“We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future. At the end of the long struggle for advancement, the golden years of retirement beckon. 'We are always getting to live’, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, ‘but never living’.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Society imposed the idea that people are predestined to become/do something according to what the future tells them. What happens is that they focus on a future that doesn't rely on a present to happen. If that present never happens, than that pretended future won't happen neither.
With this type of mentality, people are constantly delaying what they want, instead they wait (hope) that their future will bring it. When confronted with how far that future seems to be, that's when depression and anxiety kicks in.

There's a disruption between your present, mental model of yourself and the mental model of your future self.
That is constantly happening in the real world. When you want to use an object for the first time, you create a mental model of how it's supposed to work. If it's not well designed, and you fail to use it, you might feel frustrated. Your mental model of how that object is supposed to work, it's different from the object model.

This is a problem of a society that doesn't reflect upon the values of life, where the majority of the individuals limit themselves on following pre-stablished paths created by institutions that represent it (society). How can we make sure those institutions work for the best of us if we're willing to blindly trust them? When I mean institutions, I'm also saying values, ideologies...

Society is a constant target of propaganda that rely on human behaviour (biological, cultural...) in order to try to shape the individual's actual behavior and mentality. They exploit political and religion views, biological behaviours (like sexual, violence...), the need to feel safer and so on... in order to better promote their campaign. They use it as a vehicle, since it's usually not the goal of the campaign.

By studying the human natural behavior, we can take advantage of that, in order to exploit the consumer, even if it's morally wrong. This is one of the biggest current problems. In a highly advanced society, morality seems to have no place. Let me remind you that UX was created to serve the people, not the other way around.

The current reflection proves it. There's an increase dependency on unnecessary things that don't contribute anything to happiness. The western world has access to so much information, technology and resources than ever before, yet unhappiness, stress and psychological problems seem to raise. The actual social system explores people's energy in order to fulfill it's purpose. ^[1]

“On the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufactures, and advertisers to spend our earning on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is dialectically linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy dissipation – provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A person has to devote a part of it's own energy in order to adapt or survive in a complex social system. If the system is really efficient, a person doesn't need to provide a vast amount of energy in order to get the social return. She can then use that energy on personal goals.
But what happens when you dispense so much energy into a system that you have practically no control of the outcome? You end up with less energy to invest on your personal life. So are we really living our personal life or an imposed life by society? Seems like a conspiracy theory but you should question yourself.

Why am I saying this?
There's a difference between social goals and personal goals.
Take this as an example: if the social goal (group goal) is to get rich, you (the individual) tend to follow it. But what does it happens if getting richer is no longer the social goal? The problem happens when the social goal is not related to your own personal goals.
How can you expect to achieve happiness (assuming that's the major goal) if your goals are not personal? How can you achieve a personal realization if you're "following the crowd" (social goal). They can both have the same goals, but you have to truly question yourself. Otherwise your happiness it's not dependent on you, but on a social view.

In the Hindu culture, there's very old concept called Svadharma that can be expressed by a quote from Bhagavad Gita: "It is to better fulfill one's own duty (dharma) however imperfectly, than to do that of another, however perfect it may be." ^[2]

How can we solve this?

If the social system is well structured and implemented, the social factors lose their weight because the main goal is to support personal goals and not the other way around, where social goals tend to be temporarily perceived as personals. In other words, the system should take into account the amount of energy devoted by an individual so he can better pursue his own happiness.
We can say the same about technology. When it contributes to the realization of personal goals, it's positive and well implemented. When it implies it's own goals according to it's functionality, it creates a human dependency that only contributes to temporary goals. Goals that came and go around, imposed by technology, and not the personal ones.
How many of us are in these situations? Hostages of bad technologies and not of our own happiness. If society wants to have happiness in mind, we must change how happy the individuals are. We must not forget that the pursuit of happiness it's personal, so a personal change must occur, independently of the social goals.
Society is composed by individuals, so happy individuals compose a happier society. Not the other way around. It's not logical to have a happy society composed by unhappy individuals. In it's essence, it's just an unhappy society.

Every technology must contribute to the human happiness, as it is happiness and the demand for it that contributes the most to the human.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti