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

People tend to get happier as they get older (an age effect), presumably because they overcome the hurdles of embarking on adulthood and develop the wisdom to cope with setbacks and to put their lives in perspective.³⁸ (They may pass through a midlife crisis on the way, or take a final slide in the last years of old age.)³⁹ Happiness fluctuates with the times, especially the changing economy—not for nothing do economists call a composite of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate the Misery Index—and Americans have just dug themselves out of a trough that followed the Great Recession.⁴⁰

The pattern across the generations also has ups and downs. In two large samples, Americans born in every decade from the 1900s through the 1940s lived happier lives than those in the preceding cohort, presumably because the Great Depression left a scar on the generations who came of age as it deepened. The rise leveled off and then declined a bit with the Baby Boomers and early Generation X, the last generation that was old enough to allow the researchers to disentangle cohort from period.⁴¹ In a third study which continues to the present (the General Social Survey), happiness also dipped among the Baby Boomers but fully rebounded in Gen X and the Millennials.⁴² So while every generation agonizes about the kids today, younger Americans have in fact been getting happier. (As we saw in chapter 12, they have also become less violent and less druggy.) That makes three segments of the population that have become happier amid the American happiness stagnation: African Americans, the successive cohorts leading up to the Baby Boom, and young people today.

The age-period-cohort tangle means that every historical change in well-being is at least three times as complicated as it appears. With that caveat in mind, let’s take a look at the claims that modernity has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness, suicide, and mental illness.

To hear the observers of the modern world tell it, Westerners have been getting lonelier. In 1950 David Riesman (together with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) wrote the sociological classic The Lonely Crowd. In 1966 the Beatles wondered where all the lonely people come from, and where they all belong. In a 2000 bestseller the political scientist Robert Putnam noted that Americans were increasingly Bowling Alone. And in 2010 the psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz wrote of The Lonely American (subtitle: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century). For a member of gregarious Homo sapiens, social isolation is a form of torture, and the stress of loneliness a major risk to health and life.⁴³ So it would be another joke on modernity if our newfound connectivity has left us lonelier than ever.

One might think that social media could make up for whatever alienation and isolation came with the decline of large families and small communities. Today, after all, Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie could be Facebook friends. But in The Village Effect the psychologist Susan Pinker reviews research showing that digital friendships don’t provide the psychological benefits of face-to-face contact.

This only heightens the mystery of why people would be getting lonelier. Among the world’s problems, social isolation would seem to be one of the easier ones to solve: just invite someone you know for a chat at a neighborhood Starbucks or around the kitchen table. Why would people fail to notice the opportunities? Have people today, especially the ever-maligned younger generation, become so addicted to digital crack cocaine that they forgo vital human contact and sentence themselves to needless and perhaps lethal loneliness? Could it really be true, as one social critic put it, that “we have given our hearts to machines, and are now turning into machines”? Has the Internet created, in the words of another, “an atomized world without human contact or emotion”?⁴⁴ To anyone who believes there is such a thing as human nature, it seems unlikely, and the data show it is false: there is no loneliness epidemic.