When someone who has had the privilege of living on the planet for seventy years and counting thinks we are going backwards as a society, I sit up and listen. Your viewpoint strikes a chord with me. I'm thirty-nine and over the past decade feel like sociological progress has ground to a halt. It's not a scientifically researched position, of course, just an instinct. And it's an increasingly widespread point of view, though people tend not to talk about it all that much. For me, the "best your best life" doctrine of happiness is a sure sign something is going wrong: a society which needs to remind itself to be happy invariably is an unhappy one.