I think the "likely culprit" is, as it has always been, just the "human condition."
The coming into an unknown world, ignorant of everything, constantly reconciling conflicting ideas, nagged by a sense of ultimate pointlessness, and the dread of inevitable mortality. However we may try to pooh-pooh these things away, they've been an incurable source of unhappiness since time immemorial.
Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Throughout our history the distraction has mostly been provided by daily struggle for survival, but the comforts of civilization and technology, and the increasing knowledge of the species as a whole, have been laying us bare to the above.
We probably either have to keep cooking up new distractions, or we'll need to sit down as an species and conduct a no-bullshit review of what it means to be human, and everyone's place, right and requirements in this world, and our combined place in the cosmos.
The coming into an unknown world, ignorant of everything, constantly reconciling conflicting ideas, nagged by a sense of ultimate pointlessness, and the dread of inevitable mortality. However we may try to pooh-pooh these things away, they've been an incurable source of unhappiness since time immemorial.
Humans cannot be truly happy unless we keep ourselves seriously deluded or constantly distracted; with biosocial emotions, religion, duty, hope, ambition, goals, pleasure or whatever.
Throughout our history the distraction has mostly been provided by daily struggle for survival, but the comforts of civilization and technology, and the increasing knowledge of the species as a whole, have been laying us bare to the above.
We probably either have to keep cooking up new distractions, or we'll need to sit down as an species and conduct a no-bullshit review of what it means to be human, and everyone's place, right and requirements in this world, and our combined place in the cosmos.