Ask HN: If technology is so good for the world, why are we becoming less happy?
20 cmcy 22 8/21/2025, 10:59:13 PM
People are becoming less, not more, happy. Since the internet era began, every meaningful metric reflects this same picture - self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates. Anything you can think of as a proxy for whether people are enjoying life is either stagnant or down.
Of course it's not as simple as saying technology is the cause of all of this unhappiness, but what is clear is that, at minimum, technology is not doing enough to counteract it. And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it? A generation and a half of some of the smartest people in the world working on expanding the boundaries of what is possible and people are less happy than they were when it started. This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?
The Internet was weird in that for a brief second it really looked like it was the great leveler and a place where all humanity to stand on equal footing, at least to the ruled under the current major players on the world stage at that time. But of course, maybe that was just post fall-of-the-Soviet-union zeitgeist. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Time to stop relying on the Internet and get back to building in-real-life networks.
I'm definitely not in the ruler class, but I'm happy. Media isn't real, and I've decided to limit my consumption of media I don't like, including "news", and fill my time with things I do like.
Also I'm getting tired of this recent overarching attempt to make concern over birth rates a thing. If the rulers were worried about birth rates they'd start paying people to have and raise kids. Because they have all the money so they can do that if they want. Until they do, it's not something I'm going to care about.
Read it. You will find some answers and some actionable steps to alleviate your problems.
From what I understand, important factors to happiness are family, friends, sense of belonging, sense of purpose, and then more immediate factors such as stress and work/life balance.
Technology is arguably a negative influence on some of these factors like meaningful in person relationships. Also, much of this has more to do with society as a whole (having kids, having close extended families, being in meaningful long term partnerships) than technology in particular.
Let's look at the obvious, social media, which is some of the most impactful technology used everyday by real people. It's been discussed to exhaustion, but these arguably aren't tools that contribute to factors that promote happiness. They optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not happiness. Dopamine hacking =/ happiness boosting.
If you look at top US companies, half of top 10 is investing tens of billions $ trying to get people addicted to screens. That's reflected in the metrics you're seeing. It's an unfair game. Hell, even the richest guy in the world got his brain rotten recently (arguably with a solid help from drugs) and is spending his days posting soft anime porn AI generated images and videos.
It's just really all about the incentives. Everybody would like the world to be a better place, but who among top technologist, which are in big numbers here, are willing to work for 1/10 of what he can make at a big co, to make it happen ?
It's also justified the destruction of workers rights, which has led to a huge number of people being paid less in insecure jobs forcing them to work longer hours.
There was a time when ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" and trickle-down economics justified focusing economic success but increasing inequality has shown that it's not true.
Edit: And of course technology has enabled a lot of this.
The shift to the attention economy moved a lot of the major platforms from social media to an entertainment slot machine. Without being very intentional about how you use devices and seeking out actual connection, it is very easy to get sucked in while time slips away.
The connectedness then also made it easier to see what others leverage the opportunities for, which constantly forces one to compare. It is of course, well-documented that these comparisons, almost by design, make it seem like one falls behind.
It is notable that poorer countries score pretty high usually on metrics trying to quanity happiness.
Tech is not at all exempt from this. If anything tech is more affected by this phenomenon than most other industries due to the nature of its products, which are particularly susceptible to enshitification. Tech has no shame in actively manipulating its users to their ends, as we have seen with social media, and now with this phenomenon of AI psychosis. Further, tech leaders and investors are much more interested in the next unicorn than in meeting real needs and providing genuine user satisfaction. So yes, this is a hot mess. And it is driving people mad. To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?
What he said in the 1950's has come true now;
From Confronting the Technological Society - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...
Rather, it [i.e. Technique] is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency … in every field of human activity. ... The machine has created the modern, industrial world, but it was originally a poor fit for society; technique was the process of adapting social conditions to the smooth churning of the machine,”
Ellul distills the essential characteristics of technique to a list of seven. The two most obvious ones, he says, have been addressed so often by other scholars that he can set them aside: rationality (for example, systematization and standardization) and artificiality (subjugation and often the destruction of nature). The other five characteristics of technique are less widely discussed. They are automatism, which is the process of technical means asserting themselves according to mathematical standards of efficiency; self-augmentation, the process of technical advances multiplying at a growing rate and building on each other, while the number of technicians also increases; wholeness, the feature of all individual techniques and their various uses sharing a common essence; universalism, the fact that technique and technicians are spreading worldwide; and autonomy, the phenomenon of technique as a closed system, “a reality in itself … with its special laws and its own determinations.”
Also see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society Overview - https://medium.com/@NimaCheraghi/jacques-ellul-the-technolog...
Following a parallel theme of labour vs. work vs. action and the dissolution of the public sphere (as enabled by technology), I can also recommend Arendt's The Human Condition for further reading.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” Einstein
“Our souls have become corrupted as our sciences and arts have advanced toward perfection” Rousseau
“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” Thoreau
And on and on. Who said technology is good? The simple things in life are the best.
This is a tricky one, because the answer is so simple you may refuse to accept it, or it is made meaningless by its banality.
People are their own problem. Before we had to take more time to ourselves, we had to work out our problems and have some patience. That didn’t work for everyone either, though you can see life has been abstracted away from living somehow. It affects our self satisfaction.
Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.
Technology is only an extension of ourselves.
This is good advice. There's not a small amount of irony that I'm writing this reply agreeing with you instead of actually doing any of those things.
Everyone afraid of indictment has either sold their stock or died.
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Answer to second question: No.