The Dark Side of Digitalisation: Wealthier but Unhappier

Abstract

Since the first industrial revolution, the world economy has passed a turmoiled path with many salient transformations that have shaped today’s human relations, commercial trades, innovation and governance. Now, humanity is going through the digital revolution, which seems to change the world even more rapidly than its predecessors. Despite the myriad of digitalisation advantages connected with this, one cannot neglect the downsides. Terms such as technostress, cyberbullying or technology addiction emerged to express the harm the accelerated digitalisation has brought into our lives. The present paper focuses on digitalisation’s effects on happiness, using a VAR model for the EU countries from 2017-2022. Despite the positive effect on economic growth underlined in the literature, a positive impulse in terms of digitalisation generates a persistent negative effect on happiness in the next three years.

Keywords

• digitalisation
• economic growth
• happiness
• human relations
• healthy and meaningful life