▶ Your Answer :
There has been a controversy
whether or not people nowadays enjoy happier lives than in the past.
Considering all the technologies and conveniences that we are enjoying now,
people conclude that today is the golden age of the civilization, and thus,
people are obviously much happier than they were in the past. However, we are
likely to live unsatisfied lives due to the following factors: the development
of social media and the difficulty of balancing work and life.
First and foremost, people nowadays
are less likely to be happy because they constantly compare and despair themselves
whenever they log on their social media. It is true that social media, such as
Facebook and Instagram, connect ourselves with the rest of world and enable us
to reach people that we do not know in real life. However, we cannot deny the
fact that we feel bad about ourselves whenever we see the fancy pictures of
celebrities who are enjoying the vacation in their private islands. Being
affected by these fabulous lives via screens, people started to fake and
exaggerate their lives to upload nice pictures in their social media. Previously,
people were more grounded and focused on the present. After social media
dominated our lives, people often fabricate their lives but end up feeling low
self-esteem because they cannot keep themselves from comparing with others. Thus,
we now have less satisfactory lives than in the past because of the negative
effects that social media have.
Furthermore, people nowadays live more
chaotic lives than they did in the past. This is because the development of
technology made it hard to separate our work and life. This is illustrated by
the recent research conducted by Korean Work Association. According to the
findings, people in the modern era, on average, engage in their work 52 hours
in a week. On the other hand, people, 30 years ago, reported that they spend 42
hours on work in a week. The researchers say that the reason of over-work today
is that people fail to divide their work and non-work due to the development of
technologies. For example, people can work wherever the wi-fi is on, and thus,
they often bring their work home even after they leave their workplaces. They spend
their spare time on working, such as responding to e-mails and having a discussion
with their bosses using their smartphones. The continuous work invades our private
lives and people easily feel job burnout, which is the symptom of being worn
down by too much workload.
To sum up, people in the modern era are affected by the following
factors such as the development of social media and the inseparability of work
and non-work. Therefore, in this sense, I strongly agree with the above
statement that people nowadays are less happy and satisfied than in the past. |