Key to happiness? Use the internet every day
Unwanted adverts for juicing machines that follow you around, friends who insist on documenting their every meal and change in emotional state on Facebook.
Work emails that demand a response in less time than it takes to find the euros sign on a keyboard.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the internet is making everyone bored and miserable but according to a pair of economists in Norway the opposite is true.
Using the web each day leads to a marked improvement in life satisfaction that increases as people get older, a study of 100,000 Europeans suggests.
It also appears to soften the blow of a mid-life crisis and to fastforward it by more than two years.
The typical adult life follows a happiness curve shaped like the letter U.
People tend to be fairly happy in their teens but the optimism starts to tail off when they reach their twenties and run into things such as council tax and arguments about whose job it is to put the rubbish out.
The decline continues until the early fifties, before things pick up again and continue to get better.
Fulvio Castellacci and Henrik Schwabe, of the Centre for Technology Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo, studied whether the trajectory would be different for frequent internet users compared with people who went online less or not at all.
They plotted the number of broadband subscriptions per hundred people in EU countries against data on life satisfaction from the Eurobarometer survey. They adjusted their data to remove factors that might influence happiness, such as income, occupation, education and living in a town or city.
Even after these tweaks, they were left with two different curves. They found that in the early years of adulthood, heavy internet users started out more or less as satisfied with their lives as people who did not use the internet. Their happiness fell much more gently, however, and they reached their turning point – the mid-life crisis – at an average age of 48.5, compared with 50 for those who logged on once or twice a month and 51.9 for those who did not go online. Their sense of wellbeing also recovered faster in middle age.
The economists suggest there could be three explanations: web access saves time and stress, it gives people access to information they can use to make better decisions, and it helps them to keep up their social lives.
Malte Elson, of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, was not convinced by the results. He said: ‘‘You can have very positive and very negative experiences on the internet, and you can use an internet connection for meaningful but also less pleasant or enjoyable activities. Summarising all of this under one umbrella term does not sufficiently map the diversity of the ‘place’ we call the internet.’’