I just really despise the whole line of reasoning that the sexual revolution “failed” and therefore we should turn back the clock and get married as soon as possible. I’ll spare you my rant, but I think that whole argument gets a lot of correlation/causation wrong and misreads a lot of history. If our grandmothers were happier because they married young, then why did my grandmother and her sisters, who were born before 1925, encourage me to wait? Maybe because there are very different reasons for people to self-report happiness (or lack thereof) on surveys? Ugh, I ranted anyway. I didn’t mean to. Sorry.
Meanwhile, I know what you mean about being annoyed when you don’t want to like a book. There are books I refuse to read because I’ll be very annoyed if I like them — mainly because the author is an ass.
Being followed around by a hole kind of reminds me of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.
Yeah, to be clear, I'm really not interested in taking a side or entering the "debate"—and even if I were, I promise you that I have zero ability to force you or anyone else to live a certain way (but if I did, that way would most definitely involve bagpipes and snorkels). I'm just sorta kicking ideas around here—and I'm deeply interested in the question of whether freedom and happiness can actually sometimes work against each other. That said, I can offer you a few thoughts, if you want them:
1. I'm probably at least as skeptical of happiness polls as you are. Happiness is almost impossible to define, let alone quantify, and (as I mention in the piece) I'm increasingly convinced that emotions are culturally constructed more than internally experienced. Bernie Bros (full disclosure: I myself am, by any reasonable definition of the term, a Bernie Bro) love to point at polls that show Scandinavian countries as being the happiest in the world and say "See??? They're happy because they have sOciALisM!!!11"—but, of course, if you dig down into cultural differences, you'll find that at least *part* of the reason that many Scandinavians are happier is that Scandinavian cultures define "happiness" much more modestly than American culture does.
2. By that same token, studies have repeatedly found that most people have sort of a "baseline" level of happiness that they rarely deviate from for long (they call it the "Hedonic Treadmill")—so it's never hard to find examples of people who are happy despite objectively terrible circumstances, or people who are miserable despite objectively great ones (I mean, that's literally what the black hole in this book represents, right?).
3. To say that women (and men), on average, are less happy than they were several generations ago, is not to say that *all* women (or men) are less happy. The plural of anecdote isn't data, as they say—and your grandmother and her sisters are far from a random sample. :) I don't want to have to point at the Republicans yelling about how "If Global Warming is real, why are some days in Minneapolis still cold??? Checkmate!"—but you get the point.
4. So, the data says what it does. It's possible it's bad data, or full of noise, or whatever, but it's still there. And like I said, I just sort of find it interesting.
I really need to read some Margaret Atwood—she's one of the more embarrassing gaps in my reading. :)
Well, I think what gets missed is that there have been big cultural shifts. Back in the day, if women were unhappy, they didn’t discuss it over the back fence while hanging out the laundry. Society was much more conformist and there was pressure to perform happiness. You just wouldn’t have told some survey-taker that your life was miserable. Now, things have swung the other way, and there’s so much more talk about mental health. People feel left out if they don’t say they’re depressed or anxious. In Mad Men, Betty Draper tells a nine year old boy that she’s “so sad” because she can’t tell anyone else. If that episode were set in today’s world and not 1960, she’d be telling everybody.
Margaret Atwood has a huge backlist of great
novels. The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace are a couple of my favorites. I think you would like Oryx and Crake.
I think I mostly agree with you here, although I do bristle a bit at the suggestion (which I've encountered in many, many places) that everyone throughout time and space probably felt and thought the same way 21st century Americans do and was just "repressing" their true thoughts and emotions. I'm not a psychologist (once did a dozen or so hours toward an M.S. in educational psychology, so that's something, right? lol), but my reading of Mesquita's work has me pretty convinced that most people are genuinely feeling the emotions they claim to be feeling—even if cultural and social pressures have pushed them toward feeling them. Far more of our thoughts and feelings were programmed into us by culture than a lot of us like to admit. But maybe that's more a quibble than a serious point of disagreement.
Looked up Oryx and Crake, and you're absolutely right that this book sounds like my jam. Adding it to the ol' to-read list. :)
You think 1950s housewives had orgasms?
Obviously not. The female orgasm wasn’t invented till 1994
I just really despise the whole line of reasoning that the sexual revolution “failed” and therefore we should turn back the clock and get married as soon as possible. I’ll spare you my rant, but I think that whole argument gets a lot of correlation/causation wrong and misreads a lot of history. If our grandmothers were happier because they married young, then why did my grandmother and her sisters, who were born before 1925, encourage me to wait? Maybe because there are very different reasons for people to self-report happiness (or lack thereof) on surveys? Ugh, I ranted anyway. I didn’t mean to. Sorry.
Meanwhile, I know what you mean about being annoyed when you don’t want to like a book. There are books I refuse to read because I’ll be very annoyed if I like them — mainly because the author is an ass.
Being followed around by a hole kind of reminds me of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.
Yeah, to be clear, I'm really not interested in taking a side or entering the "debate"—and even if I were, I promise you that I have zero ability to force you or anyone else to live a certain way (but if I did, that way would most definitely involve bagpipes and snorkels). I'm just sorta kicking ideas around here—and I'm deeply interested in the question of whether freedom and happiness can actually sometimes work against each other. That said, I can offer you a few thoughts, if you want them:
1. I'm probably at least as skeptical of happiness polls as you are. Happiness is almost impossible to define, let alone quantify, and (as I mention in the piece) I'm increasingly convinced that emotions are culturally constructed more than internally experienced. Bernie Bros (full disclosure: I myself am, by any reasonable definition of the term, a Bernie Bro) love to point at polls that show Scandinavian countries as being the happiest in the world and say "See??? They're happy because they have sOciALisM!!!11"—but, of course, if you dig down into cultural differences, you'll find that at least *part* of the reason that many Scandinavians are happier is that Scandinavian cultures define "happiness" much more modestly than American culture does.
2. By that same token, studies have repeatedly found that most people have sort of a "baseline" level of happiness that they rarely deviate from for long (they call it the "Hedonic Treadmill")—so it's never hard to find examples of people who are happy despite objectively terrible circumstances, or people who are miserable despite objectively great ones (I mean, that's literally what the black hole in this book represents, right?).
3. To say that women (and men), on average, are less happy than they were several generations ago, is not to say that *all* women (or men) are less happy. The plural of anecdote isn't data, as they say—and your grandmother and her sisters are far from a random sample. :) I don't want to have to point at the Republicans yelling about how "If Global Warming is real, why are some days in Minneapolis still cold??? Checkmate!"—but you get the point.
4. So, the data says what it does. It's possible it's bad data, or full of noise, or whatever, but it's still there. And like I said, I just sort of find it interesting.
I really need to read some Margaret Atwood—she's one of the more embarrassing gaps in my reading. :)
Well, I think what gets missed is that there have been big cultural shifts. Back in the day, if women were unhappy, they didn’t discuss it over the back fence while hanging out the laundry. Society was much more conformist and there was pressure to perform happiness. You just wouldn’t have told some survey-taker that your life was miserable. Now, things have swung the other way, and there’s so much more talk about mental health. People feel left out if they don’t say they’re depressed or anxious. In Mad Men, Betty Draper tells a nine year old boy that she’s “so sad” because she can’t tell anyone else. If that episode were set in today’s world and not 1960, she’d be telling everybody.
Margaret Atwood has a huge backlist of great
novels. The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace are a couple of my favorites. I think you would like Oryx and Crake.
I think I mostly agree with you here, although I do bristle a bit at the suggestion (which I've encountered in many, many places) that everyone throughout time and space probably felt and thought the same way 21st century Americans do and was just "repressing" their true thoughts and emotions. I'm not a psychologist (once did a dozen or so hours toward an M.S. in educational psychology, so that's something, right? lol), but my reading of Mesquita's work has me pretty convinced that most people are genuinely feeling the emotions they claim to be feeling—even if cultural and social pressures have pushed them toward feeling them. Far more of our thoughts and feelings were programmed into us by culture than a lot of us like to admit. But maybe that's more a quibble than a serious point of disagreement.
Looked up Oryx and Crake, and you're absolutely right that this book sounds like my jam. Adding it to the ol' to-read list. :)