Every spring the United Nations releases the World Happiness Report and each year, since 2012, the United States has fallen in the rankings with both adults and adolescents reporting significantly less happiness than they did in the early 2000’s. While the economy has improved dramatically since the recessions of 2008, and with unemployment the lowest in decades, Americans get less and less happy as a whole each year.

This is not a worldwide trend.

Global poverty rates are falling. Now 87% of people in the world have access to electricity. Global literacy rates have been increasing for decades with 90% of people over the age of 15 able to read. Infant mortality rates are falling, as are teen pregnancy rates. TB and malaria rates have also fallen dramatically. It is unarguable that the quality of life in the world has increased in a measurable fashion over the last two decades, yet in the west we get more and more depressed. According to a Harris poll only a third of Americans report being happy.

This decline in happiness is indicative of the Easterlin Paradox, named after Richard Easterlin, the first economist to study happiness data. Easterlin disovered that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow. Essentially as the broader measure of the standard of living improves, we are not getting happier as a nation.

I touched on the Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World last week in a post on willpower, and felt his important work warrants a deeper overview, so much in fact that I’m going to divide it into multiple articles. Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of a number of important books including Deep Work, So Good They Can’t Ignore You and How to Become a Straight-A Student .

Newport’s thesis on digital minimalism:

Our current relationship with the technologies of our hyper-connected world is unsustainable and is leading us closer to the quiet desperation that Thoreau observed so many years ago. But as Thoreau reminds us, ‘the sun rose clear’ and we still have the ability to change this state of affairs. To do so, however, we cannot passively allow the wild tangle of tools, entertainments, and distractions provided by the internet age to dictate how we spend our time or how we feel. We must indeed take steps to extract the good from these technologies while sidestepping what’s bad. We require a philosophy that puts our aspirations and values once again in charge of our daily experience, all the while dethroning primal whims and the business models of Silicon Valley from their current dominance of this role; a philosophy that accepts new technologies, but not if the price is the dehumanization Andrew Sullivan warned us about; a philosophy that prioritizes long-term meaning over short-term satisfaction. A philosophy, in other words, like digital minimalism.

The era of the smartphone is incredibly fascinating. For all the positives these devices have brought to society, so many of us struggle with the nagging feeling that for all the good they provide, there’s a downside. Newport’s use of the famous Henry David Thoreau term, “quiet desperation”, is very fitting. Smartphones and social media apps, with the promise of optimizing our life and making us more connected often have the opposite effect.