Rachel Sumner
CH 202H
2 December 2003                                                                                                                                                    

Does Better Technology Equal More Happiness?

           Happiness is something most humans value above everything else.  The various things in life that make us happy, such as family, friends, and cool cars, to name a few, are the very things we hold dearest to us and place the most value on.  People fill their lives with things that please them to ease the gloom that comes as a result of the seemingly never-ending trials and tribulations of life.  We gladly accept any amount of pleasure we can extract from the monotony of our daily lives, and we will do almost anything to achieve happiness.   

Throughout Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud talks about happiness—why we don’t have it and how to attain it.  He blames civilization for people’s general unhappiness.  Civilization is obsessed with technology, figuring out how the world works, and controlling nature.  This focus on and excess of technology and science may have advantages, but it also has many disadvantages, the main one being unhappiness.  Civilization hinders man’s instinctual drives.  Man is born with these innate drives, and when he is not able to fulfill them, he becomes miserable.  There are restrictions placed on the members of a society through cultural norms and beliefs.  All these things put together add up to an unhappy society.

Freud believes that aggression is a primal instinct, and civilization thwarts this instinct, making man unhappy.  Civilized society controls man’s tendency toward aggression through rules and laws and the presence of authority.  These mechanisms are put in place to guarantee safety and happiness for all individuals in a society.  However, the necessity of suppressing the aggressive drive in members of a society has led to much unhappiness and discontent in society.  In Chapter V, page 72, Freud says, “It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression.  They do not feel comfortable without it.”  When this aggressive drive is repressed, man becomes unhappy.  Another drive is the sexual drive, or Eros.  Civilization suppresses this drive in much the same way as it suppresses the aggressive drive, and this leads to more unhappiness.  

Freud also claims that technological advancements in society are counterproductive.  The disadvantages of technology are not too far behind the advantages of technology.  On page 40, Freud offers a perfect example of the relationship between the advantages and disadvantages of technology when he says, “If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.”  It is thrilling that we are able to travel long distances because of railroads, but this easy mode of transportation makes it simpler for a person to leave his/her family and go to a new and exciting place.  So we invent the telephone so we are able to talk to distant family members, but that is never as good as having a conversation with them sitting right beside you.  The technological advances of a society are meant to further people’s happiness, but in reality they do nothing more than get in the way of that happiness.

One of Freud’s suggestions for finding happiness was forming relationships with other individuals.  He believed in finding pleasure in simple everyday things.  Samuel Beckett seemed to have somewhat the same idea when he wrote his play Waiting for Godot.  The two main characters in this play, Vladimir and Estragon, find their only happiness in being together while they wait for the mysterious Godot.  Vladimir is all that Estragon has, and Estragon is all that Vladimir has, and therefore they value each other a lot and try to take pleasure in each other’s company.  The Godot that they wait for is supposed to bring them happiness, and until he arrives, Estragon and Vladimir have to extract as much pleasure out of the little stuff in their everyday routine.  The little happiness that is to be found in their state of pure existence comes from their companionship.  They remind each other why it is that they wait beneath the same tree day after day, they provide entertainment for each other, and they each give the other someone to talk to.  The little happiness these two characters are able to find comes from the friendship they share.  This happiness gives them the ability to bear the dullness of their lives and the general suffering of being.

Waiting for Godot illustrates perfectly the idea of existence before essence, which Sartre addresses in his essay Existentialism is a Humanism.  Sartre proposes that one must act in order to define oneself, and that if one does nothing, he/she simply exists.  That person is simply in the world, and that is all.  It is action that makes an individual who he/she is, and this action also has the ability to bring an individual happiness.  Since there is no equation for happiness and no set way to achieve true happiness, one must simply live life and make the most out of it.  Whether an individual gets pleasure from sticking his/her foot out into the cold air and then back under the warm blanket again, as Freud uses as an example, or forms meaningful relationships with others, as Beckett’s main characters do, happiness is striven for in any way possible.  It is all the small pleasurable things that add up to something much greater. 

       In my opinion, happiness is something that every individual needs and desires.  One of the ways people today are finding “happiness” is through technological advancements.  However, the things technology produces provide cheap fulfillment and do not have the means to make people truly happy.  The development of machines that perform simple human tasks is supposed to make our lives easier, which will in turn bring happiness.  We all want to know the secrets of the universe, and science and technology slowly but surely reveal them to us, which is supposed to make us happy.  However, technology interferes with nature.  The more we interact with machines, the less we interact with each other.  Why is this a problem?  It is our interactions among each other that bring happiness into our lives.  As technology continues to go forward, machines will become more advanced, they will be able to do more for us, and we will become lazy.  What are we going to do all day if we have machines to make meals for us, to do our laundry, and to clean our houses?  We would do nothing.  We would become like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot—we would be doing nothing more than existing, which we have seen does not bring much happiness.

The fact that happiness is valuable is proven when one takes a look at the various aspects of an individual’s life.  Each person surrounds him/herself with the people and things that bring him/her the most pleasure.  Our happiness is so important to us that we will do almost anything to be happy.  While many people believe that technological advancements can bring happiness, there are too many problems that come along with these advancements that in the long run do not bring happiness.  Better technology does not equal more happiness.