The Curse of Freedom

"No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility." ~Seneca

I've known a lot of people who feel like their lives are meaningless. They find their thoughts gravitating toward suicide for lack of anything to care about. I myself have toyed with those sentiments before in a previous life.

It's always been somewhat of a mystery to me though. Why do relatively well-off Americans seem so much more miserable than subsistence-level farmers in developing countries, or even their own ancestors just a few decades ago?


This excerpt may enlighten:

"In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints.

"No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Durkheim looked at the 'degree of integration of religious society' and found that Protestants, who lived the least demanding religious lives at the time, had higher suicide rates than Catholics; Jews, with the densest network of social and religious obligations, had the lowest. He examined the 'degree of integration of domestic society'--the family--and found the same thing: People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less.

"Durkeim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives: 'The more weakened the groups to which a man belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.'

"A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim's diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live...you should find out about her social relationships.... An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

"Seneca was right: "No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility."

~The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt