Laws we live by: The Law of Increased Expectation and Decreased Happiness

We have all heard of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong it will.  The corollary:  Murphy was an optimist. 

I invented Tucker's Law:  If anyone can find a way to misunderstand you, he/she will.  The corollary:  This is doubled in online classes.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is also one of my favorites, since we can't foresee everything that will result from an action or decision.

Then there is the Law of Attraction (Oprah's pet), which is nonsense, the Law of Knowledge doubling every however many periods of time, and the Law of 29 (I just learned this one); 

"A belief held by some marketers that on average a prospective customer will not purchase a good or service until they have been exposed to a marketing message 29 times. While the number of messages can differ a great deal when courting prospective clients, advocates of the law of 29 believe that a constant, "in your face" approach to marketing is the best way to sell a product or service."

Read more: Law Of 29 https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-29.asp#ixzz582ECqXj3
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However, I have a new Law:  The Law of Increased Expectations, and its corollary, the Law of Increased Unhappiness. 

 

By all factual accounts, life on this planet is better than ever.  Yes, there are still lots and lots of problems in certain places, but globally people live longer, have more rights, get more education,  pollute less, and have more access to technology than at any time in the history of the world.  Even from a Christian evangelical standpoint, more people are able to hear the gospel, although there are different kinds of barriers to that goal.  (It used to be communism, now it's strict Shariah law that will prosecute converts to Christianity.)  

Yet, we complain more and more.  Could we address the problems that exist?  Of course; in the words of Dr. Seuss, "We can do better."  This is one area where I differ from some of my colleagues. I believe that if the Lord tarries, we will develop technologies to decrease the pollution (they already exists, we just haven't started using them) and to feed more people and to fight diseases.  It's distribution and access rather than availability, in many cases. It's also barriers in the marketplace, electric cars being one of the best examples.

Due to the news cycle, we are more and more aware (or could be) of problems, or actually, we are more and more inundated with messages that the news media wants us to think are problems.  They don't want to talk about the evils of pornography; they want to talk about a crisis of guns.  They don't want to talk about abortion; they want to talk about oppression of transgendered persons.  We could argue that both of these issues they focus on are "ginned up." I won't do that here.

What I will do here is say that despite better living conditions than ever, we have higher and higher expectations and are more and more aware of what we don't have but think we should--the wonderful phrase "first world problems" comes to mind.  And with not having what we think we should, we are more unhappy. More and more people are on antidepressants, more and more young people have acute anxiety despite having all their needs met and having incredible opportunities.

The word snowflake comes to mind, which is insulting yet hard not to use. We Boomers have created the snowflakes, to the extent they exist.  I'm thinking a lot of Boomers I know are snowflakes, too, compared to their parents.  

Lest I seem to be preaching, I point the finger at myself.  I think I need a bigger house.  Why?  To store all my junk.  I could just divest myself of the junk and be happier.