What Protestors Won't Tell You About Improving Our World

The Key Almost No One Uses

Humanity is chained to a dystopia, and people are pissed about it. Luckily, we’ve got a 2,300 year-old key for the lock.

What sort of dystopia are we talking about? 

Imagine it with me: All human efforts to solve problems fail. This year, next year — forever. The next generation is as poor as this one, or poorer. The hungry stay hungry, the ignorant learn nothing, and a century from now we’re still losing a hundred thousand humans a year to cholera. 

In this reality, we can’t smash suffering to pieces with reason by dreaming up creative solutions to life’s travails. When problems arise we shrug in acceptance and bear them, since we’re helpless to innovate.   

“This isn’t the world we live in!” I hear you protesting. 

No, but we’re chained to its psychological equivalent. 

Most things get better in our world, but we can’t appreciate it because our expectations rise in lockstep with our circumstances. It’s terrifying, and almost as bad as a world where nothing improves. Our dystopia is one of imagination, but no less horrible for that. We’re trapped on a hedonic treadmill, running so fast to stand still that we’ve forgotten where we came from.

Before we discuss the key that frees us, let’s talk about the world as it is.

A Delusion-Free Assessment of Our World

“The never-failing certainty with which all men, sooner or later, accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation, may, perhaps, induce us to think that the Stoics were, at least, thus far very nearly in the right; that, between one permanent situation and another, there was, with regard to real happiness, no essential difference: or that, if there were any difference, it was no more than just sufficient to render some of them the objects of simple choice or preference.” —  Economist Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

Earth is no utopia and human ingenuity has ample room to improve things. Healthcare, housing, and education are more expensive than we’d like, for instance. Wars slaughter the innocent. The environment is degraded and the world is warming. But the outrage and despair expressed over life in first-world countries is delusional.

Households in the United States are rising from poverty and the middle class to become rich. Even after accounting for inflation, median household income is dramatically higher than in the 1960s. 

Source: Economist Mark J. Perry, University of Michigan–Flint

If you prefer the post-WWII ideal of a single wager earner supporting a stay-at-home mother and children, that path is also far more lucrative than it was.

Source: Economist Jeremy Horpendahl, University of Central Arkansas

If you suspect — with good reason — that more wealth doesn’t guarantee a good life, then let’s try a different tact.

You know that childhood friend who got polio and spent the rest of their life crippled? Probably not, because cases are almost nonexistent in developed countries.

Deaths from most infectious diseases have dropped off a cliff:

Source: Ghernaout, Djamel, “On the Other Side of Viruses in the Background of Water Disinfection.”

Crime of all kinds has plunged:

Penicillin, air conditioning, clean drinking water, vaccines, food refrigeration, quick intercontinental transportation, fire and police protection, year-round fresh fruits and vegetables, freedom from devastating wars, entertainment at our fingertips, electricity, open heart surgery, instant communication, cheap lighting, insulin — the list of things we have which a medieval king or 19th-century robber baron would give their fortunes for is long.

Think housing is too expensive? It is, but the homeownership rate was 12 percentage points lower in the “American Dream,” year of 1950 than it is today while the average home was smaller by a third. We spend 13% of our budget on food. In 1950, people used 29% of their paychecks to feed themselves.

So why don’t we feel blessed?

I’ve just loaded you down with statistics and facts, but even if I’ve managed to “convince you,” you probably don’t feel better about your circumstances.

That’s simply not how we’re wired, and there’s something far more likely to grab our attention.

The Joneses Set the Trend:

“That man will never be happy whom the sight of a happier man will torment.”
— Seneca, On Anger, 3.30.3

We don’t listen to crotchety old men. You know the stereotype — they begin conversations with…“In my day…” before rattling off the ways their life was harder. Their life was harder, and we should be grateful to be alive in the present, but it’s understandable that we’re not.

The sort of chronological contrasting that best serves us — comparing ourselves to our great-grandparents or any distant historical period — doesn’t come naturally to humans. Instead, we take jealousy cues from our neighbors. It’s a problem as old as time.

Although everyone is richer today and technology has created many accessible opportunities and luxuries, income inequality has grown since its nadir in the post-WWII era, which people laud as America’s golden age.

The odd wartime surge of equality was enforced by the Roosevelt administration’s “National War Labor Board,” which favored a smaller pay gap between low- and high-income workers than free markets create. After the war, pay inequality eventually crept up again.

The income gap was modest in the 1950s. Everyone was impoverished by today’s standards, but they had roughly the same amount of what was available. That’s why the 1950s and 1960s were happier times — wealth differences were small, so there was more social cohesion. There weren’t many millionaires around to be jealous of.

Those days of relative equality are gone. Modern Americans look around at neighbors living extravagant lives and ask — why not me?

Social media compounds the problem. Those of even modest wealth can curate the misleading appearance of luxurious, ease-filled lives. Between the stratospheric wealth of the richest people and the jealously-inducing fake lives on social media, is it surprising we think our lives suck?

“…we grow angry even at the gods, because some person is ahead of us, forgetting how many men there are behind us, and how huge a mass of envy follows at the back of him who envies but a few. Nevertheless such is the presumptuousness of men that, although they may have received much, they count it an injury that they might have received more.” — Seneca, On Anger, 3.31.1

The final problem is that our abundant world didn’t appear overnight. Average GDP growth since the 1980s was around 3 percent per year. Over decades, that compounds into incredible wealth, but in any given year a 3 percent rise in GDP is unnoticeable.

If you’re over the age of 50 you’ve seen median per capita GDP more than double. But baby boomers only vaguely recall their parents’ constrained circumstances in the 1950s. By the time they were teenagers, their parents were wealthier. By the time the baby boomers had their own children in the 1980s, they were much wealthier than their parents.

But if we’ve watched the rich jet set around the world, go on ski vacations, and buy sportscars, it’s easy to think we’re stuck economically because we don’t know where we came from. Our wealthier, abundant world crept up on us.

The Key to Hedonic Shackles

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” -- Peter Thiel, 2013

Peter Thiel’s complaint about technological stagnation shouldn’t be ignored, but it’s no justification for misery.

You’re deluded if you think getting a flying car or seaside villa, marrying your sweetheart, or achieving any honor or accomplishment will make you permanently happier. The best of your previous achievements and acquisitions were nice, but failed to increase your long-term happiness. Every mountain peak leads back down to a valley. If you want happiness you need to unshackle yourself from the hedonic treadmill.

The key to our chains was created at a time when half of humanity’s children died before the age of 10, economic growth was anemic, and plagues, famines, and wars were the rule, not the exception.

I’m talking about the halcyon days of the Greco-Roman world, when despair was far more defensible factually, yet roughly as surmountable. A number of ancient philosophers — particularly the Stoics — created a suite of tools to increase gratitude and combat immoderate desire. They remain as powerful today as they were in the “bad old days”.

Let’s talk about three of them that can be done as part of a philosophical journaling practice, or on the fly in our heads.

The Power of Disdain:

He who has more than enough and yet hungers for still more will find no remedy in gold or silver or horses and sheep and cattle, but in casting out the source of mischief and being purged. For his ailment is not poverty, but insatiability and avarice, arising from the presence in him of a false and unreflecting judgment; and unless someone removes this, like a tapeworm, from his mind, he will never cease to need superfluities – that is, to want what he does not need. — Plutarch, On Love of Wealth

An overlooked strategy for finding contentment in any situation is the utilization of rational disdain. We have several techniques to choose from, and one might work better for you than another.

Horace’s Wedge

The poet-philosopher Horace utilized a technique for wanting what he had instead of what he didn’t.

Horace’s Wedge asks us to examine the lives of those we’re jealous of and see they’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Not only would living their lives be unpalatable, but we often have valuable things they lack, which is easy to forget. The wedge can be deployed against desire for almost anything we can’t get, or which requires immorality or the surrender of something valuable to acquire.

I’ve explained how to deploy this technique against the desire for prestige, money, power, “toys,” and experiences here.

Seeing Things as They Are:

Stoics aren’t monkish Cynics. They enjoy pleasures and luxuries. Why not? But they won’t sacrifice happiness or their character to acquire them.

Stoics see how money, goods, power, and prestige can lead to us into dark places. If a lack of some luxury causes negative emotion, Stoics “put it in its place,” and see it for what it really is.

This means looking at a desired thing, breaking it down into its constituent parts, and realizing how sordid or pathetic many desires are in this light.

I discuss how to apply this technique against many desires, and how Marcus Aurelius used it himself here.

Choose The The Right Lens

A key to happiness is finding the right frame for every occurance, like putting on a pair of tinted glasses that casts reality in a new light. Reality is a value-neutral canvas — it’s only our beliefs that paint it with good and bad.

It makes sense to find the lenses that promote happiness. This isn’t about delusion. Anyone insisting on leaving misery-inducing glasses on their face is a fool.

Wise people recognize this, and while playing the most important game, they become experts at deploying whatever lens fits the situation.

So as jealousy or FOMO pops up, they:

1. Make sure they decide to be lucky every day.

2. Reanchor for gratitude and happiness.

3. Stop themselves from making the mistakes they really want to make.

4. Recognize that there will be bullshit in their life, but cut out the damaging sort of bullshit.

Away From Dystopia

Human nature pulls us back to toward our dystopian treadmill and the chains that beckon. It’s up to us to walk away and recognize that we have everything we need to be happy.

Freedom comes from having the right rejoinder for every irrationally discontented thought.

With practice, deploying these techniques becomes automatic. Either we make them a part of us, or dystopia makes us a part of it.