Happiness technology: yesterday, today, tomorrow

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The world around us is developing: with the growth of technology, more and more discoveries appear, people are looking for opportunities to change the world and live a better, happier life. But what is happiness and how can it be measured? How to be happy and pass this feeling on to future generations? Read about this in our article.

About genetics, Danes and "mood bots"

Every day there are more and more gadgets, but the main thing for us is still one thing - the possibility of live communication.

In 2014, researchers at the University of Warwick in England released a statement that they found a strong link between genetics and life characteristics such as happiness and well-being. Scientists have discovered 5-HTTLPR, a serotonin transporter gene that affects the conversion of the neurotransmitters serotonin, the hormone responsible for our mood, sex drive and appetite. Their further scientific research aimed to find an answer to the following questions:

• why in some countries (especially Denmark) there is a steady increase in the so-called happiness index;
• whether this indicator is associated with a specific nation and its genetic makeup.

The authors of the study took into account all the main factors that can influence the general satisfaction of people with their lives: profession, religious beliefs, age, gender, income. As a result, scientists came to the conclusion that the DNA of the Danes at the genetic level is distinguished by a predisposition to life well-being. In other words, the more Dane you have in you, the more likely you are to be happy (Shakespeare did not seem to know about this).

However, those with Danish bloodlines are not the only examples of how powerful happiness genes can be. In one part of the study, data are given according to which every person on Earth is equipped with a set of genetic parameters, including preset values for this feeling. If at a certain moment in time we do not feel the joy of another victory or the bitterness of disappointment, then the body will "roll back" to the desired moral state by itself.

In part, this "assemblage point" is determined at the birth of a person at the genetic level, and as for the Danes, they, apparently, were a little more fortunate than other peoples of the world.

Neuroscientists are also studying a type of gene whose presence leads to increased production of anandamide, an endogenous cannabinoid neurotransmitter that is responsible for feelings of calmness. People with certain changes that result in the body producing less of the enzyme required to make anandamide are less able to withstand life's adversity.

In 2015, Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill-Cornell College of Medicine, stated in an editorial in the New York Times: “All people are endowed with a number of genetic attitudes, selected without any logic or social justice. It is these genetic rules that determine our propensity for anxiety, depression and even drug use."

What we, according to Friedman, really need, is a "drug" that can cause increased production of anandamide. This would be especially useful for those whom nature has not provided with powerful genes. Communication with friends and family is what makes us healthy and happy. People need it in principle.

Some servants of science have already turned their gaze to the future. James J. Hughes, sociologist, writer and professor at St. Trinity, being an adherent of futurism, already believes that the day is not far off when a person will be able to unravel the genetic code of key neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. Then the management of "happiness genes" will be possible (not 5-HTTLPR, so something else like that). In many respects, the stake is placed on the development of nano- and microtechnologies, due to which it will be possible to "marry" robotics with pharmacology. Why not?

Imagine: “mood bots” injected into the body begin their journey straight to certain areas of the brain and adjust our “assemblage point” in such a way that all events in life receive the proper emotional imprint and, as a result, bring satisfaction.

With the development of nano-technology, we will be able to carry out very fine and precise tuning, in fact, tuning our mood.

James Huey

It seems that we are almost ready to believe the futurist, because, in addition to writing and teaching, he is also the executive director of the Institute of Ethics and Developing Technologies, which means that he considers issues of genetics comprehensively.

We can come to the conclusion that the genetically renewed person of the future will be able to control mood literally at the snap of his fingers and live happily ever after. “But not so fast,” sociologists and neuroscientists who study the phenomenon of happiness quell our ardor.

Happiness in seconds - small, sharp

The fact that scientists were able to approach the study of a certain new biological essence of man and the need to find a special drug to control it cannot guarantee our descendants a happy and full of pleasure life. “Man is not just a perfect biomachine, all the secrets of which have not yet been solved,” the researchers state. "Years of hard scientific work speak of very specific actions necessary for a long and happy life."

The fragility of the term "happiness" has always caused a lot of problems for those who decided to study this emotional phenomenon closely. Therefore, many researchers are unanimous in the opinion: happiness is a condition that can be described as “subjective well-being”. Ed Diener of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia was among the first to use this definition in the 1980s.

However, in recent years, more and more bright minds are beginning to doubt the validity of the scientific approach based on the subjective impressions of the subjects. After all, happiness can be felt in different ways. For example, if you ask to describe this feeling of a teenager, adult, and child, you will realize that it can depend on very, very different aspects of life: a promotion, summer vacation, or a Christmas tree in kindergarten.

For over a decade, the idea that happiness can be conditionally divided into two types has been increasingly appearing: hedonistic and eudemonistic (the natural desire of a person to be happy). Aristotle spoke about the second a long time ago:

Happiness has a meaning and is ultimately the most important goal of life.

This is the form of happiness in which you look at life from the point of view of pleasure from the very process of being: days go by one after another, and each of them is unique and good in its own way.

Yes, it may very well be that soon advanced technologies in medicine will allow for a short time to completely block the feeling of fear, as well as instantly recreate the feeling of happiness. Happiness, however, is technically more complicated.

Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist and author of the bestselling book Stumbling Over Happiness, believes that humans can by default increase feelings of hedonistic happiness, and they have done quite well without even having mood bots in their arsenal. which James Huey of Hartford College talks about.

In 2004, Gilbert demonstrated his idea at a TED conference with two side-by-side images. From the one on the left, a man with a lottery ticket in his hands was looking at the viewer. As planned, he just won nearly $ 315,000. The second illustration also showed a man, but in a wheelchair.

“I urge you to think for a moment about both possible outcomes in life,” Daniel says to the audience. In fact, from the point of view of happiness, both situations are equivalent: after a year from the moment one man was in a wheelchair and the other won the lottery, their level of satisfaction with life will be relatively the same.

Research shows that virtual communication can help combat depression, loneliness and enhance the positive effects of social support received.

So why does it seem to us that the people in the pictures are not equally happy? The reason for this, according to Gilbert, is a phenomenon that he called erroneous influence. In other words, the tendency of people to overestimate the positive properties of events that have not yet taken place. The researcher notes that this is becoming a trend, although many phenomena in life are inherently temporary and cannot affect its quality in general. Judge for yourself: what globally bad can happen if you don't pass the exam the first time or part with your next passion? That's right, nothing critical: the sun is still shining, the girls are still beautiful in the spring, and there is still a whole life ahead.

Nevertheless, something should and can influence the feeling of happiness? Answering this question, Gilbert does not hesitate: “Often times, the state of happiness in us is caused by time-tested values. I bet that in 2045 people will still be happy if their children can achieve success and fill their lives with love and care for their loved ones."

“These are the foundations on which the state of happiness is based,” the researcher continues his thought. - They have been forming for millennia, but to this day they do not lose their relevance. Humans are still the most social animal on Earth, which is why we should make every effort to build stronger relationships with loved ones. The secret of happiness is so simple and obvious, but many simply refuse to understand it.

Why it happens? The answer sounds simple: people are looking for a riddle where there is none. It seems to them that they have already heard all this advice somewhere, maybe from a grandmother or a psychotherapist, now they would like to hear the secret of a happy life from scientists. But there is no secret."

Life-long exploration, the winner's list and the secret to happiness

Perhaps the most obvious confirmation of the idea of the benefits of human relations is precisely our parents, who, not today or tomorrow, will turn from father and mother into grandfather and grandmother. A group of scientists from Boston set themselves this idea, the participants of which decided to test a number of patterns for themselves, starting one of the longest studies ever known to the world. The project was originally titled The Main Study on Social Adaptation and was later renamed the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

The work began with a series of scientific experiments and a series of interviews with a group of college graduates from 1939-1941. Each graduate was carefully selected to participate in the study. Incidentally, they included John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post from 1972 to 1974.

The primary goal of the experiment was to observe a group of potentially successful men for one to two decades. To date, more than 75 years have passed since the beginning of the study, while 30 of the 268 people involved in it are still alive.

In 1967, the results of the study were combined with the fruits of another scientific work on a similar topic: Sheldon Glueck (Sheldon Glueck), professor of law and criminology at Harvard University, observed 456 children from low-income but well-off families living in central Boston in the early 40s. -NS. Eighty people from the group of test subjects are in good health to this day. Those who did not live up to the present day lived on average nine years less than the participants in the 1938 Boston experiment.

In 2009, writer Joshua Wolf Shenk asked George Vaillant, the former head of the Boston study, what he felt was his most important discovery. “The only thing that really matters in life is relationships with other people,” George replied.

After the publication of Schenk's article, Waylent seemed to be attacked by skeptics around the world. The researcher's response to the barrage of criticism was the "winner's list" - a document that included 10 accomplishments in the life of a man (aged 60 to 80), the implementation of which can be regarded by others as a clear success. This hit parade included:

• the participant has reached a certain level of income by the time he enters the final part of the study;
• presence in the American biographical directory Marquis Who's Who;
• a successful career and happiness in marriage;
• mental and physical health;
• sufficient social activity (in addition to communicating with family members).

It seems that the constituents of each of the above categories in Waylent's list are related to each other. In fact, only four points, according to the writer himself, have a close relationship with success in life and lie in the field of human relations.

In fact, Veilent once again confirmed that it is the ability to have close relationships with other people that predetermines success in most aspects of our life.

However, for the writer himself, who published his research in a book called "" in 2012, the term "happiness" does not seem so apt. “It would be nice to exclude it from the vocabulary altogether,” Veilent explains. - By and large, happiness is just a manifestation of hedonism, the desire of a person to live life for his own pleasure. For example, I will feel good if I eat a hefty burger with beer. At the same time, we cannot correlate this action with life's well-being. The secret to happiness lies in the positive emotions we receive. The source of the most useful emotions for a person is love."

Veilent admits: “Hearing something like that in the 60s and 70s, I would have laughed, no more. But gradually my work allowed me to find more and more evidence that warm relationships with other people are the basis for happiness."

On health, the impact of technology and loneliness on the web

Robert Waldinger, a psychotherapist at Harvard Medical School who is currently leading a study begun at the university in 1938, notes that it is not just material well-being or happiness per se that is critical to fulfilling relationships. Alas, one cannot do without good physical health.

“One main takeaway from all of this is that the quality of relationships is far more important to health than we might have thought. Moreover, we are talking not only about the mental, but also about the physical condition of people. Being happily married at the age of 50 is much more important in terms of longevity than keeping an eye on your cholesterol levels. Ultimately, those who focus only on achieving success in life lack the warm feelings and emotions they receive from communicating with family and friends. People need it in principle."

However, the development of personal relationships can have an impact not only on a person's health, but also on the structure of his brain.

Socially isolated people are more likely to get sick and are more likely to suffer from memory and thinking disorders, their brains are less productive, as evidenced by the results of our research.

Robert Waldinger

According to Waldinger, passionate people are happier than others. They may be raising children, tending a garden, or running a family business - in principle, they can make time for it all. After all, if you are seriously passionate about business, and there are faithful like-minded people next to you, then unattainable goals simply do not exist for you.

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of a fundamental work on personality psychology using the example of the study of twins, believes that the likelihood that a person's life was successful thanks to the "happiness gene" is only 33%. At the same time, Christakis is convinced that the main component of well-being is sociality, and not the technological advantages of the modern world.

Christakis studies the phenomenon of social networking and argues that genes like 5-HTTLPR have less influence on feelings of happiness than subjective feelings of a person. The latter, on the contrary, transform the functions of the nervous system, changing our behavior and forcing us to communicate and find friends of different nature - cheerful, calm, sad.

Scientists have devoted decades to researching the phenomenon of happiness and the importance of human relationships and have come to a very urgent question. We live in the era of the heyday of network technologies. The presence of people on social media and the time they collectively spend on the Internet grows steadily every year. George Veilent is unambiguous in his judgments on this matter: “Technologies make our thinking superficial, alien to the voice of the heart. It's not even that this is an endless pursuit of a new iPhone, which every time gets out of date, and you have to buy yourself another, newer and more powerful - in a global sense, it does not matter. Modern gadgets seem to not let you out of your own head, no matter how strange it may sound: my daughter in all seriousness thinks that writing messages to friends is much more convenient than calling, not to mention live communication. It is unlikely that this habit will pay off a hundredfold to people in 2050.

The hopelessness of a new world in which, sitting down at the same table, people do not take their eyes off the mobile, breathes from the words of Sherry Turkle, professor of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Relationships between people are complex and spontaneous, taking up a considerable amount of mental strength … It would seem that technologies are designed to make the communication process more convenient and faster, but it turns out that at the same time we talk less and less. And then we gradually get used to it. And after a short time it ceases to bother us at all”.

Yes, on the one hand, technology brings us closer. But at the same time, we are becoming more and more alone in this world.

Some early research into Internet use has already suggested that the age of networking is dragging us inexorably into a sad, lonely future. In 1998, Robert E. Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, conducted an experiment, the results of which, alas, were not encouraging. The study involved families with children of senior school age, and all subjects had the opportunity to use a computer with access to the Internet without restriction. Observations of the experimental group revealed a pattern: the more time its participants spent in the virtual space, the less they communicated live and the worse their mood became.

The problem of the detrimental effect of modern technology on human life is still relevant. A study by a group of employees of the University of Utah Valley was widely known: 425 alumni who took part in the work noted a decline in mood and growing dissatisfaction with their own lives against the background of active use of Facebook.

However, the problem of the influence of the virtual space on our life worries not only people of science. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI, in one of his addresses, warned the world: "Virtual space cannot and should not replace people with real human communication." It is worth considering, what do you think?

However, in recent years, there has been a growing perception that technology may not be so damaging to human relationships. Consider Kraut's research, what conclusions can we draw from it today? If in 1998, during the experiment, people had (it was just a necessity) to communicate with people they did not know very well on the Web, today almost all people are present in social networks, in the virtual space, in another world, if you like.

The reality is that most people today are used to communicating on the Internet, even with those whom they have known for years and live on the same street. This means that the point is in the communication process itself, and not in its form. After all, what difference does it make if a person feels less lonely anymore?

Yes, virtual relationships are developing too. Any form of communication brings us more joy and warmth if we communicate with our own. It's a matter of trust.

More often than not, we use technology to communicate with people we know well. This only makes the relationship stronger.

Robert Kraut

Kraut's words are eagerly endorsed by Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers University. Investigating the problem of the influence of the Internet on relationships, he became convinced that social networks and the virtual space bring people together. “I don’t think people are giving up communication in favor of online interaction. This is just a new form of contact that complements the ones they are used to for a long time,”- shares his thoughts Hampton.

In fact, Hampton's research suggests that the more different media we use to communicate, the stronger the relationship becomes. People who do not limit themselves to just talking on the phone, but regularly see each other, write emails and communicate on social networks, involuntarily strengthen the connection with each other.

“In this case,” Keith continues, “Facebook is playing a very different role. If only a few decades ago people left the provinces for large cities in search of new opportunities, often losing touch with friends and family, today we have not heard of such problems. Thanks to social networks, relationships live and develop, becoming long-term."

Of course, social media will not be enough to contain the onslaught of loneliness that threatens people. However, coupled with other forms of communication, virtual communication media can support and add variety to human relationships. Time and distance are no longer so critical.

Of course, Hampton is familiar with the views of Professor Turkle and the rest of his colleagues that technology is literally killing the forms of interaction we are used to. The professor, along with other researchers, examined four videotapes that were filmed in public places over the past 30 years. After analyzing the behavioral characteristics of 143,593 people, scientists came to the conclusion: being among the crowd, we always feel apart. In public places, there is mainly group communication, despite the widespread use of mobile devices. And in places where a person is forced to be in relative loneliness, on the contrary, a mobile phone in his hand is not uncommon.

One way or another, technological means of communication are unlikely to ever be able to change human nature. Amy Zalman, director of the World Future Society, believes that human relationships have always been a complex and ever-changing process. Even the language in which we communicate with each other is one of the communication tools, along with other means: social networks, mobile phones and others. Technologies penetrate deeper and deeper into our lives, and another feature of the human character is triggered: we inevitably get used to their constant presence.

Scientists-futurists believe: we will soon be able to communicate through the collective mind. Or maybe interact with each other through some virtual entities-avatars in a separately created ideal world. Or one day someone will still manage to settle the human mind in an artificial body.

One way or another, the truth remains true since the time of Aristotle: it is never too late to go out, talk to a person and make new friends. After all, happiness, as you know, cannot be bought.