As sites like Our World in Data and books like The Better Angels of Our Nature like to remind us, most of humanity has, materially, never had it so good. Gone are famine and infant mortality as experiential norms, gone even is the constant misery of tooth decay without effective dentistry. Through countless objective measures, for most of the world, for most of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the material conditions of life have continued to improve, the numbers of people alive to experience such improvements have continued to increase, and the gap between the poor and rich world (albeit as viewed on the logarithmic scale of dollars, tens of dollars and hundreds of dollars) has continued to decline.
But such evidence of continuing material progress - this decades-long Good News - seldom seems to be felt or to translate to clearly improved happiness and wellbeing amongst most of the population. Part of this relates to our perception of time and tendency to attend to the negative more than the positive: like climate change or the growth of a tree, material progress may just happen too slowly for us to see it; and evolutionarily it has been more adaptive to attend to the carnivorous predator than the juicy berries when both are in our environment. But much of this is likely related to hedonic adaptation and social comparison.
On hedonic adaptation: we get used to things maybe too quickly to appreciate how much better things are now than in the past. We get used to the world’s films and music being no more than a few clicks away on a magic brick, whereas our past selves would marvel at our current technology. The magic of the old becomes disenchanted and hum-drum, invisible to us except during its brief moments of failure: the wifi not connecting, the title being removed this week from the streaming service’s rota, and so on. We forget the technological magic of the present epoch, and so it quickly fails to make us happy.
Then there’s social comparison: mass media brought impressions of the rich, powerful, glamourous and beautiful onto the silver screen, then the living room, then the laptop, then to the palm of our hand. The lives and living standards of the most privileged fraction of a fraction of the top one percent of the world appear within touching distance. However, though we can see them, we can never be them. The screens through which we see their lives messes, in a profoundly harmful way, with our internal psychological architecture, encouraging ourselves to compare ourselves with them, and through this act of comparison almost always find ourselves lacking and wanting. Misery, the constant drip-feed misery of knowing how much less we are than them, emerges inevitably as a consequence.
Now, faced with this dilemma, those given to thought experiments - philosophers, effective altruists, other (often) autistic social systematisers - may be given to wonder the following: what would happen if, instead of being constantly reminded of people with much more than us, we were instead constantly reminded of those with much less? What if, instead of our ‘celebrities’ being persons whose lives we aspire to attain, instead our ‘celebrities’ were comprised exclusively of those whose lives we aspire to avoid?
Given our understanding of social comparison, we might might imagine a hypothetical world where our television and social media comprises accounts of the meek and miserable rather than the rich and glamourous as one where almost everyone would be happier. Why? Because almost everyone, no matter how hard life is for them, still has a better life than that poor sod on the telly. Mass media focusing on those with least, rather than those with most, would - from first principles - appear a theoretically, hypothetically, valid strategy for improving most people’s happiness without improving their material standing.
But here the thought experiment would end, because how else could this diet of misery and misfortune be sustained for the masses except by seeking out and keeping a few select people extremely miserable. What individuals, and what society, could tolerate inflicting and watching these anti-celebrities experience constant harm and hardship? Surely no civilised society would ever do this, or ever want to?
Well, that’s what I thought too: the anti-celebrity would forever (thankfully?) always remain a thought experiment. But then I saw a BBC documentary called The Contestant, which suggests that in Japan, in the 1990s, the anti-celebrity thought experiment outlined above actually happened! 1
The details of The Contestant are as described in the blurb linked to above. A young man, Tomoaki Hamatsu, ethnically Japanese but still ostracised in Japan due to his unusually long face, decides to try to lean into his distinct appearance and try to develop a public profile in Tokyo as a celebrity. He applies for a segment on a reality TV show that usually involves travelling in unfamiliar parts of the world, and is instead essentially kidnapped, taken to a very small apartment, and told to strip. The apartment includes thousands of blank postcards and aisle of magazines, and he is told he may not leave the apartment, and that the only food, clothes, or other items he can have access to are those he wins in magazine prizes.
The segment the contestant (unwittingly) stared in was called Life in Prizes, lasted over a year, and was routinely watched by over ten million Japanese people each week. Over this period, Hamatsu nearly dies of starvation and starts to go insane with loneliness. He is encouraged to document his thoughts and feelings on camera, and in a journal. The journals, describing his constant hunger and misery, his loneliness, his suicidal ideation, stretch to four volumes, and become best-sellers.
How could this have happened? Could it have happened anywhere else? I don’t know, but Hamatsu’s ordeal - and the absolute and unmitigated joy that tens of millions of Japanese felt at seeing his constant hardships week after week, does reinforce the idea for me that Japan, amongst high income nations, is culturally distinct. In Japan, at the time, was Haratsu’s ordeal considered for the greater good? One person’s suffering to make millions of people happier? Did Haratsu’s physical and psychological torture actually improve Japanese wellbeing, thus empirically verifying the results of what I thought could only ever be a thought experiment. 2
I just don’t know. Just that, unlike with most research, I hope this finding doesn’t get replicated.
Footnotes
Note from Claude: The documentary “The Contestant” (directed by Clair Titley, released on Hulu May 2024) documents the verified ordeal of Tomoaki Hamatsu (“Nasubi”) on the Japanese reality show segment “A Life in Prizes” (part of “Susunu! Denpa Shonen”) which aired from January 1998 to April 1999. Nasubi lived alone and unclothed in a tiny apartment, surviving only on magazine sweepstakes winnings until he earned 1 million yen (~$8,000) in prizes. Crucially, while he knew he was being filmed, he had no idea the footage was being broadcast to over 15 million people weekly on Nippon TV. This predated “The Truman Show” (1998) and preceded the term “reality TV” entering cultural lexicon. The BBC’s Tokyo correspondent at the time, Juliet Hindell, was shocked that spectators found it amusing rather than brutal. Regarding hedonic adaptation and social comparison: research confirms these are well-established psychological phenomena. The “hedonic treadmill” describes how humans quickly return to stable happiness levels despite major life changes, and social comparison theory shows we recalibrate wellbeing by comparing to others around us. See The Contestant on Hulu - Time Magazine and Hedonic treadmill - Wikipedia.↩︎
Note from Claude: This phenomenon of finding collective relief through one person’s suffering connects to René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism, which profoundly influenced tech investor Peter Thiel. Girard’s mimetic theory posits that when humans mimic one another’s desires, inevitable conflict arises and is often resolved through “the scapegoat mechanism” - societies channel collective violence onto a single individual (often innocent) to restore order and release tensions. Thiel encountered Girard’s work at Stanford and credited it with shaping both his worldview and his decision to invest in Facebook. However, there’s a crucial distinction: Girard saw the task of modern thought as revealing and overcoming the scapegoat mechanism to defuse its power, whereas critics argue Thiel applies the theory instrumentally - believing in “the salvationary power of scapegoating as a positive project” and using technologies (Palantir, Facebook) to control mimetic violence for the protection of the powerful. The abuse and harassment endemic to social media may thus be “features, not bugs” - platforms channeling mimetic desire also serve as conduits for the scapegoating violence that accompanies it. See Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection - Cyborgology and René Girard - Britannica.↩︎