So maybe income equality + disposable material goods is not a good path towards people being happier and better off.
It's our job to build a system that will work well for ourselves. If there's a point where incentivizing a few to hoard even more resources to themselves starts to break down in terms of overall quality of life, we have a responsibility to each other to change the system.
Look at how many miserable-ass unhappy toxic asshole billionaires there are. We'll be helping their own mental health too.
Happiness is very slippery even in your own life. It seems absurd to me that you should care about my happiness.
So much of happiness is the change from the previous state to the present. I am happy right now because 2026 has started off great for me while 2025 was a bad year.
I would imagine there was never a happier American society than the year's after WW2.
I imagine some of the most happy human societies were the ones during the years after the black plague. No one though today gains happiness because of the absence of black plague.
To believe a society can be built around happiness seems completely delusional to me.
Most people think the best year in pop music history was the one when they were 12. There’s a similar effect about the good old movies.
You also can't really compare the 90s to now when music and the movies were the dominate art form and there was no way to get rich and famous from just the internet.
I watched an interview with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains and he said in the late 80s Seatle, he worked at a giant 50 room rehearsal space, almost apartment complex, that was opened 24/7. Music can't be the same as a time when being in a band was so popular that the economics could support a 50 band room rehearsal space that never closes. It is night and day different to now. Same with movies.