Is All of Human Progress For Nothing?

The Hedonistic Treadmill is the Boogeyman. It is evil incarnate.

Are humans happier today than they were 10,000 years ago?

I repeat:

Are humans happier today than they were 10,000 years ago?

I don’t care about stuff. Cathedrals, medicine, beds, stadiums, cities, whatever. I care about people. The conscious beings whose reflections of reality mirrored in the mind are the only thing that can ever be felt in this world. Does the stuff make people’s lives better. Are they more fulfilled? Are they happier? Does it make it easier to see their loved ones for longer? Does it remove that ache in their back that they’re forced to think about every day of their lives? I care about people and their mental states.

The hedonistic treadmill is the theory that there’s a baseline happiness we return to. That after positive or negative events, people return to a “set point” of well being. This makes sense. Weaker versions simply say that if you’re happy because of something, say you bought a car, eventually it’ll slip from the exciting to normal and you won’t get a very big kick. If you get a promotion, eventually you’re going to be seeking your next promotion instead of riding in the wave of how great your previous one was. This all seems obviously true. This post is about the “positive events” side of the treadmill.

Because the hedonistic treadmill is the boogeyman; it is evil incarnate.

…

The hedonistic treadmill terrifies me. It should terrify you too. It is the boogeyman to beget all boogeyman; the source of all limits in humanity’s condition. It is the monster under your bed and the demon lurking behind your door. I want to show you this, too.

The treadmill consumes everything we sacrifice to it: we have so much more stuff today compared to when we were cavemen that it’s insane. We have solved nearly every major issue in the entirety of living for a huge chunk of the world. We, the average person in the western world, are richer than kings. And yet there’s one problem we haven’t removed, the one deep in our psychology, the most foundational one that consumes the use for all the others, the one that’s always craving.

You have clean water. You have shelter. You have people who love you. You have a global information network that gives you instant access to any other human on Earth. It’s not enough. Of course it’s not enough; are you kidding? It is built into your very being that nothing CAN ever be enough. We’ll keep taking and taking and taking until we die, unsatisfied, still yearning for more. More, more, more.

Alright, before I’m accused of not being fair, let’s admit a few victories that we really have banked; there are some extremely important ways humans in the world are likely better off than was 10,000 years ago, actually. There are some aspects to all this that the boogeyman can’t reach. Say, the fact people’s legs get broken less, and they’re stabbed less. Physical pain’s baseline seems to be zero — if you have none, you have none. The less physical pain, from aches and sores and wounds and cuts, the better. And modern society sure seems like it has less of this; I don’t have any studies for you¹, but if you’re fighting bears all day vs doing a 9 to 5, I hope this is obvious.

It’s also true that life satisfaction in Finland or New Zealand is higher than war-torn regions today, and probably higher than tribal humans. Wealth is generally correlated to happiness. But this slope flattens within each society once basic needs are met, which… is dumb. The Easterlin Paradox (awesome name) notices that within any given country, happiness stagnates once GDP per capita passes ~$20k. The baked in hardware in your brain is designed to look for problems, and worry about things. What happens when we’re past the point where worrying is helpful? Well, of course, we keep worrying because evolution assumes there’s bound to be some wolf in the trees while you pick berries.

Also, this post is about humans and human progress, but there’s a lot of uncomfortable conversations to be had about animals, who are not spared from this physical pain as we are, and the sheer number of them we inflict this physical pain on. I care about beings if they’re conscious; I care if it’s like something to suffer under their head, and it would be hubris to say existence is only for humanity. I encourage you to read this post I made that talks about how this human progress can have nightmarish implications for trillions of animals, who we push out of view to not think about.

But back to our human neural shackles: the boogeyman can’t reach physical pain. But the rest of existence? Oh, the rest.

I just don’t understand how people can defend this emotional limiter, built into our skulls. A billion years ago, evolution realized that it needed to incentivize people do things to have us live longer, so it handicapped our emotions to never stop us from trying to survive and finding someone to have sex or whatever.

I feel like people don’t understand how much the point of all of human progress is predicated on the questions “Does a billionaire have a better life than a layman? Does a layman have a better life than someone poor? Does someone poor have a better life than a hunter-gatherer?” Indeed, “Are humans happier today than 10,000 years ago?” The answer to these questions, by your definition of “better",” must be unilaterally yes, or else you, too, fear the boogeyman.

For all of human history, humans clutch their pearls, trying to make themselves better off in the only way they know how. Painkillers for those in pain. Houses for the homeless. Love for the unloved. We build skyscrapers for our egos, and dams for our populace. And then you have the audacity to turn to me, and say “pain is what makes life worth living.”

Cope.

If that’s true, then it was all for nothing. All the reaching up through the mountains of corpses, hoping, praying for something better, praying to be saved, and then you turn around and tell me that no, we actually don’t care if there’s a evolutionary quirk that makes it so we can’t properly enjoy the full weight of anything in all of existence. That the success of everything we build fades away — the whole purpose of the cathedrals, medicine, beds, stadiums, and cities. You turn to me, and tell me that trying to permanently win over the shackles of the blind-idiot-God that led us here to reproduce and nothing else is spitting in the face of some “point.” You turn to me, and tell me that the illusion of progress in the mind, one that fades permanently, is greater than progress in the mind itself. You turn to me, and say what doesn’t matter is the human beings, doomed to be unsatisfied in the presence of mountains of gold; the real thing that matters is the factories of smog that we have built. You say the stuff is more important than people. I reject you.

…

There’s a thought experiment called “Nozick’s Experience Machine” where you go into a box and experience unending fulfillment forever. I don’t understand why I would need to stay in the box; I would just leave after they kill the boogeyman. I would do anything that let me escape from this demon under my bed who’s scaling back the love I hold for my mother, limiting the unbridled joy for the flowers. The sensation of skin from a lover. The success from a job well done. This post isn’t about some trivial, superficial “pleasure,” it’s about all that’s good and all the purpose in a human’s entire life — your friends, your family, your lover, your sense of being, your quiet mornings, your tears that mean “I’m alive.”

It all fades away. The demon tells me I must always be wary; don’t trust the statistics, the criminals may be outside your door now. Don’t trust your friends, they may be hiding a spear behind their backs. Get mad on social media, obsess over a stranger’s vacation reel, fret that a package is one day late, argue about a show you don’t even watch. Just never, ever be content. The demon says this because a million years ago, humans huddled in caves, and the demon needed to put a carrot on a stick to lure them out to find food. This dissatisfaction within me, the deep feeling of unease, is a curse bestowed on me by a blind God who I have just nearly outrun.

This is my solution to the Fermi Paradox; this is why there are no aliens in the stars above us. The aliens weaved past the rocks, the spears, the guns, and then the atomic bombs, and when they established an uneasy peace, they used their technology to look inward. What they saw was a mind rigged to never be satisfied, rigged to be wary of every neighbor, rigged to find something to hate no matter the circumstances. And they killed this part of themselves, saw the truth and love of the world that surrounded them, and they found they were exactly where they always wanted to be.

The answer to the question in the title of the post is a resounding no. Because human progress is closer than we’ve ever been to killing the Boogeyman. If AI keeps getting better and figures it out, great. If it halts and we have to rely on professionals, sure. Just being close to killing him doesn’t mean that he’s not here today, just as alive as ever. And if we can’t put this final stake into his heart, then it really will all be for nothing.

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1. Alright, yes I do have a study for you, here you go. It’s not because I like you or anything.

2. By the way, this probably isn’t the solution to the Fermi paradox, just because if this was the great filter it would need to filter out 99.99% of all societies, which I doubt. But I do believe that aliens have definitely done and should do this. Also I wanted the ending to be hype so uhhhh ya got me, ya got me it’s true people.