Is technology causing our misfortune? Yes and no

The general state of misfortune in society seems to be growing and there seems to be no end in sight. One question that continues to raise the alarm is whether technology - and especially the use of smartphones - is the cause of such a growing disaster.

Dr. Kostadin Kushlev is an assistant professor and researcher at Georgetown University who researches how constant connection affects the health and well-being of society. He is a leading researcher at the Digital Health and Happiness Lab (aka Happy Tech Lab), which is part of the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. Kushlev provides us with some astonishing discoveries and points of thought to consider.

“Happiness is definitely a full expression,” he thought. “Even we researchers who study happiness admit that happiness is something that some people can define themselves. But in order to study it scientifically, we have to define it, so most often the way we define happiness is with the term ‘subjective well-being’.

Kushlev points out that happiness has three components at its core. There is life satisfaction - the cognitive part of happiness, in essence, the way we evaluate our lives - as well as the two types of emotional components (positive and negative feelings) that, when combined, make up our happiness.

Whether we decide to live our lives in a hedonistic way - experiencing as much pleasure and positive emotions as possible - or we want to live it in a more meaningful and self-fulfilling way (sometimes called eudaemonia) is truly at the heart of our happiness.

“But when you look at the data,” Kushlev said, “those two things - Eudamon’s well-being and Hedon’s well-being - are highly correlated. For most of us, when we know that what we are doing is meaningful and important, it means that we have more positive and less negative emotions in everyday life, so we evaluate our lives more positively. So they are very connected. “

So how does technology improve or stand in the way of our happiness?

“It is about as harmful or useful as eating potatoes or wearing glasses,” Kushlev joked.

One might expect that society should be happier and see positive effects using technology and smartphones. But Kushlev and his research team noticed that the net result was close to zero.

“After all, we are not happier,” he suggested with a touch of irony.

Take, for example, Kushlev’s research on various hypotheses about happiness and technology, including displacement, disturbances, and complementary theories.

What can we do with our time, given that we know that we spend a certain amount of daily effort on phones? Many of us are amazed at how many hours a day our time in front of the screen has when it could otherwise be spent on things like exercising, sleeping, or direct activities in the community. As a result, a guilt-like complex may manifest. We choose the phone and replace more useful activities that do not contribute to greater happiness.

“We know that one of the greatest predictors of happiness is actually spending time with others, and especially with friends and family,” Kushlev noted. “But when our attention is focused on our phones, and not on friends and family, we get less sense.

As we begin to open more offices and hybrid work becomes the norm for many - but not all - organizations, the relationship between technology and happiness should be at the top of the list of leaders’ issues to consider.

“I think what we have learned personally is better than the virtual,” Kushlev said. “But we’ve also learned that a hybrid model can be quite useful. Research on the hybrid workplace even before the pandemic suggests that the hybrid may be the best of both worlds. ”

Any leader who wonders whether technology helps or harms someone’s happiness at work should consider the necessary balance of direct and remote work with technology itself. As I have stated in this column on numerous occasions, true happiness — indeed, engagement in the workplace — is, in part, a factor in how an organization balances the use of technology with its culture, purpose, strategy, and methods face to face.

Watch the interview with Dr. Kostadin Kushlev in full below or via the Leadership NOV podcast.

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