Life gets better, yet people feel worse

Life just gets better?

Progress is measurable and quantifiable. The statistics prove beyond doubt that people in the industrialised world - which includes much of Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and newly industrialising economies like Singapore and Taiwan - are far better off than they were not only five to 10 years ago, but better off than human beings have ever been in history.

And yet, why are so few of us happy? Why do so many of us go through life fervently believing that if only things were a little better - the car a tad more posh, the house a trifle bigger, the sofa just a little deeper, and so on and so forth - we would finally, really and truly, promise, be happy? And of course, when the car is a little more posh, the house a little bigger, the sofa a little deeper, we persist with our dissatisfactions.

Each shiny and alluring ceiling of material existence, once it is attained, turns almost instantaneously into a tawdry carpet underfoot. Get rid of the carpet! Replace it with marble! But the marble, too, will, in due course, turn - or seem to - into cheap linoleum. Get rid of... The cycle repeats itself endlessly, and will always end where it began - in disappointment.

It is amazing to reflect, but I remember Singapore's political leaders always telling the young not to forget how much better off they were than their parents as far back as 1970, only five years after independence. Thirty years later, the politicians who were young then are telling today's young the same thing, and meeting the same incomprehension. Of course, I'm not better off. Of course, I will be satisfied if you politicians made my life just a little better. And of course, I won't be when you do.

Part of the reason few of us are convinced we are better off is that progress may be measurable but it cannot be directly experienced. It is possible, of course, with the application of just a modicum of imagination, to recall how it felt living in a three-room Housing Board flat when one is now living in a five-room HDB flat or a private condominium. But it takes effort; the past is always a passing experience; and what occupies the foreground of one's mind is almost invariably the altogether imperious present - and that bungalow I just saw in district 10.

Imagining progress over a longer timeframe - 100 years, say, or 500 - is virtually impossible. You can tell a Londoner, for instance, look chum, 500 years ago, your sewage system consisted of pigs, dedicated to St Anthony for some reason, roaming the streets, chomping on the muck. He might thank you for the information, but it wouldn't make an ounce of difference to his appreciation of the present.

Just 150 years ago, Londoners were still dumping everything - faeces, rotting vegetables and dead cats, not to mention 'the foul and gory liquids from slaughter-houses' and 'the purulent abominations from hospitals and dissecting rooms', as one contemporary document put it - into stagnant pools that stood, as eternal as the Styx, between homes. It was not till the end of Victoria's reign, just 100 years ago, that all of London, rich and poor, got a sewage system. One contemporary writer called it 'the greatest achievement of our age'. And so it was.

But would it strike a contemporary Londoner as still great? Unless he is sewage engineer, he wouldn't have given more than a moment's notice in his entire life to where his shit would go today after he flushes. Where it didn't go to a hundred years ago would be a matter of profound indifference to him. He can flush now; it disappears; end of story. To all intents and purposes, that describes too our experience of progress: Time flushes it from our memories, both personal and historical.

Is it any wonder that progress, especially over long stretches of time, has made nobody happy? It is altogether real; economists and historians can prove its existence; but we can't experience, taste, feel or see it - so obviously, it has no power to move us. 'All told, except for the clamour and speed of society, and for trends in popular music, your great-great-grandfather might say the contemporary United States' - or Britain, France, Japan and Singapore, for that matter - 'is the realisation of utopia'. Yet, virtually nobody in these countries feels that to be the case.

It's astonishing that after all the progress humankind has achieved over the centuries, all of wisdom should boil down to something so simple even a child can understand it: Just try to be a little kinder, folks. It might actually make you happier than owning a Lexus.