Episode 41 - Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy

Darron and Jeff talk about the seemingly ubiquitous and pervasive dissatisfaction with modern life that they experience day to day, and try to identify some possible root causes for the collective ennui. They discuss their failed attempt to record an episode about this topic and the emotional difficulty of winter time, the relationship between true lack of material hardship and serious life risk and overall happiness, how modern technological changes mess with our biology, how a cultural and economic focus on individuals and maximizing our preferences makes us less able to deal with situations where we are unable to maximize these preferences and more prone to negativity bias, and how the greatly expanded and almost infinite comparison set of things and experiences we are exposed to through the internet and social media impacts our relative happiness.

Notes:

• 3:33 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson

• 4:51 - See the entry for “Seasonal Affective Disorder” from John Hopkins Medicine

• 6:38 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 25 - “Living the Dream” from 2022

• 8:14 - See the “Hygiene hypothesis” Wikipedia entry

• 13:42 - See ideas related to the pace of major cultural and technological shifts popularized in Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970)

• 15:50 - See “Calorie-free sweeteners can disrupt the brain’s appetite signals” from USC’s Keck School of Medicine (2025)

• 22:30 - See “The semi-satisfied life” from Aeon about Arthur Schopenhauer’s thoughts on happiness

• 24:59 - Watch the classic Simpson’s clip “You could flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds”

• 29:30 - See the “Habituation” Wikipedia entry

• 28:40 - See “AI and the Human Condition” from the Stratechery Substack, which contains the Louis C.K. clip “Everything is Amazing…and Nobody is Happy”