Brian.Carnell.Com

The WorldWatch Institute released a study recently that echoed what other studies have found — despite the extraordinarily wealth lifestyle that most Americans live, people today are not any happier than they were in the late 1950s.

The survey found that only 1/3rd of Americans described themselves as “very happy.” And in 1957, about 1/3rd of Americans also described themselves as “very happy.”

Now the WorldWatch Institute tries to spin this to mean that our wealth is no good — we’re destroying the environment when we could stop all this consumer culture nonsense, go back to 1950s-level consumption, and be just as happy. In fact, according to WorldWatch we’d actually be happier if we did,

Higher levels of obesity and personal debt, chronic time shortages, and a degraded environment are all signs that excessive consumtion is diminishing the quality of life for many people.

The challenge now is to mobilize governments, businesses and citizens to shift their focus away from the unrestrained accumulation of goods, and toward finding ways to ensure better life for all.

What’s going on here, however, is pretty simple — human beings are simply not the sort of creatures who will ever be satisfied with what they have. This seems self-evident even to a confirmed fan of American consumer culture like me.

Here’s what inevitably happens a couple months after I buy a computer — some company releases an even more powerful computer at a lower price point. Just the other day I was complaining that for the price I paid for my laptop last year, today I could by a machine with a 3ghz P4 and a 7,200 RPM 80gb HD. And once I had that machine, a few months later I’d be salivating over an even faster machine.

Or to use another example. On the one hand, I consider my job to be amazing. My grandfather, who worked in a factories all his life, probably wouldn’t consider what I do for a living even to be real work. And compared to what he had to do, it isn’t. On the other hand, that doesn’t stop me from being dissatisifed with parts of my job or wishing I earned more money.

It’s pretty simple — if I had to work in a factory like my grandfather did, I’d probably be wishing I had an IT job like I have now. But since I have an IT-style job now, I’m wishing for a job more like that other IT person in the building across the street who I’m envious of. I’m happy doing my job, but I’d be very happy to being doing someone else’s better job — at least until I actually had it when I’d then be wishing for yet a different job.

This desire to constantly improve one’s situation seems to be part and parcel of the human condition and is responsible for much of the progress we’ve seen in the past couple centuries. But it also pretty much guarantees that a large percentage of us will never be satisfied with the status quo.

Am I very happy? I’d say no. Would I be just as happy if I had to live a 1957-lifestyle? Hell no. Contra WorldWatch, there just ain’t no going back. And thank goodness for that.

Source:

Richer, stouter, and no happier. The BBC, January 9, 2004.

The best part of New Years, for me at least, has become the SciFi Channel’s annual 48 hour Twilight Zone Marathon (if only for proof that the SciFi Channel can actually program beyond horrible fifth rate horror films).

My favorite episode of TZ is still “The Obsolete Man” featuring Burgess Meredith whose four appearances in the series were all above par (my wife says I’m gradually becoming Henry Bemis). Anyway, “The Obsolete Man” is interesting for two reasons.

First, is its riff on totalitarian states. Meredith’s character, Romney Wordsworth, is proclaimed obsolete by a faceless but powerful bureacracy and sentenced to death. By the end of the episode, Wordsworth achieves a pyrrhic victory against his oppressors — managing to take along his primary persecutor but not, apparently, effecting any real change in the system (which is, perhaps, accurate with respect to the difficulty in altering totalitarian systems, but not, alas, a message of hope). The episode concludes with a Rod Serling voice-over saying,

Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the dignity, the worth, the rights of man . . . that state is obsolete.

But the reality, of course, is that totalitarian states and ideologies can survive for extraordinarily long periods of time without becoming strictly obsolete.

The second, and even more shocking, aspect of the episode is Wordsworth’s explicit Christian faith. Wordsworth is declared obsolete because there he is a librarian and there are no more books. His persecutor compares being a librarian to being a priest — the state has proven there is no God, so there is no need for priests. Wordsworth responds that there is a god, prompting his presecutor to yell,

The State has proven that there is no God!

Wordsworth replies,

You cannot erase God with an edict.

Later, when luring his persecutor into a trap, Wordsworth reads from a Bible he has hidden and treats his persecutor to Psalm 53:1.

I don’t think you’d ever see anything like that anywhere near network television these days (I certainly don’t remember ever seeing anything like it in my decades of obssessive-compulsive television watching). The universal pop culture shibboleth is that the religious person is generally the enemy of freedom — or granola enough not to actually hold any ideas that might make the audience uncomfortable.