Progress Is Making Us Unhappy - Here’s How - Future IQ

6,021 views Wait, is this logic right? • Sep 26, 2025

Slog Reference: Everyone is angry because the world is better, Toqueville effect

Description

Why are people angrier than ever, even though the world has never been better? From road rage in India to global protests, frustration is everywhere. But here’s the paradox: as societies improve, we actually become less tolerant of the flaws that remain. This is called the Perfection Paradox, the closer we get to progress, the more even tiny imperfections feel unbearable.
In this episode of Future IQ, we explore why improved roads make us complain about potholes, why better safety makes us obsess over minor crimes, and why history shows revolutions often happen during times of progress, not decline. Backed by psychology experiments and real-world examples, this episode uncovers why we keep finding new things to be unhappy about and how to focus on the real issues without losing optimism.

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More Videos:
The World is Getting Better Than You Think: https://youtu.be/2l0jnwf-2kA

A cow on a golf course taught me how to deal with unfairness in life: https://youtu.be/77_YwP9aok8

You're Not Supposed to Be Good at Everything: https://youtu.be/uvK-WlH7Z-8

Democracy's Biggest Lie: https://youtu.be/ns57h46YjZ8

STOP Watching NEWS Right Now! Why NEWS is Bad for You: https://youtu.be/YYr7qNnOPDg

The Internet Is Making You Stupid: https://youtu.be/ftSJN9R-IY4

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocqueville_effect
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap8731
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/the-tocqueville-effect-and-why-well-always-find-new-controversies/
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/simon-abundance-index-new-way-measure-availability-resources (Read: Simon Abundance Index)

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

0:00 - Introduction: Why Are We Angry When Life Is Better?
0:43 - The Perfection Paradox: Why We Notice Flaws More
2:50 - The Tocqueville Effect & The French Revolution
4:22 - How This Paradox Affects Daily Life
8:00 - Scientific Proof: The Blue Dot Experiment
13:10 - The Psychology of Finding Problems
17:28 - Should We Stop Complaining?
18:28 - Differentiating Between Serious and Unserious Issues
21:18 - The Danger of Pessimism
25:20 - Conclusion: Complain with Optimism

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Everyone is angry because the world is better, Toqueville effect

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Transcript

- Why are Indians angry all the time? Countless cases of road rage, of fights, petty clashes and just everybody is unhappy all the time and situation seems hopeless. Yeah. Yeah. I I agree with you. But uh didn't we say in an earlier episode that the world is improving that the world is getting much better? Yeah. In fact, the people are unhappy because India is so much better. Okay. As conditions improve, as we get closer to perfection, the more we actually want perfection, right? Because when things are very bad, we are like we just give up.

0m 36s Okay? But when things are quite good, then we start noticing, oh, I should fix this, I should fix that. It's called the perfection paradox. Okay. Okay. It seems a little implausible what you're saying. I mean in India I have every right to be angry with the roads, the potholes and the general infrastructure which is failing. See when I was growing up. Yeah. Okay. There were no roads. So nobody was complaining about the potholes. Okay. We didn't have gas for cooking. There would be like you know months of wait for that. We didn't have water coming into our houses. We would have to go to some tap and fill pots and come back. And yet I would say that the complaints were

1m 16s less. And then after 1991 when the situation significantly improved, our economy improved, so many people suddenly came into the middle class and got so many things right including gas and phones and water and all of electricity. Now we are complaining viferously about corruption, right? See the difference between what the problems were and how much we are complaining about what. Right? Fair. Different example like older is that in the British Raj 1909 to 1919. Okay. Before that Indians had just accepted the British. Okay. Yeah. uh I mean after the uh you know just nothing happened and then from 1909 to 1919 there were the modelto reforms the Montego Chumsford reforms and suddenly you know Indians were being

2m 12s given more of a say in the governance right my history is a little weak the Morinu and the Monteue Chance for reforms I remember by name but what were they about both of them were roughly about giving Indians more repres representation in the governing bodies. Legislative councils were created. Indians were given representation. There's a bunch of other things but core was this that now Indians had some say in the governance in the government and what did Indians do? They started the non-ooperation movement saying okay we want swar yeah because now we just want don't want governance we want everything we want the entirety of the country our country.

2m 50s This is basically called a toquewhe effect. Okay. This is from Alexis Tokavil who is a French uh political scientist and he first talked about it in the context of the French revolution. Okay. In the time of Louis 15 and 14 and earlier the situation of the French peasants was so bad they had just given up in life. Okay. There were some protests of course but Louis 16 and his finance ministers and all that right at that time people were drowning in taxes. Okay. 97% of all taxes were paid by the poor people.

3m 28s Okay. Louis 16 tried to improve things. Okay. He tried to reduce some of the taxes. He got rid of forced labor. There used to be like, okay, you know, people were made to work on say building roads because they couldn't pay taxes. That's called forced labor for taxes. It's called Corvy labor. Okay. Louis 16 banned that. They reduced taxes. Good guy. because of all these improvements, guess what happened? Uh he was the French Revol he was his head was cut off. Okay. The French Revolution happened because as the situation improved, people started wanting more, complaining more and that uh you know more than 3% 3 and a half% of the people wanted that and it converted into a full

4m 12s scale revolution. Okay. So that's the effect. Yeah. The three and a half% is an episode we did on how minority actually uh dictates everything in a democracy. We want to see that we'll leave a link etc etc. Yeah. But you know this is doesn't necessarily happen just at the level of countries. Okay. Even in smaller things right as crime rate drops as the number of murders goes down people start complaining about smaller and smaller crimes to a point where at some point you're mainly complaining about dogs. Okay. on the streets. So, stray dogs and kabutters and all of that because pretty much now the bigger things to complain about are going away.

4m 51s Yeah, there are no murders to complain about. So, I I just want to complain about something. I will complain about something. And you know, as the worst excesses of racism and the cast system go away, we start complaining about fair and lovely ads, right? Oh, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise fair skin. Correct. Okay. So Chris Rock at the Oscars had said this, right? That we are complaining about no black nominees in the Oscars, right? Because earlier blacks had much more serious things to protest against. They used to get lynched just regularly for no good reason, hanged and killed, right? And now they're complaining about, oh, there are not enough black nominees. So see the difference, right?

5m 33s This also affects much much smaller things in daily life for you, right? Like that earlier if you wanted something you had to go out and get it yourself. Now there are 10 minute delivery which comes in 20 minutes. So you're complaining oh my god this is so slow right. Yeah I have done that. I'm sorry to say but I have done that. And the fruits the fruits are now so much better especially in cities bigger cities we have excellent fruit. So then we complain about minor blemishes on the fruit. earlier we would be happy to just see get some fruit any fruit right yeah this apple has a black spot I'm not going to eat it

6m 10s correct rai I thought it was but turns out there's a much bigger reason for this privacy protections we complain about privacy protection in our phone and our Aadhaar and so on earlier we used to have phone books where the list of everybody's name and address and phone number used to be printed and given out to anybody who wants right yeah and I have used those phone books for nefarious purposes as a child. Those who grew up in the '9s or 80s, they will know what I'm talking about.

6m 42s Uh if you have worked in a large company, you know, I mean, you know, HR is given the job of fixing problems with the culture, right? And if the culture of the company becomes decent enough, then the HR will start looking for smaller and smaller and smaller problems to solve and keep sending out policies and so on, right? or just good morning messages depending on which HR you are. So the fundamental thing is that when the serious problems go away then we start complaining about smaller and smaller things right like we are now complaining that in the garbage people are not doing the wet and dry garbage segregation and that people are just throwing plastic on the streets when I

7m 22s was growing up people didn't complain about plastic on the streets because there used to be [ __ ] on the streets there was open defecation right yeah and now that we are getting closer to open defecation free India we are now complaining about whatever is on the streets, which is typically plastic. Soon plastic will be out and we'll find something else to complain about. But you know what? All of these are valid explanations, but at the same time, all of these sound like anecdotes that you and I personally experience or people personally experience.

7m 50s Is there a scientific basis for this behavior? I'm glad you asked. Right. In this channel, we believe in scientific basis for everything. So yes, there is a lovely lovely experiment in which the researchers showed subjects a dot either it is blue color or purple color or some shade in between. Correct. Okay. Okay. And this was done thousand times in a row and each time the subject was to say is this blue or purple. Right? And then they plotted a graph. Right? On the x-axis is how blue the dot was. Here is fully purple. here is fully blue and here are in the middle.

8m 30s Okay. And on the y-axis is how many times did that person call this dot blue. So obviously the purple ones zero times were called blue. The fully blue ones were called 100 times 100% of the time fully blue. And you get a curve like this that you see on the screen. Right. Correct. Because different people will perceive different middle shades in either purple. Now here comes the crux of the experiment. Okay. In half of the cases the experimental group what happened was that over time they slowly started reducing the number of blue dots that were shown to the people.

9m 07s Okay. Okay. Earlier the dots that were shown were picked uniformly from this entire range. But by the later half of the experiment now they were mostly picking purples and very few blues. Okay. Okay. So earlier in the experiment they were likely to see a mixture of purples and blues but towards the later half they were more likely to see purple rather than blue. Correct. So the number of blues should have actually gone down. Right. Instead what happened was that the people started looking for blues. Okay. And they started calling purples or things that were earlier classified as purple they started calling it blue.

9m 47s Okay. Okay. Okay. And the way they checked this to double check is that you know for the subjects they looked at they plotted the graph for the first 200 guesses and you get a graph like this. Then for the control group where the frequency was not changed in the last 200 experiments. Again they plotted the same graph and you get the same curve. The two curves coincide like you can see here. Right? But for the second group, the one where the blues were lesser and right. What happened was that you can see the curve has shifted.

10m 27s Oh, they were seeing more blue where there were none. Exactly. In fact, if you take any one point on this x-axis on this graph and go upwards, you will see that in the second in the end of the experiment, the last 200, the number is much higher. Oh, right. So, it was called blue much more often. the same color. Were they told that the frequencies of blues is reducing? Yes, they were told that the frequency could change. Okay. So maybe they thought that frequency change means it could increase.

11m 00s Right. So a second experiment was conducted where they were clearly told that the frequency of blue is going to decrease and they still saw more blues. No difference in the outcome. They still saw more blues, right? Right? I mean it was just dots. They might have taken the experiment a bit casually. Right? So in the third experiment what they did was one/ird of the subjects were told very clearly you better be consistent. Okay. Try not to change your idea of blue. Okay. And onethird of the participants were told we will give you money if you get it right.

11m 37s Oh, made no difference. Same results. I remember this video where I saw uh things changing very subtly in the background. Maybe what happened was things were changing slowly so they couldn't differentiate between the purples and the blues in in that middle sector. Correct? So for experiment four what they did was that for some of the subjects the change happened very gradually over the two thou over the thousand dots but for some of them the change happened abruptly at a single point. Right. made no difference. I keep coming up with confounding variables and this guy keeps coming up with experiments that they have actually done on those confounding variables.

12m 18s What other confounding variables can I think of now? Uh maybe they wanted it to be blue. Yeah, we love blue. Blue is like one of our favorite colors after green, right? It's a cool color. So in experiment five, they actually increased the amount of blue that was being shown. Okay. And the curve shifted down. people started seeing more purple when the purple decreased. You know what blue and purple is actually very close. So, uh my wife anyways tells me that I don't understand colors and shades. I call blue purple and purple blue. Maybe that is what happened.

12m 54s Correct. Maybe that is what happened. Right? So that's why in experiment six instead of using colors they used faces of people. Okay. Okay, they were shown faces and for each face they were to say whether this is a threatening face or a non-threatening face and very similar. Earlier the distribution from very peaceful non-threatening face to very threatening face was consistent consistent and then slowly over the experiment they reduced the frequency of threatening faces and people started seeing more and more normal faces as threatening. Okay. Uh I keep thinking whether this is something to do with system one and system two behavior.

13m 38s That is a very good question. Right? Because faces is this threatening or not or color. Right? These are very much system one things that instinctive brain takes a decision within 0.1 second and maybe for more rational higher order logical thinking maybe we will not run into this problem. Right? ecosystem one is easier to trick. Yeah. So in experiment 7, participants were given descriptions of an experiment to be conducted on human subjects and were asked whether this experiment would be ethical to conduct or not. Which would require system two thinking.

14m 16s Yes. And of course as before there was a distribution of experiment descriptions from clearly very ethical no problems to clearly unethical and like very problematic. Okay. Same thing as the number of unethical experiments decreased people started finding more and more innocuous experiments as oh this is unethical right? Okay. Uh so there were people who identified nice faces as threatening ethical experiments as unethical or unethical. Not only that the same face which they found as non-threatening earlier in the experiment they found as threatening later and very similar experiment description which they said was ethical in the beginning of the experiment they said was unethical later on in the experiment. Okay, the same thing more or less. So people look for problems even

15m 14s when they aren't there. No, in fact you know earlier there are lots of problems and people are like used to it. As the number of problems decrease but they have the job of looking for problems then they will find problems even when the problems are not there. Right? Is that why Indians tend to look for problems when there aren't any problems and then get worked up about those problems? So let's not generalize to like all Indians or all people right? So one of the things that that experiment showed was that it didn't affect everybody equally. Okay.

15m 49s Okay. Some people were less affected by the change and they were you know generally more consistent and some people were much more affected and were much more inconsistent in the sense that some people the change was much more marked in terms of looking for problems that are not there. So it kind of depends on the person also. Do we know which kind of people were more affected and which kind were less affected? Not really. That experiment did not explore this and I am not aware of any other experiments which have tried to find which kind of people. But if I were to guess, I would guess that those people scoring higher on the neuroticism in the psychological big five uh scale,

16m 35s right? They are more likely to be affected, right? like they're they are the ones who get emotionally affected by problems and so they go looking for problems but that's just speculation on my part. Okay. You know my brain just uh came up with a very dangerous thought that this entire behavior is very weaponizable. I mean if I can actually make people think that non-threatening faces are actually threatening there is so many ways in which this can be weaponized for dangerous things. All politicians are in the business of finding problems and creating problems out of China, right? They know that I mean see the world is improving. India has gotten so much better every year for

17m 18s the last 30 40 years, right? And yet politicians keeps finding bigger and bigger problems to get their electorate worked up about. Right. So absolutely weaponizable. Yeah. But are you saying that we should just accept that India has improved over the years and that we shouldn't aspire to be like maybe a Shanghai or a Tokyo or a New York or you know whatever other cities big cities there are global cosmopolitan cities there are no so absolutely not right we should not stop complaining in fact this is one of the best times to complain right in an earlier episode ruled by the minority we saw how when things are improving is the best time to create a revolution, right?

18m 02s And that's what Tokavville also talked about in the Tokavville effect, right? But the important thing to remember is that this, you know, grabbing the opportunity and pushing on it, we should do it for the serious issues. Okay? And we should learn to ignore the unserious, the minor problems that we are getting extra worked up about, right? Yeah. How do you decide which issues are serious and which are not serious? Yeah. So, frankly, I don't want to tell you what you find serious or not right. So, that's why I'm not going to give that answer directly. I'm going to give an indirect answer. What I will say is that most of the issues are unserious.

18m 46s Okay? So, the 973 rule, 97% of the problems you worry about are not really that serious. So you decide right you look at the things that you're getting worked up about and then you decide which 3% of them are serious enough important enough that you really really want to do something about those right the remaining things you can let go okay complain about the things where you are willing to do something other than you know post on social media like slactivism to the things where you are willing to do something actually do something be part of the three and a half% who can you know move the needle and that is really worthwhile but then

19m 32s pick those 3% properly I mean see one thing that comes to mind is every generation solves the problems that are put in front of them uh the generation before me solved the problem of castism racism which is why I now talk about microaggressions and importance of safe spaces and all of that I mean even if you look at it in the scientific research perspective, Newton solved the law of gravity. So now I'm looking at what more there is to explore in terms of maybe a quantum gravity or the theory of everything or string theory or something like that. So what I'm essentially trying to say is I solve the problems that I have available to me. So sometimes the problems that

20m 14s are available to me might come across as unserious issues and at the same time there is also the worry that not solving this unserious issue might cause a reversal and we go back to when it was a serious issue like if I don't talk about microaggressions now maybe racism will come back. Yeah. So see first of all I am not saying that you should just accept everything because the world is better right? I am not saying that the famous Indian fatalism that you know whatever is going to happen is hap going to happen and I should just accept it.

20m 48s That's not what I'm saying at all. Okay. What I am saying is that there is a danger. Okay. Yes, sure you're allowed to complain. You can complain about a lot of things and complaining is what results in some fixes. Right. In fact, all the improvements are because someone complained. Correct. The danger which I'm seeing a lot of young people run into is that because you don't realize that your mind is picking up on smaller and smaller things. You think that everything is screwed up and you become pessimistic and you become depressed and you think life is meaningless and you stop wanting to have kids because why bring kids into this big bad world, right? But really

21m 31s the world is great. Okay, the world has significantly improved and it is going to improve. So complain but don't let it get to you. Do it like in a more karma way. Okay, I am this conversation is actually blowing my mind and also twisting it in different ways because I am talking about the world getting better. He's giving me examples of the world getting better and at the same time he's giving me valid reasons to be angry about it. But what I'm getting from you is that most problems are somebody else's problem. My question is sometimes the problem is not understood whether it is SCP somebody else's problem or EP everybody's problem until you see at it in hindsight. For example,

22m 18s if slavery wasn't everybody's problem, we would be in a very terrible situation right now. Yeah. I think what you're trying to say is that two 300 years ago a lot of people had just accepted slavery as a fact of life and nothing to complain about. Right. Yes. Only in hindsight now we realize that it was a very very serious problem and it should have been everybody's problem and everybody should have been complaining about it all times and maybe right now there are such problems. Right. Thank you for you giving me those words.

22m 50s very likely for example climate change is in that category was in that category 20 years ago now more and more people are accepting it and there might be another problem which nobody's accepting sure that is possible but just looking at the history of the world and how things are getting better it is highly unlikely that all the problems that you're thinking about including plastic straws are really problems of that magnitude right Okay, climate change is a problem, but plastic straws and paper straws is not the answer to that. Okay, so focus on the 3% that is really serious right now and where you can do something about it.

23m 33s Right? If you're going to get worked up about a problem but not do anything about it, then the only thing you are achieving is getting depressed. Right? So don't do that. Right? Either do something like this is your circle of competence. We have an episode on that, right? Yeah, focus on the things where you can do something and then everything else make it SCP, someone else's problem. Yeah, world is good. There are lots of people in the world and lots of them willing to work on problems that you don't have the bandwidth for. And let us be honest, everybody has a limited bandwidth. You know what I actually uh see this as a matter of two different perspectives

24m 13s where you are saying that some problems can be dismissed because there is a larger context of yesterday that can be applied to those problems and the people who are looking at those problems as not to be dismissed are not looking at it from the context of that yesterday but looking at those from the context of tomorrow because they want to improve that for tomorrow. And then these two perspectives clash where the people with the context of yesterday use that as sort of a cudgel to beat the people looking for a better tomorrow.

24m 47s Yeah. So see important I mean this episode should not be interpreted as dismissing the complaints of the people today. Okay. Uh definitely there are enough serious problems. Right. What I want people to understand is that the context of yesterday helps in understanding that things did get better which helps in understanding that things can get better tomorrow also they will get better guaranteed right so do your complaining but in an optimistic hopeful way not in a pessimistic doomering way right so overall be happier with the state of the world okay and Stop complaining about the minor issues. No, no, let me correct myself.

25m 34s Okay, you can complain about the minor issues. Stop getting worried about those. Okay, you can complain about them but not be worried. Worry only about the small number of major issues where you can do something about it. Combine your worry with action. Hm. And uh if you want to figure out a way to stop complaining about it uh then there's an episode we did on how to curate your social media so that you get what makes you happy and makes you aware of the world without falling into the toxic traps. And if you are wondering how you can do things that are actionable then there is an episode that I would highly recommend you watch. In fact, we line it

26m 20s up next called a cow on a golf course changed my life. It talks about the 97% 3% split that Naven has been speaking about. Go check that episode out. Meanwhile, I will uh do a little more of this jabbering with him off camera. Shriant Naven, Future IQ.