You need to find some kind of proxy for life satisfaction otherwise you could just be measuring a change in society’s expectations regarding the answer to that question.

That is, if there’s less expectation to lie and say everything is fine, you could get declining life satisfaction numbers with no actual decline in satisfaction.

Anecdotally people I know from my grandparent’s generation are much less likely to admit to being unhappy.

p.7

> ...answers to subjective well-being questions have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, sociability, and electrical activity in the brain (Diener, 1984)

Unless you check that correlation at the beginning and end of the time period in question, it’s meaningless.

One of the most useful things you can do in debate is reveal yourself to be immune to evidence of anything you don't like. It is useful because it allows rational participants to stop wasting time with you.

The data says people are saying they are less happy over some time period. There are 2 competing hypotheses to explain the cause.

1) Society has changed in a way that has made people less happy. 2) Society has changed in a way that has made people less likely to lie about being happy.

If you stop to think it through for a second, you’ll quickly understand how the statement “we have some data from somewhere in the middle of the time period in question that self reported satisfaction and a actual satisfaction are correlated” isn’t evidence to support either side. That statement can easily fit either hypothesis.

This is quite easy to test in a longitudinal cross-cultural study of people over time. You'd probably find half a book shelf of research already which does exactly that, if only one bothered to look for it.

Happy to take a look through anything you might want to point me to.

My grandparents too, but what I've found out that they really are much happier, because they have seen so much worse. Try to imagine how you'd feel yourself at the moment if you'd have seen WWII, deportations, 50 years of communist occupation etc?

It's probably more a matter that women's lives have improved greatly, but not kept pace with rising hopes or expectations.

If I look at the plot in the linked study I see essentially the same trend for men.

Historically, the % of women that were able to reproduce is something like 90%+, while the % for men was in the low 20s or something. At least from now on it seems that women will "become equal" to men in regards to biological dread.

How historically is this, caveman era with harems?

I have not (yet) seen any relatively modern stable society where 80% of men don’t have children. Having that many men with not much to lose would, presumably, be a destabilizing force.

How about "modern" Muslim societies where polygamy is still a thing?

Also: Just because you are married, and your wife gives birth to a child does not necessarily mean that it's your child :) Nowadays, with contraception and paternity tests available, the number of guys unknowingly raising another man's child is around 2-3%, but it was much higher in the past.

It's still very rare even in Islamic countries. Look at this map.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/07/polygamy-...

It's basically just Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and sub-Saharan west African countries that have >1% rate of polygamy and only the African countries that have more than 5%. Not exactly the most stable countries.

There’s an argument that monogamy is a requirement for what we’d consider a stable society, specifically for that reason.

There are so many factors at play and even when we try, we can only control for a minority of them. The average measured quality of life has gone down for everyone. A little steeper for women than men, yes, here are just some alternative seemingly plausible partial causes for that:

- The patriarchy is still here, but we now expect women to have a career while simultaneously taking care of children.

- Decades of hypersexualized media put the emphasis on sex during dating over caring relationships.

The age math sucks for women too. If she wants a career she has a short window to get experience and find a spouse before she gets pregnant.

If she wants a doctorate she has to be married before she enters the workforce.

She has time for maybe 1-3 long term relationships before she ages out of childbearing age.

So yes women have more options but they also have less time to pick the right one.