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271 points nradov | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.223s | source
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tivert ◴[] No.42172599[source]
It's sad, but I'm sure there's a certain kind of person who's gloating over this. As in "Haha, those assholes wanted happiness, but my awesome capitalism wins everytime!1!! Join us at the bottom, suckers!!1!"

Personally, I kinda feel like people probably have perverse psychological impulses that cause us to make ourselves unhappy and discontented unless there's certain specific external constraints to control those impulses. Modern technology, in its quest to remove all constraint, eagerly removed the necessary ones.

It's sort of like fitness: way back, there was no such activity as "exercise," because everyone got enough as a matter of course (e.g. by farming, hunting, walking everywhere). Now no one has to do any of that, "exercise" is a new chore that requires willpower, so we're all getting fat.

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konschubert ◴[] No.42173072[source]
How do you know that people in Buthan were actually happy?
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1. tivert ◴[] No.42180180[source]
> How do you know that people in Buthan were actually happy?

Honestly, that's kind of irrelevant to my comment. My points were to 1) decry a kind of obnoxious schadenfreude and 2) posit that our society is likely to lead to unhappiness because of it's focus on individual choice and technology to make various things "easier."

I do respect Bhutan for trying to take a different path, and I suspect they erred by not excluding enough (e.g. allowing the cancer of social media).