A little over a week ago, Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, went into space on a rocket, on a flight that lasted 10 minutes. Ten minutes. The news had a lot of repercussions, naturally. One of the richest men in the world, who increased his fortune in the most difficult time the world has gone through in many years. Memes emerged depicting Amazon employees taking advantage of the ten minutes to go to the bathroom; such is the exploitation they suffer.
Between us, it really amazes me that in the middle of a pandemic, in which there are countries so poor that they cannot afford vaccines, the man whose fortune reached the record of US$ 211 billion dollars, sees a "hobby" like this as a priority. I speak from a humanitarian point of view. I could also talk about what this extravagant trip represents in technological terms. I mean, I couldn't, because it's not from this field that I think or speak. So, let's get to the point.
Happiness in space
Thinking about Bezos' flight and following the repercussions on social networks, I remembered a passage from Freud's Malaise in Culture, in which he talks about technological advances, about how these advances they are attempts to break with some limits of human abilities and senses . Glasses are a way to amplify vision, means of transportation, a way to shorten distances that would be covered with our own legs, and so on.
There I went to look for the passage in question in the text. That was when I found an excerpt that seems perfect to me to reflect on what I call here "Bezos' flight". I reproduce part of the excerpt below:
Over the past few generations, men have made extraordinary progress in the natural sciences and their technical applications, consolidating their dominion over nature in a way unthinkable in the past. (...) But they believe they have realized that this newly acquired disposition over space and time, this subjection to natural forces, the fulfillment of an age-old longing, does not raise the degree of pleasurable satisfaction they expect from life, that this disposition over space and time has not made them happier.
From this observation, we should content ourselves with drawing the conclusion that power over nature is not the only condition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural efforts, without deriving from this that technical progress has no value for the economy of our happiness (Freud, 1930, The Discontent in Culture, edition of L&PM Pocket).
We know, as Freud himself tells us in this same text, that for happiness there is no magic formula, each one must find their unique way of being happy.
But I wonder, did Bezos come back happier?
If it was, is it a lasting or fleeting happiness? Was the happiness in the experience of the flight itself, of the ten minutes in space? Or was the happiness in the spectacle around the flight, in what it brought most narcissistic to him? Is it, from a collective point of view, convenient for a billionaire man to spend millions and millions on a ten-minute flight to space? What progress does this flight represent when there is an abyss separating its passenger from those who did not have lunch today? I genuinely wonder how happy you get from a ten-minute flight into space.
