There's a crisis of singleness that hasn't been present in much, although not all, of human history.

Home ownership is way down. At various points throughout human history it was common for people to own their own homes.

Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.

I resonate with the rest of your post - I do think having a connection to society is vital, and I also think that the US has become too much of a me-first, get-ahead-at-all-costs hustle culture that devalues social bonds. But I see people still forming very deep cultural identities.

I also agree with you that pride in one's accomplishments and a sense of purpose is important and home ownership is ONE way to achieve that - to have control over at least that facet of your life.

But it's far from the only one.

Lenocracy. The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/

Like most of Greers writing, it makes you think and also wonder what is in the water at his house.

The service economy is all about taking a whopping cut of everyone else's work, and it seems like venture capital is only interested in funding companies who will be able to do that. Uber, Doordash, Task Rabbit, the App Store, etc.

Never have I come across an author I simultaneously agree and disagree with.

In other words, it didn't start with social media. Rather, social media exacerbate what was already happening for decades at this point.

Aside from this being one hell of a subjective thing to measure vs. the past, and aside from it not necessarily being a bad thing (cultural identity has been used for centuries by demagogues to foment grotesque acts of religious and political violence, compared to what you see in many modern pluralistic liberal societies), it's also a very minor thing compared to all the colossal negatives of life in the past.

We can find our own voluntary cultural associations and create connections to society in all sorts of ways. Modern living, modern technology and modern conveniences don't hinder this. If anything, they make it easier. In a ridiculous irony considering the occupations of so many people on HN, and their lifestyles, there's a lot of hypocritical hate for social media and digital connectivity, but one part of it that's unfounded is the idea that it can't be used by those who are creative for expanding their own personally chosen connections to certain communities more widely.

As for the crisis of singleness, that's more complex, but maybe no longer forcing younger people into marriages of convenience and religious prudery about how the neighbors might be "scandalized" has something to do with fewer marriages. I see little wrong with that. The society I live in pursues marriage less than at any time in its history, but at least today you see nowhere near the frequency of young men and women being shotgunned into youthful marriages for absurd religious and social reasons that later lead to those marriages being abusive, unhappy and stagnant.

I agree with worries about your point on home ownership, but like anything else, it too has its caveats and complexities. One of these being that many younger people want to live in places that are trendy but also own their own property there. Market pricing for high-demand areas isn't something that can be magically wished away.

Finally, >Most people have very little autonomy in their day to day work. In the past most people worked on small scale farms and cottage industries where they didn't have layers upon layers of middle managers micromanaging them.

I'm sorry, have you actually read about how many hours people working in cottage industries and farming in particular (what the vast majority of people did for a living before industrialization) had to pull off just to stay afloat? I'd be willing to bet that they'd pick shorter hours with a manager or two over that existence.

On the other hand, the amount of autonomy and freedom an average modern person in the developed world today has is vastly greater than it was in this past existence you seem to be idealizing without closer examination. This applies even if you include all the middle managers you like over this modern worker's head. This is the case because, very importantly, it's their free time outside of work that matters most.

It's incredible to think a 17th century farmer of mid 19th century cobbler had more autonomy than a modern white collar worker in, say, Pittsburg, or Oakland California or Lyon, France does today just because you don't like the management culture in which the modern workers work their relatively moderate hours.

You seem to be missing my point about autonomy. Certainly your average peasant was in a much worse economic situation than most modern people and has less human rights. However, they likely also had less moment to moment micromanaging. As long as you deliver your quota at the end of the season, your feudal lord probably isn't dictating your daily work.

Human beings are not purely logical creatures. While from an objective standpoint people are certainly better off today, it's possible that the things that we've given up are more important for subjective emotional/psychological wellbeing.

I guess perhaps that's true in some countries, but not for the US. People put off major medical needs for years and even decades to wait until they can get on medicare.

Dental issues are even worse. Yes, the availability of the treatments is nice, but the majority of people are deeply stuck in modern society to have access to those treatments.

I could make a large list of all the ways in which this comparison is laughable.

You should make a list. I would find it very helpful. The people claiming the world progresses in a single direction will eat their words one day.

> The people claiming the world progresses in a single direction will eat their words one day.

That's a completely unfounded assumption on your part. It may end up being true, since the future is uncertain at all times, but at least right now anyone can say that the world has improved for humans like never before in measurable ways from those of earlier. That's a hard fact.

It's easy to intuit this by thinking about society in terms of generations. Since a peak fertility window is around 20 years, a generation also tends to be around 20 years. So how much will population rates change as one generation dies, every ~20 years? It's easy to work out by example. Imagine a fertility rate of 1. That means each woman is having 1 child on average. You need to have 2 for replacement. It generalizes to a factor of fertility_rate/2, so with a fertility_rate of 1 the population will decline by 50% per generation, per 20 years. If you start with a generational population of 8, then you'd have child populations of 4, 2, 1. Once that 8 generation starts dying, the 4 generation will start dying about 20 years later. And when the 8 generation dies you lose 50% of your total population, and 50% again when the 4 generation dies, and so on every 20 years. That's going from 8 population to 1 in 60 years! This also emphasizes why immigration is obviously not a solution, the scale is simply far too large.

Also bear in the mind the vicious cycle these outcomes will create. With a growing population your economy also naturally grows, even if it stays (proportionally) the exact same size - because there's more people, more consumption, and so on. The exact opposite is true in cases of population decline. So you're going to be trying to encourage people to have more children at the same time that your economy is collapsing. You will also have totally screwed up age ratios - in our example your 60-80 year old group will make up 50% of your population, forever! So you also have a lower labor forces, extremely high costs in terms of social security/healthcare/etc, and so on.

So there is no way that any civilization can persist on any reasonable timeframe with a subreplacement fertility rate.

The first thing that comes to mind is dependence on other people. Modern life has made it possible for the average person after a certain age to live without meaningful interaction with others. In the same vein one’s ability to choose one’s company has been greatly increased, which leads to superficial relationships and the isolation of those that no one chooses to be with.

> This paints a powerful case for humanity also being psychologically and emotionally better off, on average, than at any older time in history

This is not at all obvious for the reasons listed above, after a certain point material abundance does not cause psychological well-being. I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.

> Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true

The only broadly true statement that can be made about this topic is that modern life is generally incomparable how it was historically.

I find that the sentiment underlying these arguments is usually masturbatory in nature.

I have been trying to find a news interview for years. It was on Fox news just before Christmas about 15 years back, they had someone from an anti-consumption group. Needless to say, the interviewer did not take kindly to the position they had "It's un american to not buy Christmas presents!". But the last point the interviewee made as they played the music over them was something along the lines of "Consumption is three times high per capita than the 1950's and we are no happier because of it!".

Fair point to be made.

> I’d argue that point was well within the reach of most of our ancestors, since we have had happy ancestors of modest socioeconomic status.

While they aren't the only ones, folks like the Jainists, Taoists, all manner of Buddhists, Hindu's have lead very happy lives living on a tiny fraction of the material needs that we have. Not saying they didn't appreciate some of the new things but it isn't a case of living in squalor for millennia.

I mostly agree, but my point was that materialist analysis has obvious limits. It also naturally favors industrial society as industrial society optimizes for material production (not necessarily material satisfaction, mind you, hence why I mostly agree)

> If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures

If you presume superiority by comparison to our modern "complex" pleasures, sure, you're not going to find much interesting in the past.

> If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.

You will still be haunted by what you have seen of other humans and heard from their lips—there's no escaping that.

The will to live.

The depression is rampant. People are lonelier than ever, and they eventually kill themselves. Despite the fact that the world is objectively a better place to live, for the first time in history of any species people don't want to reproduce because it sucks.

Human happiness is directly correlated with relationships. Not with technological progress. But with relationships. Which are under fire in modern society.

But hey, here's a new iPhone. Go browse tiktok on it or something.

Maybe within the last 30 years but certainly not if you count even just prior to 1970 when heavy manufacturing still provided the primary jobs.

Mill and mine jobs sucked worse than agriculture. Women had zero choice other than homemaker, teacher and secretary. Many Rust Belt men were basically functional alcoholics because life was so damn difficult. For example, a black humor joke at Bethlehem Steel was that nobody ever retired from the car shop (they manufactured railroad cars)--they died of some form of weird cancer long before that.

People complain about how badly we deal with "mental health" now but everybody had to just suck it up and effectively smoked and drank themselves stupid to deal with it in the past. And prior to World War II and the broad distribution of antibiotics, basic physical health was a crapshoot let alone mental health.

I'm not happy about IQ starting to trend down. However, IQ continuously increasing indicates that groups of people were still systematically malnourished up into the early 1990s.

I may have a bunch of problems with the way things are going, but I'm having a tough time coming up with a time when it was that much better than things are right now.

Certainly most of the people sitting here reading HN would have had a really shitty time in the 1950s and 1960s (and probably even 1970s). They've forgotten that smart people had a hard time escaping their local social area and were strongly ostracized up through even the 1980s.

Eh with access to information IQ has become much less useful. We need a test much less bound to culture than what is currently offered—which includes at least a rework of verbal intelligence, which is literally just knowledge of culture. Knowledge without context is basically useless and certainly has little to do with intelligence.