What technology cannot do to achieve happiness

In 2014, researchers from the University of Warwick in England announced the discovery of a strong link between mutations in the gene associated with human happiness and well-being. It is called 5-HTTLPR and affects how our body processes the neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps control our mood, sexual desire and appetite. The study examined the question of why some nations, especially Denmark, constantly fall into the top lines of the charts in happiness, and whether there can be no connection between a nation and the genetic code of its people. Of course, it was found that owners of Danish DNA have a genetic advantage in the matter of well-being. In other words, the more a person’s genes resemble Danish, the more likely he is to be happy.

This intriguing study is not the only example of the influence of genes responsible for well-being. One of the works asserts that people are genetically predisposed to a certain basic level on the scale of happiness - the level of life satisfaction, to which our consciousness returns in the absence of recent victories or disappointments. About 50% of the factors influencing this level are genetically determined. Perhaps the Danes were lucky to possess genes that determine the high position of this level.

Neurologists are also studying a gene that affects an elevated amount of anandamide in the brain, which is responsible for the state of calm. Those people who have genetically reduced production of the protein that assimilates anandamide are less likely to drag out a hard life. In 2015, Richard A. Friedman [Richard A. Friedman], a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University’s College of Medicine. Weil Cornell complained in the New York Times, “that we all live with a random and unfair assortment of genetic variations that make us more or less satisfied, anxious, depressed, or addicted to drugs. What we need is a medicine to increase the level of anandamide, a bliss molecule, for those who are unlucky genetically. Stay with us".
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Some scientists have already tuned in to the future. James J. Hughes, a sociologist, writer and futurist at Hartford Trinity College, already sees a not too distant future in which we unravel genetic susceptibilities to key neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin, and we can control happiness genes - 5- HTTLPR or something similar - with the help of nanotechnology, combining robotics and pharmacology. "Nastroenobebota", being swallowed, will proceed to certain areas of the brain, turn on genes and adjust our basic level of happiness. “With the increasing accuracy of nanotechnology, we will be able to influence people's moods,” says Hughes, who works as executive director of the Institute of Ethics and New Technologies. He also authored Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to a Renewed Man of the Future, 2004 [Citizen Cyborg: Why not?

It could be decided that the renewed person of the future can simply eat the pill and live happily. But happiness psychologists, sociologists and neurologists are not in a hurry to recommend this. The fact that scientists have unearthed some biology underlying this state, which is difficult to describe with words, and is already paving the way for the creation of a stimulating drug, does not guarantee our great-grandchildren a happy and contented life. Human nature is not only biology. Generations of happiness studies clearly show us what is needed for a long and satisfying life.



The amorphous term "happiness" has long prevented people studying the subject. To measure happiness and related semantic problems, many physiologists use a measurement called “subjective well-being”. It is based on how people themselves tell researchers how happy they are. Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” first developed this approach in the 1980s. Today, Diener serves as a senior scientist at the Gallup Institute, providing polls used in building happiness lists, to most organizations ordering such lists.

In recent years, more and more researchers have recognized that this is not such a good approach and needs improvement. What we actually mean by telling the researcher from Gallup that we are “happy” varies greatly. When answering the question about happiness, a teenager or a young man will have in mind plans for the weekend, the amount of money in his pocket, and how his peers treated him at lunch. An older person with children will describe a larger picture, even with back problems, no babysitter for the weekend, and a scheduled visit to the doctor for a colonoscopy.

Over the past ten years, more and more researchers have begun to change the approach to happiness and divide it into two categories: hedonic happiness (the same state of euphoria) and eudamonic happiness. 2300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about the latter: "Happiness is the meaning and meaning of life, the goal at the end of human existence." This type of happiness determines a good life, a time spent with benefit. Medicine will soon be able to ensure the absence of fear, or the presence of a feeling of well-being, but it will be much more difficult for her to create a second type of happiness.

Harvard's Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist and bestselling author of Stumbling On Happiness, suggests that people already have the ability to raise their hedonistic happiness without any nanobots. Gilbert has studied all his life how we convince ourselves to accept external conditions and return to hedonistic equilibrium, regardless of the circumstances.

In 2004, Gilbert demonstrated this with two images. On the left a man holds a big lottery check. He just won $ 314.9 million. On the right, another person, almost the same age, in a wheelchair, pushes off the ramp. “Imagine two different options for the future, think about them, and tell us which one you prefer,” Gilbert told the audience. He said that there is evidence of the happiness of lottery winners and people with disabilities. It turns out that a year after losing their feet or winning the lottery, the winners of the lottery feel not much happier than the disabled.

The reason why people do not believe that both groups can be equally happy lies in the counterintuitive phenomenon, which Gilbert called the “influence shift”, the tendency to overestimate the hedonic influence of future events. This tendency is visible when winning or losing in elections, acquiring or losing a romantic partner, receiving or not receiving promotion, passing or not passing the exam. The influence of all these events is not as strong, intense and long as it seems to people.

It's all about bringing happiness back to the basic level. But should something influence happiness? Gilbert says that “most of the happiness is due to long-developing things. I’ll bet that in 2045 people will be happy to see the prosperity of their children, eat chocolate, feel loved, well-fed and safe. ”

These are the “braces of happiness,” he continues. “To just think about the possibility of their change, it will be necessary to go through evolutionary shifts. This question could have been asked a few years ago, 300 years ago, 2,000 years ago. And it would always be right to say "You are the most social animal on Earth, so develop social relationships, this is one of the forms of happiness." This answer is so obvious that the majority rejects it.

"There is generally no secret about the things that make people happy," says Gilbert. “But if you list them, people say, 'Well, yes, this is what my rabbi, grandmother, and a familiar philosopher told me. And what is the secret? But there is no secret. They are right".



Perhaps the strongest evidence of the importance of relationships is the study of a group of people who currently have grandchildren. Information is stored in a room in the suburbs of Boston, in which rows of cabinets stand, storing the details of one of the most detailed and lengthy studies on the development of healthy men: the “Harvard study of adult development”, formerly known as the “Grant study on social adaptability” [Harvard Study of Adult Development / Grant Study in Social Adjustments].

In 1938, researchers began conducting tests and interviews with selected Harvard male students of the 1939, 1940, and 1941 graduation classes. People were elected not because of the problems that awaited them, but because of a promising future. The group included John Kennedy and Ben Bradley, who led the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal, among others. It was originally planned to study people who are predisposed to success for 15–20 years. Today, 75 years later, the research is still ongoing. 30 out of 268 people are still alive.

In 1967, the data was combined with the Glueck Study, a similar attempt to study 456 poor white children without mental disabilities who grew up in Boston in the 1940s. Of these, 80 people are still alive, while the dead lived on average nine years less than the Harvard group.

In 2009, former research director George Waillant, who led them the longest, told a journalist that he considered the most interesting discovery made from the beginning of the research. “All that matters in life is your connections with other people,” he said.

After the release of this article, Vailanta was attacked by skeptics from around the world. In response, he wrote Decathlon Prosperity, which included a list of 10 accomplishments between the ages of 60 and 80 that could be considered success. They included income from the top quarter of the list of subjects, mention of the Who's Who in America almanac, lack of psychological problems, work pleasure, love, good physical and mental health, social support not only from wife and children, good marriage and good relations with kids.

It turned out that high achievements in one of these positions strongly correlated with the others. But of all the factors studied, only four strongly correlated with success in all respects - and all of them were related to relationships with other people. He again proved that success in the lives of men is determined by the opportunity to establish close relationships.

But Waillant, who described in detail his discoveries in the Triumphs of Experience book of 2012, objects to the term "happiness." “The most important thing in happiness is to get rid of the use of this word,” he says. - The point is that most of the happiness is simple hedonism, and today I feel good after eating a big mac or successfully going to the toilet. And this has little to do with a sense of well-being. The secret of well-being is experiencing positive emotions. ” And the secret of this may sound trite. But you can not argue with the facts. It's all about love.

“In the 1960s or 70s, I would be ridiculed for making such assumptions,” says Vaillant. “But I found clear data confirming that your relationship is the most important thing in your well-being.” I was pleased to find confirmation of such sentimental things like love. ”

Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, the current director of the study, notes that not only material success and psychological sensations are associated with good relationships. Next to them is physical health.

“The main conclusion of all this is that the quality of relationships between people is much more important than we thought - not only for emotional well-being, but also for the physical,” he says. If you are now 50 years old, then your physical condition in 30 years will predict happiness in marriage better than cholesterol levels. “Close relationships and social connections ensure your happiness and health. Such is the conclusion. People who focused on success or abandoned relationships were less happy. In fact, people are focused on personal connections. ”

Strong personal connections not only improve health, but also affect the structure of the brain. People who feel social isolation get sick earlier, their brain collapses earlier, their memory is worse, Waldinger says. With a brain scan, he and the team found that more satisfied people had more connections in the brain. Their brains worked harder when viewing images than less satisfied people.

“People with lots of connections were happier,” Waldinger says. - They could raise children, break a garden, manage a corporation. If you like something, it matters to you, and especially if you do it together with other people - that’s what makes you happy. ”

Even Nicholas Christakis, a Yale University sociologist who worked on twin research, who demonstrated that 33% of the difference in life satisfaction can be attributed to the 5-HTTLPR gene, agrees that social ties are a key component of happiness. “I do not believe that technology will affect what I consider to be the basics of human nature,” he says. “I don’t think that the development of technology or futuristic things can fundamentally change our possibilities of being happy.”

Christakis, who studied social networks, says that the effect of 5-HTTLPR-type genes on happiness is not as direct as that of a simple subjective sense of well-being (although it may be part of the latter). He believes that the key may be their influence on our behavior - and on our relationship. “It's not about what the genes do inside the body and how they change our neurophysiology, but what they do outside of our body, how they affect the number of friends, or the choice of happy or unhappy people as friends, which also affects happiness, says Christakis. “Even if your genes provide a predisposition in choosing happy friends, the lack of the latter will make you unhappy.”



Generations of happiness research, claiming the importance of personal relationships, take us to the epicenter of an unexpectedly modern controversy. We live in an increasingly networked society, and the number of people in social networks, the time we spend online, is growing all the time. Vailant does not hesitate in assessing what our time online does to us.

“Technology is moving us towards the cortex and farther from the heart,” he says. - The world does not exist thanks to technology. Not thanks to the constant improvement of iPhones. I have a trendy new phone that I just hate. The technology only distracts us back into our heads, and it seems to my daughter that it is much cooler to send someone a message than to talk with him on the phone. Fortunately in 2050, this does not bode well. ”

The fears of the dystopian world, where everyone sends messages at dinner and are afraid to look into each other's eyes, were perhaps best placed on the shelves by Professor Sherry Turkle, who studies the social impact of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She explores the paradox of how technology binds us all the more closely and makes us more and more alone in the 2011 book “Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other” [Alone Together: Each Other].

“Human relationships are complex, confusing and demanding,” she said, speaking in 2012 at TED. “And we clean them with technology.” But as a result, it may turn out that we are sacrificing a dialogue in favor of simple communication. We are fooling ourselves. And over time, we forget about it, or it just stops worrying us. ”

One of the earliest studies of the Internet and technology supported the idea that the network age is leading us to a sad and lonely future. In a revolutionary 1998 study, Robert E. Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, collected families with high school children, gave them computers and Internet access, and tracked their use. The more the subjects used the Internet, the more their depression increased, and the less their social support and psychological well-being became.

Since then, several other negative studies have been conducted. One plentifully cited study of 2012, conducted by scientists from the University of Utah Valley with the help of 425 students, found that the more they used Facebook, the more they felt that other people are happier and live better. The researchers called the work "They are happier and live better than me: the impact of using Facebook on other people's perceptions."

Even in the Vatican expressed concern. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI in one of his messages said that “virtual contact cannot and should not take the place of direct contact of people”.

But more recently, a thinner consensus has begun to emerge - suggesting that technology does not so badly affect relationships. , 1998 . , , . – « ». « , ,- . – . , , ».

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This is due to the improvement of offline relationships. Relationships online, as well as offline, satisfy us more if you happen to people with whom we have a strong connection. Relationships with strangers mean much less. But most of us use technology to communicate with people we already know. And it helps strengthen relationships. “Online communication also has a positive effect on us, just as offline communication with friends would have an impact,” Kraut says.

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Of course, Facebook and technology alone, according to Hampton, is not enough to banish the feeling of loneliness. But along with other types of communication, they can strengthen existing relationships, expand their range and maintain connections. The technology overcomes the limitations of time and distance that have never been overcome before. Instead of Christmas cards, we get a constant flow of information. We can share joys and sorrows. We are less isolated.

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Some futurists believe that we will connect to the matrix and will communicate through group intelligence. Or we are waiting for personal avatars that remind us of remote-controlled robots. Maybe our brains will be downloaded to computers. But whatever happens, the truth of happiness will remain the same as it was in the days of Aristotle. It is no harm to anyone to go for a walk, make friends, make love, influence the community. Happiness has always been concluded in relationships with other people.