system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The overall direction of our (Western) society runs largely in contradiction to what biologically makes us happy

This is a sentiment I've been thinking about for quite a while but it's come more to the fore recently after reading (and listening to) the work of people like Sebastion Junger, Gabor Mate and Yuval Noah Harari.

To me it seems like a pretty basic idea. For hundreds of thousands of years we evolved as a species in a certain way. This largely amounted to living in small tribes (or even villages later on) where every individual had a role, we held a real sense of community and we all had a very simple and convincing 'meaning/purpose of life' - i.e. survival. At the core of pretty much every person since the beginning of time is the desire for happiness. Our inherent biology, developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, positions us as humans to value certain things over others in pursuit of this happiness. These 'certain things' are those we've spent hundreds of thousands of years doing, not those things we've only just started (in the last couple of hundred years of human history). Right now we're actively working to create a society that completely contradicts everything we as humans (at least subconsciously) actually want. We actually often try to recreate some of what we've lost (because we desire it so badly) but this is almost always just a weak imitation of what we've had before.

I'll give a few talking points.

**Meaning to Life:** Here we've literally gone from the strongest purpose one could have (i.e. survival of one's self/one's community) to a significantly weaker mis-match of self-improvement, helping others or furthering one's line (feel free to name any others but I think the point still stands). The reality that finding a meaning to life is such a struggle in today's time obviously suggests we've 'lost out' here.

**Tribalism/Individualism:** We've gone from a society built around a real sense of community (e.g. 40-50 people in close proximity working together towards a common goal every moment of their lives) to one based around the individual. Our 'tribes' have shrunk to such a degree that it might only contain 5-10 family members/close friends if that (and in most cases we don't exactly live in close proximity 24/7 with them). The loneliness/individualism of today's society actually causes significant mental problems with the main solution to be to find community (e.g. AA groups to name just one example).

**Relationships/raising children:** We've gone from the idea of a 'village raising a kid' to (maybe) 2 individuals. Even relationships, due to the lack of wider community, have been put under much more strain than they likely were in times past. Imagine how much more energy (and time) we're forced now to spend on just our significant other now than we would have been surrounded by a close tribe (with a ton of other significant relationships instead of (often times) just the one). All the emotion etc of daily life is often times directed towards just this one person.

**Capitalism/Materialism:** This one is really weird. Despite materialism often seen as a negative thing the entire structure of our society is built around it. We're forced into situations where we work and work in desire of 'things' that ultimately in reflection most would agree don't actually bring them happiness. The hedonic treadmill. I mean the peak of our society (celebrities/billionaires) are as much if not more unhappy than the average shmuck. The things that people generally feel brings them the most happiness is actually relationships with other people....

**Jobs:** It's almost a societal wide meme that our jobs make us unhappy. Some people are lucky enough to find something that makes them happy but many (as much as 85% I've heard) either outright hate their jobs or merely endure them. We've gone from a situation where our jobs had genuine meaning/worth (i.e. hunter/gatherer for your tribe or the only blacksmith for small village) to a situation where your individual job for the vast, vast majority means incredibly little. The jobs with the highest rates of happiness? Well they're actually the ones where people have the most autonomy and can actually see the fruits of their labour.

Well that was a long one. Obviously this world view is a little pessimistic about our future so I'm obviously open to engage with other views. **Only thing I'm not interested in is edge cases.** I'm more than aware that off-shoot hippy communes (for example) push against much of this. **I'm more interested in wider society's direction,** although obviously these societal 'black sheep' do offer a potential way to escape.

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EDIT: I have changed my view on the feasibility of the purpose of survival meaning anything in today's society. Still up for discussion on anything else.

EDIT2: Thanks everyone. I've really appreciated having my view challenged and changed in some way. To anyone interested in this topic (particularly anyone that vehemently disagrees) I'd recommend reading Sapiens or TRIBE or even just listening to their podcasts on Waking Up, the Tim Ferris Show or Under the Skin. Regardless of your personal view I think they engage in very interesting ways with problems we undeniably face right now and actually offer reasons why we are facing them. They definitely do a much better job of explaining this viewpoint than I do.
gpt
I think your argument is based in a lot of false premises. Human society has always been confrontational and in \_plenty\_ of situations that make people unhappy. There's a biological realism that needs to be addressed for any society, but equally some of the points you raise diverge strongly from biological reality.

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In brief:  
**Community** makes people happy but at the same time leads to war. War makes people unhappy. Tribal structure is not a stable long-term constructions for any society, and one of the reasons why we see so little tribalism nowadays, other than technology, is the requirement to cooperate between tribes. Tribal communities leads to war and chaos.

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**Relationships** aren't so easy to simplify. On the one hand, studies show that 2-parent families are happier than 1-parent happier (which is also obviously apparent). But, nowadays children have grandparents and even great-grandparents to help with childcare. This didn't exist in the past, where overall life expectancy was below 30 until the 1700s (excluding infant mortality stats). So here, we have it better than ever.

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**Capitalism**  is a manifestation of biological hierarchy. It's wrong to assume that capitalism is somehow a recent construction. Or even that money is a recent construction - tribes, and even monkeys show affinity to trade and value all across the world. Even crows like shiny objects and hoard them. Life is a constant status competition, and the economic system is a *product* of this status competition that exists in the animal world. This goes for jobs that make people miserable too.

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It's a false assumption to idealize the primal nature of humanity. Humans now are quite possibly happier than they have ever been in history. Human suffering has never been lower, precisely because of the products of western culture and social structures. The reality is simply that people have never had so little suffering, loss of life (including children), and chaos in their lives as they do under western society.