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Old and young people are happier
http://www.economist.com/node/17722567
COR version: around the world, people are unhappiest toward the middle of their lives, and happiest in youth and old age. The global average for lowest happiness is age 46. Article speculates a lot about why this trend exists.
Excerpt:
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| Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful. Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists� regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people�those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety�tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people�s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy. Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese. Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people�s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness�though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones�though just how much is a source of argument (see article). The view from winter Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: �Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old�. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour. Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The �seven ages of man��the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries�was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. �A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,� says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. �We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.� Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant�about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries�Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35�but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46. |
I don't dispute the results, but I think this kind of thing is too complex to examine the causes on a global level.
Fixed for childhood.
I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured.
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| Originally posted by Domesticated I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured. |
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| Originally posted by Domesticated I hope you're being sarcastic. Teenagers are the mopiest group of people alive. In fact, every time I'm forced to go to a shopping centre, the only joy I get is watching all the privileged, middle-class teenagers looking all sad and tortured. |
Meh, happiness is overrated. Unfortunately, you can't be happy for too long; fortunately, however, you can't be miserable for too long either.
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| Originally posted by Lira You don't understand me! No one does!! IT HURTS SO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!! |
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I think that was exactly Meat's point: puberty hits and then people go all emo. |
My girlfriend's mother claims she's never had a genuine moment of happiness in her life. My girlfriend then asked: "what about when Charles [her brother] and I were born?"
"I was content...but not happy."
Granted, her mother grew up with abusive, alcoholic parents, but still.
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles CRAWWWWWLING IN MY SKIIIIIIIIIIIN! |
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| Originally posted by Domesticated My girlfriend's mother claims she's never had a genuine moment of happiness in her life. My girlfriend then asked: "what about when Charles [her brother] and I were born?" "I was content...but not happy." Granted, her mother grew up with abusive, alcoholic parents, but still. |
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| My name is Sarah. I'm 32 and I live in Los Angeles. Since I was a small child, I have wanted to die. But here I am. I keep two bottles labeled "Poison" on the shelf next to my bed. They are filled with an alcohol extract of several pounds of macerated immature Conium maculatum seed pods, the part of the plant that is highest in toxic alkaloids. I feel much better having it there. My hope is that someday I'll get drunk and upset and drink it down without even thinking about it. I think it will work; my only worry is a couple of papers that point to extreme pain while dying and possible kidney problems if one survives. (Also, the stuff smells like the Grim Reaper's boiled turd smeared on a rat with gangrene.) Still, here I am. ... Life is quite unbearable, for a human, without the "risk and adventure" of a story-bound life. What we are looking for when we look for the "meaning of life" is the greater story. The unfortunate truth, suggested by science and vehemently denied by religion, is that there is no greater story. We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality, or rather worse, because there never was a story. For many of us, our personal stories have run out - and it's extremely difficult to push oneself into a new story once you see that all stories are vanity. It is like the difficulty of staying in a dream once one realizes one is dreaming. The Cheery and the Damned Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy. The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life - a pleasant life - is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to ignore - and perhaps can't even conceive of - the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us. There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life - weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines - strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary - life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm? What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them - the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem. |
Let me clarify by saying that this woman is very cheerful. She's fat and jolly, like a female santa. She doesn't keep poisons on her nightstand. I think her problem is that she has unrealistic expectations of what actually constitutes happiness. She probably thinks it's like a lifelong orgasm or something.
What concerns me is your pre-existing knowledge of this movement. You just happened to stumble across it one day, huh?
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Basically, this woman thinks life is such a terrible thing that nobody should have kids (and that it is even immoral to have them). |
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| Originally posted by Domesticated What concerns me is your pre-existing knowledge of this movement. You just happened to stumble across it one day, huh? |
Reminds me of the guy who went in and shot up the Discovery Channel offices.
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| Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I don't remember how I found it. I think it was in the process of reading about the philosopher David Benatar, who made a book-length argument along these lines: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Never-...e/dp/0199296421 |
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| Originally posted by EddieZilker Reminds me of the guy who went in and shot up the Discovery Channel offices. |
WONT YOU PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE PLEEEEEEEESE HALP ME
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| Originally posted by Domesticated What a fucking dipshit. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. The title is a fucking oxymoron, |
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| Originally posted by Domesticated and I say this as someone who long ago stopped thinking life is a super-amazing miracle. I think I want to read the book just to see how low the bar is before I get my first one published. |
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| Originally posted by Lira How so? By the way, keep in mind editors and publishers often pick the title against the author's will. Sure, just because someone's got a prominent position in society, that doesn't mean they're necessarily bright, but how "lucky" do you have to be a poor writer as a professor of one of the most prestigious universities of your Keep in mind philosophy often congratulates those who make far-fetched but well-argued claims. Like that Irish priest that thought reality was all in God's mind because he cranked the logical conclusions of empiricism up to eleven. |
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| In this remarkable book, the South African philosopher David Benatar attempts to solve, in a most unusual way, some related moral problems concerning matters of life and death. Benatar claims, inter alia, that deliberate procreation is immoral; that abortion is morally mandatory if possible before approximately 30 weeks of gestation; and that the morally optimal size of the human population is ZERO. On the face of it, this may strike the reader as absurd, or even insane, but Benatar is most certainly not a madman, as any reader who gives this book a fair chance will soon acknowledge. The above-mentioned conclusions all follow more or less straightforwardly from Benatar's main thesis, which is almost literally expressed in the title of the book: For any conscious being (whether human or non-human) it would have been better never to exist, since coming into being is always an overall harm, and thus worse than non-existence, for that being (though not necessarily for other already existing beings, e.g. parents and siblings). Benatar argues for this astounding thesis by drawing attention to an alleged asymmetry between pain and pleasure (both understood broadly): Non-existence implies the absence of both pains and pleasures, but whereas the absence of the pains is something good, it is not the case that the absence of the pleasures is bad or something to be deplored. A potential person is not deprived of anything, claims Benatar, by not being brought into existence. Some immediate, but confused, objections can be dismissed easily. One example is the objection that life must be an overall good for a person, unless that person is willing to commit suicide. Benatar is at pains to point out the important distinction between judging that a possible life should not be started and judging that an actual life should not be continued. Thus, Benatar's argument does not commit him to the view that we are morally obligated to kill ourselves and/or each other. On the contrary, he quite explicitly denounces such a view (chapter 7), but this is, strangely, lost on several of the book's reviewers. But is the alleged asymmetry a real asymmetry or only an apparent one? Benatar's argument for the reality of the asymmetry is a lot stronger than many will admit, but it is not quite as strong as he himself seems to think. At bottom, Benatar's argument is a coherence argument: Unless we accept the asymmetry, we cannot make sense of some of our other deeply held convictions, most notable, perhaps, the conviction that "while there is a duty to avoid bringing suffering people into existence, there is no duty to bring happy people into being" (p. 32). However, an argument of this kind is obviously double-edged and able to cut both ways. An opponent might be willing to bite the bullet and, while rejecting asymmetry, accept that we DO have a duty to bring happy people into being. Benatar is aware of this possibility but dismisses it because he thinks it is based on the assumption that people only have derivative value as "mere means to the production of happiness" (p. 37). This, however, is much too quick. The (imaginary) opponent does not need to absurdly abstract the happiness from the person and see the latter as being nothing but a necessary condition, without any inherent value, for the existence of the former. Rather, the question is whether a happy person, considered as a whole, has intrinsic positive value seen from the moral point of view. If this is the case, as I think it is, then it might reasonably be claimed that the possible existence of a happy person provides us with a moral reason to (try to) bring that possible person into existence. But this moral reason is, of course, by no means decisive. It might be overruled by other moral reasons pointing in the opposite direction, e.g. the reasons provided by any kind of pain experienced by the possible person, in case he/she is given life. This latter observation is important, because it means that Benatar's substantive conclusions might be correct even if we reject his claims about the alleged asymmetry. It might be the case that most, or even all, lives as a matter of fact contain more bad than can be compensated for by the actual amount of good in those lives, and exactly this view, a kind of fall back position, is what Benatar defends in the most interesting chapter of the book (chapter 3). Drawing on empirical research in social psychology, Benatar builds a strong argument to the effect that people are unreliable judges when assessing the quality of their own lives. He proceeds to show, in my opinion rather convincingly, that the quality of most people's lives is actually very bad, and that this is the case whether one adopts a hedonistic, a preference-theoretical, or an objective account of the nature of "the Good". Whether we like it or not, we do have many moral reasons, certainly more than most people realize, to STOP bringing new people into existence. Anyone who thinks that these reasons can be trumped by moral reasons for procreation has a big philosophical task on his/her hands. Generally, the book is an easy read, thanks to the clarity of Benatar's exposition of the problems, the theories, and the arguments presented. One important upside of this is that readers without an education in philosophy should be able to learn a lot from Benatar's stimulating discussion. Unfortunately, not many will. Benatar is under no illusions that his readers will accept his stance or at least consider his arguments without much prejudice. This is a pity, because neither dubious appeals to common sense nor unfair arguments ad hominem will make Benatar's arguments bad and his conclusions false, contrary to what some of this book's reviewers seem to be thinking. Just as reciting the Lord's Prayer cannot refute Atheism, a rational refutation of Benatar, if possible, must be based on some serious philosophical work. Lest wishful thinking should completely guide our actions and determine our conception of morality, philosophy should always challenge our most fundamental assumptions, and it should do so rationally, honestly, without self-deception or fear of the truth. In this work Benatar satisfies these desiderata, and that is why "Better Never to Have Been" merits attention. It deserves to be read and thought about carefully and with an open mind, and it deserves to be discussed in a serious, fair and intelligent manner. It is a very important book. |
Radio show about the book, with Benatar discussing it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpACAyWxleE
From the host's little summary:
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| The book argues that all our lives are very bad and generally much worse than we think. We are systematically and significantly mistaken about their value. We shouldn't have children, women should have early abortions. The abortion debate on the whole is between the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies: the professor holds a candle for the pro-death view; he thinks any woman needs excellent reasons not to abort a child. He hopes one day that all humans and all other animals will be extinct. |
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| Originally posted by Domesticated The title doesn't matter, the whole premise of the book is ridiculous. |
Okay, so perhaps (to borrow a Sagan-ism), I'm being a little anthropocentric here, but if humans (and animals) don't exist, then what's the point of anything? The whole premise is thoroughly nihilistic.
Life might just be a particularly special arrangement of carbon atoms, but it's still a very special one. If you want to take away that, you may as well destroy the universe as well, on the basis that it's just as pointless.
The only "real" point I can think of is that humans shouldn't exist because we're, on the whole, a miserable lot. This seems to be a central tenet to the book, that by creating more humans, we're creating more unhappiness. Two things:
a) The author is a moron if he believes he has the right to decide, on behalf of others, whether they should live or not.
b) Half the point of humanity is to improve our situation. Why else did we jump out of the trees? He's basically advocating ending the human race because we failed. He's asking that we give up the race before it's even finished. That's a shitty, defeatist attitude.
Of course, I'm interested to read the book too. I've only thought about this in the back of my mind for a couple of minutes. Who knows, this book could be the revelation that finally shows me suicide is the answer!
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| Originally posted by Meat187 Fixed for childhood. |
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