Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society

2 The Gap: Happiness Scales and the Edge of Sadness

15   2 The Gap Happiness Scales and the Edge of Sadness Modernity lends itself to two related assessments: an evaluation of key modern trends in terms of their actual, and usually complex, impact; and a discussion of relationships between a society’s achievement of modernity and the levels of satisfaction or happiness of its members. This book will actually explore both kinds of assessment, but we begin with the second, more dramatic avenue. Modernity has a positive impact on happiness but a surprisingly incomplete one, and it also increases despair. This is the satisfaction gap, and ultimately we need to know more about modernity in order to explain it. The measures of modernity are familiar enough, at least for starters. Whether we’re comparing current modern societies to their own past or to contemporary developing areas of the world, modern people will: live longer , confront less child death, have more access to education, be wealthier on average and maintain higher consumer standards of living and more daily leisure time, and probably have more opportunities (whether within marriage or beyond) for recreational sex. What’s not to like? Yet the international happiness polls suggest a narrower and less consistent relationship between happiness levels and levels of modernity than the basic gains might suggest.1 Other data strongly indicate higher rates of psychologicaldepressioninmodernsocietiesaswell .Thegapbetweenhappiness potential—including the rose-colored visions of modernity before it fully arrived—andactualachievementisnotuncomplicated,butitisquitereal. Happiness, of course, is notoriously hard to define and measure. Even within a single society, multiple definitions of happiness emerge—fifteen, according to some studies, within the English language alone. Most hap- 16  the modern and the happy piness research seeks to combine current emotional state (which can be quite volatile) with more cognitive assessments of longer-term satisfaction , but still a firm definition remains elusive. Within a given society, for example, younger adults are more likely to say they are happy than older folks, yet they are also less satisfied with their lives: criteria, in other words, change with age. However defined, happiness clearly also varies with individuals. Research suggests that many people are simply born likely to be happy (including some identical twins who are raised separately ). This has led some scholars to dismiss the whole effort to promote happiness as the equivalent of urging adults to be taller. Corresponding complexities emerge at the social level. We can’t firmly chart happiness over time, save for the last half-century, for polling data are resolutely contemporary. And even current assessments are shaped by massive differences among cultures, for example between Western societies, where people are urged to be happy and therefore likely to respond disproportionately positively to pollsters, and East Asian societies, where individualistic commitments to happiness may be discouraged and where poll results are accordingly more restrained. We should expect higher selfproclaimed happiness scores in the United States or France, where happiness is more measured by individual success and a distinct sense of self (qualities encouraged by modernity) than in Japan, where happiness has more to do with fulfilling social responsibilities and demonstrating selfdiscipline , qualities that may be less compatible with modernity—while recognizing that the same cultural differences may mean that Japanese people are “in fact” no less happy than their American counterparts. Caveats abound. Claiming too much about the meanings of happiness differentials would be folly. But dismissing the data altogether would be foolish as well. Three points are quite clear, even before we turn to the down sides of depression. First, modernity does generate more professions of happiness than more traditional societies muster on average—even across big cultural divides like the Western-East Asian. Second, the differential is muddier than the apparent advantages of modernity would predict. And third, reinforcing this last: within the most modern societies themselves, happiness levels have not significantly improved over the past fifty years, despite the fact that the gains of modernity, though not new, have accelerated . Denmark, for reasons no one is sure of, is the lone exception. Surveys of happiness differentials raise many questions, but by the same token they do confirm, if in no sense precisely delineate, the gap, and by so doing they help launch the inquiry into modernity’s mixed results. The Gap  17 The Polls Recurrent efforts to probe global happiness dot the past decade. The results are not congruent...