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4 months ago
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We live in the most prosperous era in human history, yet rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to climb. Despite unprecedented resources and freedoms, we seem to be getting worse at the fundamental task of being happy. How did we arrive at this paradox?
Several years ago, I was convinced I could forge my path — one that would be better than my parents’. I believed my life would be more meaningful and enjoyable if I just applied enough intelligence and effort to optimize everything. The more years that have passed, the more humble I’ve become about how difficult it is to improve upon years of tradition and accumulated wisdom.
This personal journey reflects three broader cultural mistakes we’ve made, each feeding into the others like sides of the same coin: our arrogance toward tradition, our embrace of postmodern relativism, and our worship of the self. Together, they’ve created a perfect storm of unhappiness.
Unteachable Lessons
Some of life’s most important lessons cannot be learned analytically — they must be experienced firsthand. We cannot learn through reading or reasoning that money doesn’t bring happiness; we must arrive at being wealthy and feel its limits. We cannot understand the loneliness of prioritizing career over relationships until we’re successful and alone. Some truths can only be achieved by experience, by becoming a different person entirely. These are unteachable lessons.
Yet we’ve developed a peculiar form of intellectual arrogance, believing we can shortcut this process by simply being smarter or more analytical than previous generations. We think our life path can be special and unique, that we can abandon the whole tradition and avoid the painful experiences that taught others these lessons. We’ll do better this time.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge works. Not everything can be solved through rational thinking alone. We operate based on insight versus inference, carrying intrinsic assumptions about the world and the outcomes of actions that we’re not even aware of. We excel at identifying biases in others but struggle when evaluating our own. Despite this, we persist in believing we’re the best judges of what’s good for us.
Since we can’t learn these lessons rationally, and we’re too arrogant to accept that others’ experiences apply to us, we’ve tried to create our own frameworks for meaning and purpose. But here’s where the problem compounds: our approach to meaning has become fundamentally egocentric. Meaningful life requires coherence, purpose, and significance (I strongly recommend this insightful Modern Wisdom podcast episode with John Vervaeke) — but we’ve twisted these into ‘for me, by me, to me’ versions that fail to provide genuine connection and orientation.
This egocentric approach leads us to focus on what is most visible and immediate in our personal scorekeeping — career achievements, material possessions, personal accomplishments. The value of relationships, by contrast, is ephemeral and hard to quantify, so we systematically undervalue them in our life planning.
We’ve forgotten that life happens in stages, each with its requirements and rewards. What makes sense at 25 may be disastrous at 45, but our culture pushes us to optimize for the immediate and visible rather than the long-term and relational.
Here’s where things get particularly twisted. We are progressive — we believe in science, in progress, in human improvement. But we’ve simultaneously embraced postmodern assumptions that everything is relative and that no truth exists in the world. We’ve lost the stable values that previous generations called virtues.
The Collapse of Shared Standards
We’ve stopped believing that people should strive for certain virtues or ways of living. Instead, we’ve adopted the stance that everyone can live as they want. As a community, we cannot correct harmful behaviors. We’ve lost the concept of shame. Everything goes if it’s someone’s choice of life.
Consider how we can no longer contemplate OnlyFans models as representing a harmful way of living, because everyone has the right to decide about their life. We’ve created a world where community standards and moral guidance have been replaced by radical individualism disguised as tolerance. Any attempt to suggest that some ways of living are better than others is immediately dismissed as judgmental or oppressive.
Truth Becomes “What Works for Me”
We’ve lost the ability to recognize that some things work for individuals in the short term while being destructive to both the individual and society in the long term. Religion, for instance, demonstrably “works” for human flourishing in ways that our secular alternatives struggle to match, but we dismiss it because it doesn’t fit our rational, individualistic worldview.
Filling the Sacred Vacuum
We consider ourselves too progressive for the obscurity of traditional religion, but we’ve replaced it with something far more limiting: the egocentric pursuit of self-development and “happiness.” We’ve created a religion of self — self-development, self-care, and self-centeredness.
As Alain de Botton shows in “Religion for Atheists”, we’ve lost many great things by abandoning religious frameworks. It’s evolutionarily and psychologically difficult to abandon the religious impulse entirely, so we’ve simply redirected it toward ourselves. But this creates a fundamental problem: the self is too small to serve as the ultimate object of devotion.
The Relationship Reality
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, documented in “The Good Life” represents one of the longest longitudinal studies of human happiness ever conducted. Its findings are clear: our happiness relies most heavily on relationships. The engine of a good life is not the self but connections with others. Even status and achievement mean nothing when we don’t have people to share them with.
Yet our religion of self actively undermines our ability to build these crucial relationships. We prioritize self-actualization over commitment, personal growth over sacrifice for others, and individual fulfillment over community bonds.
Convenience Kills Deep Connection
The religion of self causes us to abandon building deep relationships because, in the short term, relationships are difficult. Having kids is inconvenient. Maintaining friendships requires effort. Committing to a community means accepting constraints on our freedom. But these short-term difficulties provide support and fulfillment in the long term.
We’ve become catastrophically short-sighted, optimizing for immediate comfort rather than long-term flourishing. Convenience, in many ways, is killing us. But slowly and in an almost invisible way.
The solution isn’t to abandon modernity entirely, but to approach it with humility. We need a balance between the ethic of autonomy and the ethic of community. We need a balance between individual identity and group identity, and we must invest in both.
We should remain open to new and different experiences and desires, but with humble respect for tradition and the way people lived in previous years and decades. It’s such arrogance to believe that we can find a new, better path to happiness and success than our ancestors developed over millennia.
Each purpose needs to have a path and movement toward it, but not every motion puts us closer to our aims. Busyness keeps us away from asking existential questions, but these questions are essential for a meaningful life. We need to create space for reflection, for considering not just what we want but what we should want, not just what feels good but what actually contributes to flourishing.
A balance point will be different for each person. However, everyone needs some balance between individual fulfillment and community connection, between personal growth and service to others, between questioning tradition and learning from it.
We can embrace progress and individual agency while still maintaining humility toward the accumulated wisdom of generations. We can be modern without being rootless, progressive without being destructive, and individual without being isolated.
The wisdom was there all along. We just convinced ourselves we could do better from scratch.
