Ask HN: If technology is so good for the world, why are we becoming less happy?

People are becoming less, not more, happy. Since the internet era began, every meaningful metric reflects this same picture - self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates. Anything you can think of as a proxy for whether people are enjoying life is either stagnant or down.

Of course it's not as simple as saying technology is the cause of all of this unhappiness, but what is clear is that, at minimum, technology is not doing enough to counteract it. And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it? A generation and a half of some of the smartest people in the world working on expanding the boundaries of what is possible and people are less happy than they were when it started. This is a huge indictment of the tech industry. What happened?