Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.

If you think you're happy, you are happy.

Filtering your sense of happiness through some quality of life lens is absurd if you think about it.

It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.

What do you mean by “objectively good?”

I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.

Both (emotional) trauma and suffering sound pretty subjective to me, as does psychology in general. How are we getting to "objectively good?"

The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.

> Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.

But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”

Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.

Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.

If you can’t agree that physically harming people is bad, I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye on this. But, your example of masochism is exactly my point. You can’t trust their reported state because people can bend their psychology to believe it to be fine. Nevertheless, torture/murder/rape, etc are all still objectively bad.

As an example: there are genuine cases of masochists that are subjectively happier because pain is being inflicted on them. In many of these cases no serious harm is done to their body. Your claim "you can't trust their reported state" is either 1) a claim that the outside observer knows better than the individual what their subjective state is or 2) that the health of the subject is more important than their subjective happiness.

If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".

People can feel less happy when there is a lack of challenge in their life. Consider the example of the guy that spends his life wasting away in front of video games, going for impulsive pleasures instead of long term rewarding goals.

I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.

> they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted

In a good year they might eat well. In a drought year, maybe not at all.

I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled.

Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.

> I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled. Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely.

I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1].

> But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.

Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized.

[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...

My personal impression, from what I've seen of the "third world", has been that people there are at least as happy as those in the rich world.

They were not well fed a century ago. The US had to start putting iron and iodine in all the food because all the young men were too weak and sick with pellagra to be able to fight in wars.

Umm have you seen pictures of what a share cropper looked like during the depression? Not much dissimilar to a concentration camp survivor

Yes. It’s easily googled. And they look like a normal healthy weight for the early 20th century[1]. Mama there has a healthy belly. Where are you seeing concentration camp victims?

[1] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family...

That woman is thin and six months pregnant.

The obesity epidemic has evidently warped your perception of what a normal healthy weight looks like.

I would be surprised if that was the case, especially in the hypothetical where she knows what she's missing.