Embedded Files
LitCharts | October 12 2024
Harari thinks the world has changed dramatically since the Scientific Revolution, but he wonders if people are actually happier as a result. He thinks about earlier periods in history, and he wonders if ancient foraging Sapiens were happier. He thinks most current ideologies don’t think about human happiness properly. Capitalists think the free market will make people happy. Communists think the opposite. Most scholars assume that modern humans have achieved so much, so we must be happier than people in hunter-gatherer societies, but Harari’s not convinced. He thinks that peasants had to work harder than foragers, but they got less nutritious food and more disease out of it.
Some scholars romanticize the past and think that a comfortable middle-class person could never be as happy as a forager enjoying the thrill of the wild. Harari is hesitant to over-romanticize the past. He recalls that child mortality rates are much lower and humans have modern medicine nowadays. But he also thinks about famines, which plagued modern societies until the 1950s, and the miserable lives of nineteenth century coal miners. Then he thinks about ecological destruction and the misery of other animals. He thinks it’s a mistake to only think about human happiness, or the happiness of the upper classes.
Now, humans tend to be richer and healthier than they were in the past, but Harari’s not sure if those qualities makes people happier. He wonders if rich people feel alienated and bored. He also wonders if people living in small, tight-knit communities felt more content than people in large nations. He decides he needs a way to measure happiness, so he can figure out how to weigh all this up. Harari thinks about psychological studies into “subjective well-being” (surveys that assess how positive people feel about their lives). Such studies generally conclude that money increases happiness and illness decreases it, but Harari’s not so sure that’s true.
Money will definitely help people who struggle financially feel better, Harari explains, but he thinks that once a person is already wealthy, more money doesn’t make them happier. He also decides that illness causes short-term unhappiness, but people with chronic conditions still live happy lives. Psychological studies also show that family and community have a deep impact on human happiness. Harari wonders if the collapse of the family and community in the last 200 years offsets the happiness that wealth and medicine provide. Harari thinks about this a bit more, and he decides that happiness doesn’t actually depend on external factors like “wealth, health, and community.” He thinks happiness depends on a person’s expectations.
In previous eras the standard of beauty was set by the handful of people who lived next door to you. Today the media and the fashion industry expose us to a totally unrealistic standard of beauty. They search out the most gorgeous people on the planet, and then parade them constantly before our eyes
Harari suggests that mass media and advertising also inflate human beings’ expectations, leaving us discontent. He thinks a teenager in a village 5,000 years ago would probably think they’re good looking, because they’d be comparing themselves to others in the village, most of whom would be old and wrinkly. He imagines teenagers today comparing themselves to movie stars and supermodels on Facebook and feeling miserable. Harari wonders if the quest for immortality will leave humans discontented. He imagines science curing all diseases—then he imagines a bunch of angry poor people who can’t afford the new treatments, and a bunch of anxious, rich, disease-free people who are terrified to take risks in case they die by accident.
Biologists also conduct surveys on human happiness. To them, houses, cars, and true love don’t make people happy. Hormones do. Evolution has molded humans to feel sensations of pleasure when we do things that help us survive (like eat or mate), but only for a short while—so that we keep doing those things and stay alive. Some people also have better biochemical luck—their bodies generate more of the pleasure-inducing hormone (serotonin) than others. Harari thinks that a person without enough serotonin will never be happy, no matter how rich they are.
Harari thinks the situation with happiness isn’t so cut and dry. He wonders if happiness is more like feeling your life is meaningful. Medieval people, for example, had tough lives overall, but were typically religious, meaning they believed their lives had meaning because they were working towards heavenly bliss, even though they were deluded. He thinks many modern, secular people probably feel like life is a lot more meaningless. Harari thinks all attempts to ascribe meaning to one’s life are somewhat delusional. He wonders if happiness depends on self-delusion.
Harari also suggests that there are many secular people living in modern societies, while people in the past tended to be more religious. Harari thinks that many modern, secular people feel like their lives are meaningless, because they have no afterlife to look forward to. So, as before, even though from the outside, the medieval peasant’s life looks more miserable than the modern, affluent, secular person’s life, the peasant might actually be better off emotionally. This means that the modern person is not necessarily happier than their impoverished ancestor’s life, even if modern life looks more comfortable from the outside.
Harari thinks that modern society privileges the individual, and tells people to trust their inner voices. Historical religious societies, in contrast, told people not to trust their inner urges and control their desires. Buddhists argue that the cycle of emotions makes people suffer. They think people are freed from suffering when they learn that feelings are impermanent, stop constantly craving them, and feel serene and calm instead. Harari considers all of these approaches to defining happiness, and he decides that many of them conflict with each other—it’s not even clear if people should trust their own feelings or not. He concludes that scholars have a lot more work to do to figure out this happiness business.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse