labor and modern medicine and hygiene and representative government, a lot
of poverty and hardship was alleviated. Vaccines and medicines have saved
billions of lives. Machines have reduced backbreaking workloads and
starvation around the world. The technological innovations that upgraded
human suffering are undoubtedly a good thing.
But what happens when a large number of people are relatively healthy
and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation
to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. One of the reasons for this
is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the
most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute.^5
If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion
route is a safer bet. As a result, we’ve built a culture in which most
technological “innovation” is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in
new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways. As the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel once said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter.”
Once an economy switches over primarily to diversions, the culture
begins to shift. As a poor country develops and gains access to medicine,
phones, and other innovative technologies, measurements of well-being track
upward at a steady clip, as everyone’s pain is being upgraded to better pain.
But once the country hits First World level, that well-being flattens or, in
some cases, drops off.^6 Meanwhile, mental illness, depression, and anxiety
can proliferate.^7
This happens because opening up a society and giving it modern
innovations makes the people more robust and antifragile. They can survive
more hardship, work more efficiently, communicate and function better
within their communities.
But once those innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone
and a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the
marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility
is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.^8
The commercial age commenced in the early twentieth century with
Bernays’s discovery that you could market to people’s unconscious feelings
and desires.^9 Bernays wasn’t concerned with penicillin or heart surgery. He
was hawking cigarettes and tabloid magazines and beauty products—shit
people didn’t need. And until then, nobody had figured out how to get people
to spend copious amounts of money on stuff that wasn’t necessary for their
survival.
The invention of marketing brought a modern-day gold rush to satiate
people’s pursuit of happiness. Pop culture emerged, and celebrities and