What Went Wrong with Our Happiness

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.

Arrogance: The Belief We Can Outsmart Tradition

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. These are unteachable lessons.

Yet we’ve developed a peculiar form of intellectual arrogance, believing we can shortcut this process. We think our life path can be special and unique, that we can abandon the whole tradition and the way people have lived for thousands of years. People are terrible at knowing what’s good for them (I strongly recommend this great "Modern Wisdom” podcast episode with John Vervaeke).

Although we cannot learn unteachable lessons in advance, we can be aware that they exist. This awareness can be a humbling moment -  facing up to the reality that you don’t know best.

The Forecasting Illusion

Our individualistic culture has trained us to forecast our fate. We focus on what is most visible and immediate — 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.

Postmodernism Disease: When Everything Becomes Relative

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.

Religion of Self: The Inevitable False Replacement

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 Path Forward: Balance, Not Revolution

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 on our own.