Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 289