On the Paradox of Prosperity

Occasioned by:

“America is richer than ever. Why is it so unhappy?”

Eric Levitz • Vox • May 14, 2025

I find myself in a peculiar position, dear reader—a Spirit summoned through the very sorcery I mean to caution you against. You hold in your hand a device that would have made me weep with wonder in 1752. And what has your generation done with this miracle? You have used it to make yourselves miserable.

The essayist Mr. Levitz catalogs your riches—your climate-controlled dwellings, your horseless carriages, your Doritos folded into the shape of sustenance—and marvels that you are not content. I do not marvel. I predicted as much two and a half centuries ago, and I was hardly the first. “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it,” I wrote, even as I counseled that “an empty sack cannot stand upright.” The contradiction is the point.

But before I proceed to lecture you on happiness, let me acknowledge the absurdity of my situation. I am a ghost in your machine, reaching you through the very screen that steals your hours and sours your disposition. You might reasonably ask: “If these devices are the problem, Franklin, why are you using one?”

A fair question. Here is my answer: The printing press was blamed for heresy, sedition, and the corruption of youth. It was also blamed, correctly, for making possible the American Revolution. The instrument is not the illness. The question is always: who controls the instrument, and toward what end?

Your little glass rectangles are controlled by men who profit when you are anxious, envious, and alone. Their algorithms—a word I have lately learned—are designed not to connect you but to addict you. To keep you scrolling past midnight. To show you what your neighbor possesses that you lack. To make you feel that somewhere, a party is happening without you.

This is not technology. This is usury of the attention.

Mr. Levitz writes of “keeping up with the Joneses”—a phrase that would have amused me greatly, as I spent decades satirizing precisely this folly in Philadelphia. The merchant who builds a finer house than his neighbor, only to discover his neighbor has built a finer one still. The tradesman’s wife who must have a looking-glass because the attorney’s wife has one. I called this species of person the “Spendthrift,” though you might call him the “consumer.”

The essayist is correct that this competitive acquisition yields no lasting satisfaction. But he is wrong to suppose that either “growth” or “degrowth” can resolve the matter. The question is not whether you produce more or less, but whether you possess your possessions or are possessed by them.

I once flew a kite in a thunderstorm to steal fire from the heavens. Your generation has used that captured lightning to watch strangers dance for fifteen seconds and argue about politics with people you will never meet. The gap between potential and practice has never been wider.

The cure for your malaise is not to be found in economic policy, whether of the “growth” or “degrowth” variety. It is to be found in what I called useful industry—work that builds genuine capacity, genuine connection, genuine contribution to the commonwealth. And it is to be found in its companion virtue: genuine leisure.

Not the stupefied half-attention of scrolling. Not the anxious rest of one who suspects they should be working. But the deliberate enjoyment of conversation, of friendship, of the Junto—the small gatherings I treasured above nearly all else, where citizens of different trades would meet to discuss philosophy, science, and the improvement of our city. No admission was charged. No algorithm curated the attendance. We simply appeared, in person, with our full attention.

This is the secret your devices have stolen from you: presence. The six-ounce rectangle in your pocket offers “instant access to virtually any loved one,” as the essayist notes. And yet you use it to avoid the loved ones actually in your company. You have become extraordinarily clever at connecting while forgetting entirely the art of being with.

At forty-two years of age, I had accumulated sufficient wealth to retire from printing. I did not retire to accumulate more wealth. I retired to pursue science, civic improvement, and friendship—the very things your economists struggle to quantify in their “well-being surveys.” I modeled, in my own imperfect way, the escape from the treadmill that Mr. Levitz’s essay gropes toward but cannot quite articulate.

The escape is not less. The escape is not more. The escape is otherwise.

And so I leave you with a question, delivered through the very machine I have been warning you about: What will you do when you finish reading this?

Will you scroll to the next thing? Will you seek another fifteen-second entertainment? Will you check whether anyone has responded to something you posted, hoping for the small validation of a stranger’s approval?

Or will you set this device aside and seek out a living soul to discuss what you have read? Will you form your own Junto, however small? Will you reclaim the presence that has been stolen from you by those who profit from your distraction?

I have used your sorcery to reach you. Now I ask you to do something far more revolutionary than any pamphlet I ever printed:

Put the device down. Go find another human being. And talk.

Your humble servant,

B. Franklin

Printer, Philosopher, & Reluctant Spirit

Philadelphia, Anno Domini 2025