There Is No App for Happiness
There are two extreme trends occurring now that are massively impacting our society and causing tectonic changes in our culture.
- Technology is exploding exponentially.
- We are becoming less happy.
Technology has begun to distract and overwhelm us while many of us find ourselves suffering from a strange malnutrition, a malnourished emotional state. This is because technology has expanded at such a rate that nearly every aspect of our world has been affected—our economy, medical industry, manufacturing, military, and education, and especially how we interrelate with each other—and technological growth is now happening so fast that we live in an ever-changing environment, which allows us to become masters of nothing. Yet with the exponential growth of information technology, there has been no corresponding expansion of personal happiness. Instead we find our society depressed, anxious, sleep deprived, and overmedicated.
Although the technology revolution has been surging for some time, it has gone largely unnoticed beyond the excitement of upgraded smartphones, social networking, iPads, and dazzling special effects in films and video gaming. But currently, because the exponential growth curve has become steeper, almost doubling every year, things are moving faster and faster. (Remember that Facebook did not exist eight years ago.) Now the media is beginning to notice that our over infatuation with social media is concurrent with our slipping into an isolated lifestyle and has begun reporting it, but it is far from headline news.
We are starting to become aware of something happening all around us but are barely processing it. Perhaps because we are so attached to what used to be, our minds cannot see what is in front of us. Like the Aztecs, who, according to legend, couldn’t recognize the European ships carrying the conquistadors, we do not seem to fathom how our own world has changed. Socially, in our attempt to be more connected, we have actually, in mass, taken two steps back by choosing to abandon personal conversations in preference for impersonal communication via text. We have quickly transformed into a distracted society focused on entertainment dispensed from flat screens. In our everyday lives the Information Age has really manifested as the Entertainment Age, and it appears that we are already having trouble deciphering the difference between life and entertainment. Yet with all this, many of us are not informed of just how vast the coming changes are.
What we are not having, tragically, is exponential growth of happiness. In fact, there is a lot of talk about the nature of happiness lately because it is becoming increasingly elusive. Despite all of the wondrous marvels that have entered our lives, statistics show that we are far less happy than we were twenty years ago. It could be said that we are witnessing an emotional collapse of industrialized society. From New York to London to Beijing, in the richest societies of the world, we find ourselves depressed, anxious, and sleep deprived, with few solutions being offered other than medicating the symptoms. The overcomplexity and ever-changing environment we find ourselves in cause anxiety and confusion, and a person continually confronted with massive change may withdraw into a more insular life in order to cope. We never planned to settle for a life of merely coping, yet we seem to have accepted it as inevitable, so we swallow our pills, becoming a society that now medicates our emotions, believing there are no other alternatives. This could be the cause of the alarming increase in suicides. Doctor Ian Rockett, professor in the West Virginia University School of Public Health, led a 2012 study that claims the suicide rate has increased fifteen percent in the last ten years and is now the leading cause of injury death in America—ahead of motor vehicle accidents.
To be clear, I am not anti technology; I do not live off the grid in a hay-bale house and grow all of my own food. On the contrary, I use a laptop, I use the Internet, I love my GPS, and I am grateful to have them. I am even an advocate of self-driving cars. I am also in awe that millions of people who cannot afford to go to school can now access free education online from sources such as the Khan Academy or University of the People. And I am excited to know that in the near future, if a man discovers that he has heart disease, biomedicine will be able to grow him a new heart from his own cells to replace his sick one. This is all excellent use of new technology.
But will biomedicine repair a broken heart? Our basic emotional needs have not changed. There is even work being done to create human organs with 3D printers, so perhaps we will one day be writing songs with lyrics like, “She broke my heart, so I printed a new one.”
This is the key point: One problem can be fixed with science, and the other cannot. Technology will repair the blood pump but not a broken heart. A GPS will help us find our way through the city, but it will not help us find our way through our relationships. Biomedicine will add more years to our life, but will that mean an additional decade of anxiety and sleep deprivation?
Do you really believe—in your heart of hearts—that your chief personal problems with happiness, relationships, intimacy, or depression will be solved with better technology? Are you just waiting for the right app to come along?
What everyone wants is to be happy, fulfilled, connected to others, and brimming with purpose—and for this, I believe that technology is close to irrelevant. This extraordinary technological revolution as well as these unstable economic times challenge us to look at ourselves and determine how we now define happiness and what we believe we need to do, or stop doing, in order to experience it.
In his new book, There Is No App for Happiness (out from Skyhorse on August 15), Max Strom argues we’ve traded actual lives for virtual equivalents, and offers a guide to trading back. This is the first of four Medium excerpts.
Note to Medium users: Leave your queries and comments in Notes, and Max will respond in a follow-up post!
