I don’t know—I don’t know...Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation? (4)

I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately (4).

They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled (8).

One indication that Lydia is not happy is her concern about her children's mental state. The scenes in the nursery are projections of the children's interests. When Lydia asks George to "look at" the nursery, he immediately understands that something has gone wrong with it. She next suggests that if he himself does not look at it, he should get a psychologist to do so. That is, rather than a technological issue in the projection system, she interprets the problem as something that is caused by what her children are requesting.

George soon shares in this concern, as the narrator presents his thoughts on the matter. George understands that the children, in conjuring up lions and vultures, are thinking about death. He thinks that they are too young for such thoughts, but his own morbid preoccupation leads him to conclude: "you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else." Lydia's unhappiness includes her alienation from her own home, in which she feels she no longer belongs.

Ray Bradbury seems to suggest that technology does not present a solution to human problems; rather, it reflects or even magnifies those problems.

Early in the story, Lydia tells George something is wrong with the nursery of their Happylife Home. The nursery is a huge, costly room with giant television screen, but when Lydia and George enter into the room, the hot African veldt, the vultures, and the charging lions they see inside leaves them frightened and uneasy.

We also learn that Lydia is unhappy because the home does everything for her. She states that the house is wife, mother, and nursemaid to her husband and children. She wants to go on vacation so that she can fry eggs and darn socks. "I feel like I don't belong here," Lydia says. She also notes that George has been nervous lately, drinking and smoking more than ever. She attributes this to him also feeling "unnecessary" in the Happylife Home.

Bradbury's point is that too much technology is not good for humans. We need to feel useful, productive, and empowered. We do best with a technology that serves us, but that is not so powerful it takes over our lives. 

That the Happylife Home system has not made George and Lydia Hadley particularly happy is evinced in their anxieties about the nursery.

"It's just that the nursery is different now than it was," Mrs. Hadley tells her husband because she is anxious about this room in which the children play. When she and George enter the nursery, a virtual reality exists inside: The ceiling becomes "a deep sky with a hot yellow sun," and an African veldt appears, complete with odors and sounds. Over their heads a shadow is cast and George notices that it is caused by swooping vultures. Lydia points to lions going to a water hole to drink after they have apparently been eating something. She, then, asks her husband if he has heard a scream.

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand,...and the yellow of them was in your eyes...the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide....

Lydia, then, screams, "Watch out!" as the lions charge them. They bolt for the door. Outside Lydia tells her husband, "They almost got us!" But, George patronizes her, saying that the walls are crystal and everything is "all odorophonics and sonics." Still, Lydia is frightened, and she urges George to tell the children not to read any more on Africa. And, she asks that George lock the nursery for a few days.