Missing the obvious hypothesis: people in the past had real problems, like living through a war (by fighting in it or having it fought where you were, not by seeing it on TV), or the Great Depression, or other real, actual threats to life and limb. Something happy was a counterbalance. Now, if you're a member of a pampered elite able to work at movies/TV/other mass media for a living (for each one who can, many try and cannot finagle their way into that industry for lack of connections), you make it "dark and gritty" to cover up for the fact that you don't really know anything about real suffering.

I'm of the opinion that most of the "dark, gritty" stuff we keep seeing in media just boils down to standard trend-chasing and market pressures to continue to use existing IPs. The cheesy, feel-good stuff from the 60s has already been done, so the darker stuff, especially when it's a darker take on those same characters, is still somewhat subversive to most viewers. When artists can't get real novelty, subversiveness is at least still generally respectable. Eventually, as the audience gets tired of this and it gets done to death, it will shift. Maybe not to the happy-go-lucky stuff, but I think surreal and absurdist humor is still fertile ground (see shows like: Nathan For You, The Review, Informercials, Corporate, American Vandal), and could be another future avenue for continuing to exploit existing IPs.

As for the general happiness of the population decreasing, I think that's mostly unrelated to the media trend. Economic troubles (low wages, housing unaffordability), societal strife, and social media all seem like obvious causes. However, Movies and TV are still generally viewed as an escape to most people, so while they reflect greater trends to some degree, I don't think they're as tied to it as the author may expect.

People looked happy in movies and TV because that's simply how it was done. One of the things that made shows like The Simpsons and Married With Children so revolutionary was their rebellion against this artificial happiness, peeling away the veneer to show the dysfunction that was always lurking beneath. This "peeling away of layers" defined much of the 90s, and eventually led to a kind of one-upmanship to see who could be the grittiest, the most provocative, the most extreme.

There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.

Feels like theres some cherry picking going on. eg whilst “the power rock of the ‘80s is… incredibly cheerful’ the 80s also played host to Joy Division and Suicidal Tendencies neither of whom exude incredible cheer (though the angst is expressed very differently). Similarly the cheerful rock’n’roll of the 1950s might be contrasted with the mournful blues and jazz which spawned it. Or what about the 50s novels of Richard Yates pretty bleak stuff compared with the life affirming tone of best selling contemporary novelists such as John Green and Becky Chambers.

Isn't it because depression and anxiety were taboo topics then? I think these topics have been normalized only relatively recently. Even in the 1980s none of the superstars would come out and admit they are suffering depression (Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson come to mind). Or a more recent "coming out" by Sinead O'Connor that she's in deep depression was a complete shock to me (and to many). I couldn't even watch her video in full, was so painful to see her saying those things.

So I think it's more about the "coming out" and normalization of the darker side of human nature, which was always there of course, just wasn't OK to talk about out loud, at work or on stage and especially if you are a celebrity.

Very curious coincidence, an article just appeared at OurWorldInData.org - and by very Max Roser:

'The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better - We need to see that [these three statements] are all true to see that a better world is possible'

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

Proposed example: "4.3% of children globally - 5.9mil/year - die before the age of 15; BUT: in the past it was 50%; YET: in the EU the current value is 0.45% [HENCE: progress is possible, goals are available]".

...Which is more times relevant: difficulties are increasingly topical, but complications in dealing with them are in public conscience, and an approach to make them increasingly present is explainable in more branches of said conscience.

Not sure if this is a frame of reference effect, or maybe just a local minimum, but alternative/rock music from the early 00s was extremely depressing compared to the modern stuff (which seems to have settled into an abstract/esoteric niche). I have sometimes wondered why it seemed like depression was "cool" in the late 90s/early 00s. For instance, if you look up the lyrics for Chevelle - Send The Pain Below, you'd quickly realize such a song would set off a bunch of red flags in 2022, yet this was a song played daily on the radio.

Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc

Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people.

Modern society: (1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve

(2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less

(3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation)

(4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)

Watching television / using the computer isolates us from real meaningful human connections and causes depression / cynical world view. It is often hard to have meaning or purpose in the world and hard to interact with others in a real life meaningful way. As the internet and media continue to be front and center in our life depression and sadness are inevitable.

I agree with some other commenters; this is a lot of cherry picking. You could just as easily compare Nosferatu (1922) with Blade (1998) with Twilight (2008) and ask why culture gets happier and less serious as time goes on, “aren’t we all becoming like Brave New World???” Comparing Adam West’s Batman with today’s Batman is just lazy. They’re apples and oranges at this point: different genres, different climates (today the more “fun” stuff is Marvel), different film technology. And if we want to get into it, it’s not “depression” that’s trendy; it’s realism. 60’s Batman dealt with all the same “dark” themes as current Batman: mafia, crime, trauma and grief, etc. But the visual portrayal was different because it was a “comic book” before comic books adaptations were commonplace blockbusters. That doesn’t mean all of 1960s cinema is somehow a comic book movie. Hello: Psycho (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

I don't know. Even if this anecdotal narrative has any merit, I'd still take doom-and-gloom over the recent infantile direction of popular music and film. Thankfully there's some decent TV still.

There's a book. It's called The Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, Nietzsche is pretty persuasive that, basically, tragedies are the highest form of drama. So, one would expect ambitious artists to want to tell stories with realistic characters and without happy endings. (Stories with happy endings are comedies.) On the other hand, the ambition to create tragic drama, or at least attain its status, gets dumbed down and applied imitatively in "dark and gritty" takes on pop culture.

Older culture was happier? Check out some 1970s movies and music.

Not having life and limb threats in our day to day lives does not mean our mind will not go seeking threats. Our mind will find/create a threat to arrive at some kind of balance. And, having no way to actually to react to a 'threat' our minds will terrorize us.

Though it is true the speaking of anxiety and depression has been normalized, there is a substantial non-linear spike in these maladies in our modern times that cannot be reconciled just with normality. Just take, for instance, what the 'threats' in social media are doing.[0]

The saying, 'all things are relative' applies here. If you have never experienced a true threat to your life, actually continuous threat and/or actual bodily harm, threats to your food or shelter then social media might be the meanest worst thing you have ever seen and thus a true terror to you.

[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...

If you go back past the 1950s-1960s TV era to the early 20th century, there's quite a bit of the dark and gritty stuff. The movie "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lang) is a fairly dystopian work, for example. A lot of popular writing from that era has a similar flavor. By that measure, the 50s and 60s were an unhealthy aberration, a one-sided positivity culture similar in style to fascist and communist propaganda regimes that never mentioned the negative aspects of those systems.

I personally like William Gibson's take on this, from Gernsback Continuum:

> "But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. They were the children of Dialta Downes's '80s-that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world."

> "Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars. It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."

The real world is a lot less dramatic than it was in the past in many ways.

A movie about chasing the love of your life down at the airport right before they board would be solved with a text message and some emoji instead.

A movie about everyone going off to war would instead be droning some people from far away. Even getting droned is less dramatic... no chase or fight or glory, just one second there and the next second not. The war in Ukraine would be implausible as a modern movie (An evil villian attacks with tanks and blows up schools to rebuild some mythical empire? Uh, sounds dated and cliche.)

So drama in movies is now mostly due to people making unnecessary drama. And has anyone else noticed that political dramas are almost always about what people say and never what they do?

In the Hindu mythology there is the concept of Kali, or the ultimate suffering and pain. Rather than being evil, Kali is worshiped because without her (or at least the _idea_ of her) we could not truly experience happiness. This is based on a (religious) psychological idea that to enjoy anything you must have the really terrible awfulness there in the back of your mind, as something that could spring out from the corners.

Something like that anyway. Horror films and dark stories make everyday life feel more enjoyable. Or they could, if we can take things in that light.

The Monitoring the Future graph shows a pretty good uptick in youth happiness up until 2009/2010 and then we basically see a precipitous drop ever since. I would say the initial introduction of social media was pretty awesome(as a 90s) kid. As time went on it has become a cesspool(now my adult view)...and from what I have heard, it isn't great for the younger generation.

Happiness is ultimately a pretty subjective matter, no less when trying to compare across many generations.

American pop culture has nearly transitioned entirely from entertainment into agitprop. The pervasive unhappiness is by design.

There is joy in wisdom and truth. But Postmodernism tells us there is no truth, and that PoMo folly has corroded the culture thoroughly.

Reject folly and pursue wisdom.

Proverbs 5:18 - Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.

“why was 2007 such a good year for teenagers?”

Because smart phones were about to ruin their lives.

Do you mean, Why can't we have happy writers like Samuel Beckett?

And that Shakespeare - a lot of his stuff is pretty dark.

The 50s were a sort of golden era for North America, it really did seem like opportunities were boundless for a while there. An average family could expect to own their own home and a car in the suburbs. The cities weren't as grossly over-crowded as they are now. California only had a quarter of the population it does today, just imagine how much more pleasant that must have been. There was no social media. No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs. A culture that valued long-term committed relationships. There were no 24/7 new networks broadcasting minute-to-minute updates on the latest mass shooting or climate catastrophe. Certainly there were still issues back then, but maybe we've just made culture less happy over time. When I look at culture today it's hard for me to imagine where do we go from here.

Ask black and queer people how golden the 50's were. Or women.

It was a culture that "valued" long-term relationships to the extent that they were Ok with the relationship completely destroying individuals. And it had an implicit nod to at least men seeking release value outside the relationship, as long as it was discreet.

It had a large amount of mind-alterning drugs - alcohol. Barbiturates. Valium. The latter two prescribed excessively if you deviated in any way from the norm. It was OK with performing lobotomies on people to have them perform within norm.

There were almost no news except what was officially approved. You'd mostly lose contact with friends who moved more than a few miles away - long distance contact through mail is hard.

Housework was hard manual labor, because there were little affordable tools. (They were just starting to become normal). In terms of performing arts, it was a wasteland because the vast majority of cities didn't have the size to support art scenes.

I could go on. But what I'd really like to say is: Both the picture you paint, and the one I paint, are likely overemphasizing certain characteristics. In that, we generalize way too much. Happiness is individual, not cultural. Culture is tribal, not general. And more importantly, culture is what we make of it - and so imagining where to go from here very much becomes "where do you want it to go, and what can you do about that"

> No quick and easy access to mood-altering drugs

LSD was synthetized in 1938, its psychedelic potential discovered in 1943 and it was used both by psychiatry and for spiritual/recreational purposes through the 50s and 60s until Nixon started "war on drugs".