Have advances in modern medicine and social security made us happier than in the past?

This article examines different perspectives on what happiness is and explores how modern medicine and social security have increased our sense of well-being compared to the past.

 

There have been few attempts to measure happiness. It’s unclear whether historians have deliberately avoided this question, or whether they see no reason to address it. Nevertheless, it’s a very important question. As a species, and even after the cognitive revolution, humans have always instinctively sought happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. So are we happier than people in the past?
To answer this question, we must first clarify what happiness is. Happiness generally refers to subjective well-being, and there are different ways of looking at it. The first view is that happiness is determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. This view is easy to understand intuitively. For example, if I expect 100 and only get 50, I’m unlikely to be happy, but if I expect 10 and get 20, I’m likely to be happy. The second is the biological view, which suggests that serotonin is released in the body to control happiness. In fact, it’s scientifically proven that we feel happier when serotonin is released, so this view is correct. The third is a religious perspective. Buddhism views emotions as nothing more than fluctuations and believes that chasing them causes suffering. In this view, happiness is determined by whether or not people recognize this fact.
With all these different perspectives, how do we choose a metric to measure happiness? First of all, biological criteria are difficult to choose. The idea that serotonin is related to happiness is relatively recent; a hundred years ago, there was no way to measure serotonin levels, and a strong correlation between serotonin levels and actual happiness has not been reliably demonstrated. For example, a study comparing serotonin levels in platelets between suicidal patients and healthy controls found statistically significant differences in psychological characteristics, but not in platelet serotonin levels. Therefore, serotonin levels are not a quantitative reflection of psychological factors.
Aside from biological criteria, we can qualitatively consider other criteria that are difficult to express numerically. Among these, the view based on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations seems to be the most significant. The Buddhist position is difficult for people to feel intuitively, and it’s hard to imagine that everyone would agree with its tenets. If we use Buddhism as a benchmark for happiness, we can infer that the periods when Buddhism had the greatest impact were also the periods when average happiness was highest, but this doesn’t seem to make much sense.
On the other hand, a view based on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations is more closely related to everyday life. This view is also empirically valid. This premise can be applied equally to people of the past as well as the present. People in any era would have had their own expectations, and would have felt happy when they were fulfilled and unhappy when they were not. However, these expectations are influenced by the society in which they grew up. In fact, people have a hard time understanding societies that are different from the one they grew up in. This is true for generational differences and historical periods, so it’s hard to compare modern societies with those of the past and guess which era people were happier. Each society would have had its own expectations and feelings of happiness.
From the above discussion, it seems impossible to distinguish between the happiness levels of people in modern and historical times. Moreover, humans are animals of adaptation. Even people with an acquired disability can adapt and live with it after 20-30 years, although there are individual differences. Just because past societies had more violence and a higher percentage of people with disabilities than modern societies doesn’t mean they were unhappier. So, what are the factors that affect happiness in the long run?
Psychologists and biologists have identified factors that affect happiness in the long term. Illnesses that are constantly getting worse, or those that cause constant pain, reduce happiness in the long run. This is not surprising given the importance of health in our lives. There’s a saying in the UK that “there is no better fortune than good health”. If your health is constantly deteriorating, it’s no wonder that your long-term happiness will suffer. Modern people have an advantage over the past in this regard. This is the advancement of medicine. In the past, people often suffered and died from easily treatable diseases, but thanks to modern medicine, this has been greatly reduced. We can say that we are happier than our ancestors in this regard.
There may be other views on this. For example, it could be argued that modern medicine has increased the amount of time that patients with incurable diseases suffer unnecessarily. But that’s just a third-party view. If there are patients who want to live at least one more day, even if it’s painful, who are we to say that it’s not better for them to die? Death is a common phenomenon that all living things fear. When patients want to live longer, modern society, which can fulfill this desire to some extent, can be considered to have increased their happiness.
Of course, there are also patients who are in so much pain that they just want to get out of it as soon as possible. This is where euthanasia comes into play in modern society. Euthanasia is divided into passive euthanasia, which involves withdrawing life-prolonging treatments, and active euthanasia, which involves ending a person’s life through the administration of drugs. Passive euthanasia is also known as dignity killing. It means much the same thing as natural death in the past, where a terminally ill patient in extreme pain awaits death without the aid of modern medicine. However, there is an important difference. In the past, terminally ill patients did not have the option of prolonging their lives, whereas today’s terminally ill patients do. Dignity with dignity is legally recognized in several countries, including the Netherlands, and the right to die with dignity is being debated around the world. In South Korea, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the right to die in 2009, and in 2017, it was legalized on a limited basis. The increased duration of suffering shouldn’t be used to discredit all of modern medicine’s contributions to happiness.
Health is an important component of happiness. Of course, health isn’t everything, so we can’t say that we’re happier than we were in the past. However, given the current state of affairs, there is reason to believe that we are happier than our ancestors, thanks to the benefits of modern medicine and social security.