Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.

We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy, we cherish the status quo. Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative occupants of the uniquely human cognitive niche. We consider goals that are rooted in the distant past and stretch far into the future, that affect people beyond our circle of acquaintance, and that must be ratified by our fellows, based on our ability to persuade them of their worth and on our reputation for benevolence and efficacy.¹⁷

An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.

Let’s agree that the citizens of developed countries are not as happy as they ought to be, given the fantastic progress in their fortunes and freedom. But are they not happier at all? Have their lives become so empty that they are choosing to end them in record numbers? Are they suffering through an epidemic of loneliness, in defiance of the mind-boggling number of opportunities to connect with one another? Is the younger generation, ominously for our future, crippled by depression and mental illness? As we shall see, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no.

Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ. Eighty-six percent of those who are asked about their happiness in the World Values Survey say they are “rather happy” or “very happy,” and on average the respondents in the 150-country World Happiness Report 2016 judged their lives to be on the top half of the ladder from worst to best.¹⁸ Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.¹⁹

What about the historical trajectory? Easterlin identified his intriguing paradox in 1973, decades before the era of big data. Today we have much more evidence on wealth and happiness, and it shows there is no Easterlin paradox. Not only are richer people in a given country happier, but people in richer countries are happier, and as countries get richer over time, their people get happier. The new understanding has come from several independent analyses, including ones by Angus Deaton, the World Values Survey, and the World Happiness Report 2016.²⁰ My favorite comes from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and may be summarized in a graph. Figure 18-1 plots ratings of average life satisfaction against average income (on a logarithmic scale) for 131 countries, each represented by a dot, together with the relationship of life satisfaction to income among the citizens of each country, represented by an arrow impaling the dot.

Figure 18-1: Life satisfaction and income, 2006

Source: Stevenson & Wolfers 2008a, fig. 11, based on data from the Gallup World Poll 2006. Credit: Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.