[genericid]

I don't think Germans are happier than Americans because we take more opiates. Your claim that productivity (or, for that matter anything else) is more important than happiness is plain absurd. I prefer a good life over one that ends with me jumping off a bridge I built.

[ergothus]

> I prefer a good life over one that ends with me jumping off a bridge I built.

That's a fantastic way to put it. If we aren't being productive to improve happiness (directly or indirectly), then why are we doing it?

[quotemstr]

You know very well that I didn't mean that Germans literally medicated themselves into happiness. (AIUI, that's more an American thing.)

My point is that a life of comfort is not the ideal to which we should aspire, and that humanity's accomplishments have not come from people who didn't want to bother exerting themselves.

As I've said previously, European social policy is basically rest-and-vest at civilization scale.

[danans]

> My point is that a life of comfort is not the ideal to which we should aspire

You are equating a life of comfort with happiness. A lot of people have a more nuanced ways of evaluating their lives, where they value facing challenging and meaningful problems while also seeking stability and comfort.

It's why we have better adjectives to describe a good life than "happiness", i.e "fulfillment".

> humanity's accomplishments have not come from people who didn't want to bother exerting themselves.

Many of humanity's greatest breakthroughs came from people who were specifically insulated from the uncertainties of daily survival. From aristocrats experimenting with physics, to lifetime tenured monks (and later academics) who were given the day to day security to pursue lines of thought that otherwise wouldn't be considered.

Despite the oft-repeated cliche, necessity is more often the enemy of invention. Necessity serves as a pruning mechanism to select the best hypothesis of the many that were created when resources were plentiful.

[genericid]

A life of comfort is very much an ideal we should aspire to. There will always be people who have the intrinsic motivation to accomplish grander things. People don't accomplish great things because they are forced to.