第100页

In an evocatively titled 2007 study from the Journal of Economic Psychology—“Does Watching TV Make Us Happy?”—the behavioral economists Bruno Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer conclude that not only do unhappy people watch considerably more TV than happy people, but TV watching also pushes aside other activities that are less immediately engaging but can produce longer-term satisfaction. Spending many hours watching TV, on the other hand, is linked to higher material aspirations and to raised anxiety.

Life in the developed world includes a lot of passive participation: at work we’re office drones, at home we’re couch potatoes. The pattern is easy enough to explain by assuming we’ve wanted to be passive participants more than we wanted other things.