Humanity has achieved many great wonders in our short time on this Earth. We've learned to look across the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, and we've plunged into the secret depths of the infinitesimal. We’ve triumphed over pestilence, and we parlay with gravity like it's a guideline, not a law. We routinely save babies from the grasping clutches of death.
But are we... happy? Crucially, are we happier than our ancestors were? It's unclear.
For many, contentment has always felt like something they’ll reach after the next achievement. And if there's anything we can learn from the history of our relationship with our tools—fire, agriculture, steam, electricity—it's that we're always hopeful that the next gizmo, the next app, the next diet or skincare routine will be the thing to enlighten us and turn us into shiny happy people. And certainly, great advances do come. I love the internet. I love being able to talk to my friends around the world. I've always loved libraries, and so I love that it's easier than ever to learn about anything at all, or to generate a mockup of anything we can imagine. One of my AI assistants notified me on my phone that this essay was due, and helpfully wrote me a draft based on my past writings. (I ignored it, but it felt good to receive anyway.)
We live in an age of great convenience, and we stand at the frontier of even more convenience. The future will be so convenient that we won't know what to do with ourselves. And if we look for clues from the people who historically had that kind of freedom, it's a little troubling. It's cheesy to say, but it's true that most of us don't know what to do with real freedom. We build a life for ourselves within our constraints, and we get cozy within them. It's comforting to blame our circumstances for our troubles, so it feels weird when the constraints are lifted and we find ourselves troubled regardless.
I don't mean to suggest something as clunky as "life is more meaningful when you're overburdened with work and bills and a suffocating commute." Loads of people are suffering in harrowing conditions, and I hope everyone can be liberated from that. My concern is that liberation won't be the panacea that we fantasize about. Everyone needs a vacation, but not everybody is ready for retirement.
Maybe that's something we can learn to adapt to, together. Ready or not, it seems like we're going to have to. Keep an eye out for the grumbling and the complaints. Almost everything will be better than ever before, and we will find a way to be annoyed and upset regardless. It's what humans do. And with the machines taking over all the tedious stuff, we will be freed to be more human than ever.
