A culture of worry in a sea of possessions

Social hypochondria is the national disease of the most successful nation. By most indexes, life has improved beyond the dreams of even very recent generations. Yet many Americans, impervious to abundant data and personal experiences, insist that progress is a chimera.

Gregg Easterbrook's impressive new book, ''The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,'' explains this perversity. Easterbrook, a Washington journalist and fellow of the Brookings Institution, assaults readers with good news:

American life expectancy has dramatically increased in a century, from 47 to 77 years. Our great-great-grandparents all knew someone who died of some disease we never fear. Our largest public health problems arise from unlimited supplies of affordable food. The typical American has twice the purchasing power his mother or father had in 1960. In 2001 Americans spent $25 billion - more than North Korea's GDP - on recreational watercraft. Factor out immigration and statistical evidence of widening income inequality disappears. The statistic that household incomes are only moderately higher than 25 years ago is misleading: households today average fewer people, so real dollar incomes in middle-class households are about 50 percent higher today. In 2003 we spend much wealth on things unavailable in 1953 - a cleaner environment, reduced mortality through new medical marvels ($5.2 billion a year just for artificial knees, which did not exist a generation ago), the ability to fly anywhere or talk to anyone anywhere. The incidence of heart disease, stroke and cancer, adjusted for population growth, is declining. The rate of child poverty is down in a decade. America soon will be the first society in which a majority of adults are college graduates.

And so it goes. But Easterbrook says that such is today's ''discontinuity between prosperity and happiness,'' the ''surge of national good news'' scares people, vexes the news media and does not even nudge up measurements of happiness. Easterbrook's explanations include:

n''The tyranny of the small picture.'' The preference for bad news produces a focus on smaller remaining problems after larger ones are ameliorated. Ersatz bad news serves the fund-raising of ''gloom interest groups.'' It also inflates the self-importance of elites, who lose status when society is functioning well. Media elites, especially, have a stake in ''headline-amplified anxiety.''

n''Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst.'' In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits.

''Catalogue-induced anxiety'' and ''the revenge of the plastic'' both cause material abundance to increase unhappiness. The more we can order and charge, the more we are aware of what we do not possess. The ''modern tyranny of choice'' causes consumers perpetual restlessness and regret.

• he ''latest model syndrome'' abets the ''tyranny of the unnecessary'' which leads to the ''ten-hammer syndrome.'' We have piled up mountains of marginally improved stuff, in the chaos of which we cannot find any of our nine hammers, so we buy a tenth, and the pile grows higher. Thus does the victor belong to the spoils.

• he cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

Easterbrook, while arguing that happiness should be let off its leash, is far from complacent. He is scandalized by corporate corruption and poverty in the midst of so much abundance. And he has many commonsensical thoughts on how to redress the imbalance many people feel between their abundance of material things and the scarcity of meaning that they feel in their lives. The gist of his advice is that we should pull up our socks, spiritually, and make meaning by doing good while living well.

His book arrives as the nation enters an election year, when the opposition, like all parties out of power, will try to sow despondency by pointing to lead linings on all silver clouds. His timely warning is that Americans are becoming colorblind, if only to the color silver.

The problem with our western culture is that we are owned by our "things" and that we have given up our sense of freedom and self determination in order to protect our being "possessed".

We have piled up mountains of marginally improved stuff, in the chaos of which we cannot find any of our nine hammers, so we buy a tenth, and the pile grows higher.

I have this problem with fingernail clippers. Except it's more than 10.

American life expectancy has dramatically increased in a century, from 47 to 77 years.

I was killing time in a cemetery a couple weeks ago and realized that this type statistic is a bit misleading. Actually there were a lot of headstones of people from the old days who lived into their 70's, 80's, 90's and a few 100's. The big difference is that there were lots of babies and children's headstones. There were quite a few deaths of people in their 20's and 30's, also.

In reality, the majority of people back then didn't die in their 40's as I'd been lead to believe by this statistic, it's that we have far fewer infant and childhood deaths.

It's really amazing what you can do with statistics, isn't it?

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