By practically every objective measure, American life has been getting better for decades.
Standards of living keep rising, with the typical house now more than twice as large as a generation ago; middle-class income keeps rising, though more slowly than income at the very top; more Americans graduate from college every year; longevity keeps rising; almost all forms of disease, including most cancers, are in decline; crime has dropped spectacularly; pollution, except for greenhouse gases, are in long-term decline; discrimination is down substantially. Yet despite all these positive indicators, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as "happy" has not increased since the early 1950s, while incidence of depression keeps rising -- and was doing so long before the morning of Sept. 11.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday March 18, 2004 Home Edition California Part B Page 15 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 25 words Type of Material: Correction
Stress -- A Feb. 23 commentary incorrectly stated that the amygdala secreted a hormone called cortisol. The amygdala signals the adrenal glands to release cortisol.
This is the progress paradox: Life gets better while people feel worse. Many explanations suggest themselves. One is the depressing effect of excess materialism, which I call "the revenge of the credit card." Another is fear that Western society will break down, which might be called "collapse anxiety." A third is the uneasy feeling that accompanies actually getting what you dreamed of. Today, tens of millions of Americans have things their parents or grandparents could only dream of -- nice houses, college educations. Though that is obviously good, Americans are finding that merely possessing the good life does not ensure happiness. This may tell us there is a "revolution of satisfied expectations" -- that general prosperity brings with it an empty feeling.
Here is another possible explanation of the progress paradox: that along with getting better at manufacturing cellphones, DVD players and SUVs, society gets ever better at manufacturing stress.
Stress is hardly a new phenomenon. To have been a pioneer prairie farmer in the 1800s, cracking hard soil with a hand plow; to have been a seamstress working 14-hour days for starvation wages in a sweatshop in the 1800s; these and many other past life circumstances were surely stressful. But the contemporary increase in stress is not in your mind; researchers believe Americans suffer from ever-higher levels of nervous tension. Higher stress, in turn, may be offsetting our appreciation of a better life.
