People are becoming less, not more, happy. Since the internet era began, every meaningful metric reflects this same picture - self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates. Anything you can think of as a proxy for whether people are enjoying life is either stagnant or down.
Of course it's not as simple as saying technology is the cause of all of this unhappiness, but what is clear is that, at minimum, technology is not doing enough to counteract it. And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it? A generation and a half of some of the smartest people in the world working on expanding the boundaries of what is possible and people are less happy than they were when it started. This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?
From what I understand, important factors to happiness are family, friends, sense of belonging, sense of purpose, and then more immediate factors such as stress and work/life balance.
Technology is arguably a negative influence on some of these factors like meaningful in person relationships. Also, much of this has more to do with society as a whole (having kids, having close extended families, being in meaningful long term partnerships) than technology in particular.
Let's look at the obvious, social media, which is some of the most impactful technology used everyday by real people. It's been discussed to exhaustion, but these arguably aren't tools that contribute to factors that promote happiness. They optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not happiness. Dopamine hacking =/ happiness boosting.
If you look at top US companies, half of top 10 is investing tens of billions $ trying to get people addicted to screens. That's reflected in the metrics you're seeing. It's an unfair game. Hell, even the richest guy in the world got his brain rotten recently (arguably with a solid help from drugs) and is spending his days posting soft anime porn AI generated images and videos.
It's just really all about the incentives. Everybody would like the world to be a better place, but who among top technologist, which are in big numbers here, are willing to work for 1/10 of what he can make at a big co, to make it happen ?
It's also justified the destruction of workers rights, which has led to a huge number of people being paid less in insecure jobs forcing them to work longer hours.
There was a time when ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" and trickle-down economics justified focusing economic success but increasing inequality has shown that it's not true.
Edit: And of course technology has enabled a lot of this.
I think that computers are simply too good for us. They are incredibly useful tools which fill in for gaps in our own human abilities (memory, processing, analysis), but are largely misused by most of the population (including myself).
We shouldn't be staring at glowing artificial screens filled with unnatural colours and designs, especially not for several hours a day. We shouldn't be consuming as much media as we do. We shouldn't be swapping real life socialisation for a sub-par digital rendition. We shouldn't be bombarding ourselves with so much easily acquired information every day.
Sure, there's many people who do moderate well, but they are a complete minority (getting ever smaller). If you use computers for work, for study, for entertainment, for hours every day, they are rewiring your brain. The best thing anybody can do is to reclaim their life. Use computers (including phones) sparingly, where they boost your abilities, and try to minimise the harmful effects of them.
I cannot even imagine how the brains of young people (I am 30) growing up today are developing with constant and very early onset exposure to computers, the internet and media, and the changes in the real world to reflect the online world. It's not natural, in any format. You can't truly adapt to it.
As a group you work a 5 day week, 40 hours laying roads together.
There’s an especially hard part of the process, and you’ve been thinking on it and realise that with a new approach it can save 20% of the total effort.
To whom do you want the benefit to go. All to the boss, as they pay everyone and run the business? All to you as it was your idea. Or alternatively it could mean that everyone works 20% less, translating into that now everyone can do a four day week and have that extra day back to do and help with other things.
Consider less how it’s split now, and more how you’d want it to be split.
The big idea of yours is like the tech, consider also if others had come up with the improvement.
I’d be interested in what folks saw as fair splits and why. Boss, inventor, the collective.
There will be more buyers because more people can afford road at that price and other businesses will benefit from more roads: shops can sell more tires, road repair and snow cleaning companies will have more work. Road building companies will delay hiring new hands as long as possible.
At the end, what we'll end up doing is working more for less money under higher pressure because any slack multiplies faster. With more companies buying cheaper services, there will be less stable companies who shouldn't be in the business anyways but who now is on the verge of bankruptcy and will make life of other businesses way more stressful and unpredictable.
The shift to the attention economy moved a lot of the major platforms from social media to an entertainment slot machine. Without being very intentional about how you use devices and seeking out actual connection, it is very easy to get sucked in while time slips away.
This is a tricky one, because the answer is so simple you may refuse to accept it, or it is made meaningless by its banality.
People are their own problem. Before we had to take more time to ourselves, we had to work out our problems and have some patience. That didn’t work for everyone either, though you can see life has been abstracted away from living somehow. It affects our self satisfaction.
Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.
Technology is only an extension of ourselves.
This is good advice. There's not a small amount of irony that I'm writing this reply agreeing with you instead of actually doing any of those things.
Technology has also lead to less reliance on others, less real interaction, and disconnected cause and effect. So our jobs and lives seem less impactful than the past.
This might be an area the Amish get right. They generally seem like a content, if not happy, group. They have family and community with jobs they can see the impact of. It may be a simpler life filled with more hard work, but it seems wholesome.