrilled with it. By a couple weeks ago, as reported on Wonkette, I was at Best Buy complaining about how crappy my old phone was. Then it broke on Friday, and today my spiffy new one should come in the mail. Getting the new phone will make me happy for, maybe, a week or two, but soon enough it’s just going to be part of the landscape. That fact is totally clear to me, and yet I still want the new phone. I’m hoping to move out of my shitty basement in a few months into a nicer place, but I’m well aware that after occupying the hypothetical new place for a while, I’ll just start taking it for granted.On a world-historical level, it doesn’t seem that contemporary hunter-gatherers are noteably less happy than people with much, much, much more comfortable lives in the developed world. And today’s hunter-gatherers occupy distinctly marginal habitats compared to what was available to similarly-organized societies thousands of years ago. And yet the drive to “progress” on an individual level — get more cell phones and so forth — keeps on driving social progress to ever-greater technological development, higher standards of living and so forth.
There’s an interesting story to be told about how all this works, despite the fact that no one really comes to appreciate it
The simplicity and solitude of man’s life in this new condition, the paucity of his wants, and the implements he had invented to satisfy them, left him a great deal of leisure, which he employed to furnish himself with many conveniences unknown to his fathers: and this was the first yoke he inadvertently imposed on himself, and the first source of the evils he prepared for his descendants. For, besides continuing thus to enervate both body and mind, these conveniences lost with use almost all their power to please, and even degenerated into real needs, till the want of them became far more disagreeable than the possession of them had been pleasant. Men would have been unhappy at the loss of them, though the possession did not make them happy….So long as men remained content with their rustic huts, so long as they were satisfied with clothes made of the skins of animals and sewn together with thorns and fish-bones, adorned themselves only with feathers and shells, and continued to paint their bodies different colours, to improve and beautify their bows and arrows and to make with sharp-edged stones fishing boats or clumsy musical instruments; in a word, so long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to enjoy the pleasures of mutual and independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.
See also: Adam Smith.
Comments are closed.