Promoting Psychological Wellbeing: Loftier Goals for New Technologies [Opinion]

For a long time, “good” in the technology industry has been bound up with more easily quantifiable things like productivity, computing power, security, novelty, portability, or reduced cost. These are all valid drivers for invention, and they've taken us a long way. But we suggest that these are really proxies to a greater overall goal: happiness. The unspoken assumption is that when we have greater productivity, security, or convenience, life is better and we are happier. So what if we were to address the issue of using technology to increase happiness more directly? Arguably, the pursuit of happiness - or what psychologists refer to with greater precision as “psychological wellbeing” - drives everything we do. But this pursuit is often indirect. Wealth has been the most commonly used proxy for psychological wellbeing. It often seems safe to assume that if people get richer, they get happier, so governments and businesses work to build systems that generate greater wealth and measure success accordingly. But economists themselves have shown that the link between wealth and wellbeing is weaker than we'd like to think, and that beyond the satisfaction of modest needs, more wealth doesn't make a society significantly happier.