“Small risks come to seem intolerable autonomy comes to defy every limit.” Wanting it all, we trip over incompatible desires. “Boundless economic growth comes to be expected,” the Storeys note.

Instead of learning what matters from those who came before us, we place our trust in technology, and that leads us to exploit nature. We are all about happiness, yet we are handicapped from the start, because we cherish an abiding suspicion of the thought of the past. In Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment, the Storeys lean hard on Tocqueville’s observations of the newborn United States because we are the perfect test case. But it is hard to be happy when you are restless. Many of our constitutions, our social contracts, explicitly defend our pursuit of happiness. Social scientists Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey use Tocqueville’s observations to frame a larger problem, the eternal discontent that now plagues much of the “developed” world-the chunk that was shaped by the Enlightenment. Swirled together, these characteristics soon proved combustible: The equality and prosperity we managed to attain by dint of our industriousness and eager consumption only inflamed our restlessness. Our defining characteristics, he said (and who could disagree?) were industriousness, the love of material well-being, and the restless hunger for change. He saw how desperate we were to be unique, irreplaceable individuals, and how hard we tried to prove it by the stuff we amassed. “The inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he was assured of not dying,” Tocqueville remarked.

Our downfall was how we defined happiness. Our genius was to make happiness the birthright of all, not the privilege of the elite. How sharply modern it sounds, his observation that Americans are “restless in the midst of their well-being.” He started out admiring and found himself predicting (quite accurately, as it turns out) a sad and shallow trajectory from heroism to petulance. It always depresses me to see how accurately Alexis de Tocqueville, a twenty-five-year-old upstart, took our measure two hundred years ago.

Pursuit of happiness genius