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And if I look at the squeeze I feel as a very high income young person, it’s still just cost of housing. The amount of house a salary of x buys was utterly decimated in the last 4 years, especially in the metros that have good job growth.
Solve the housing crisis and you’ll have happy young people and future generations. Maybe not so much boomers.
Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the military. What are we even building? For what?
Is it any wonder at all?
Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.
Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.
On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive. Even food where normally you could walk in a shop and get something for not much, a basic sandwich started from $8 and when I came out some lady followed me and said could she have some she was hungry so I gave her half and really was hungry. I've never really had that in the other fifty countries I've visited including in Africa. In London you get Roma sitting around with 'hungry' signs but they are all fat and well fed and want cash. It's odd.
I have never seen someone in america starving.
But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.
Not exactly rocket science - if there's money to be made and people aren't making it then something is stopping them.
I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.
At least you can be guaranteed for certain you won't be going hungry in Istanbul, Warsaw or Amman.
The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger percentage of buyers nowadays are buying bigger and/or more luxurious cars.
It's quite remarkable when you take into account how much more technology and safety features are in new cars. My '89 Civic didn't even have cruise control.
Even shopping for a few basic groceries felt like I was paying dollar amounts more than I would expect to see at home but in a currency that's worth 1.3x+.
Like the article states, when housing goes up everywhere, it means that even the lowest wage workers need to be paid a lot more to survive, so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.
The other issue you saw, homelessness, is especially concentrated in Austin. Austin is perhaps the most liberal city in deep red Texas, so homeless people flock to Austin because it has good services and a generally sympathetic populace, and some rural conservative locales have even been giving homeless people one way bus tickets to Austin.
I guess the good news is that Austin built a shit ton of housing since 2021-2022, so housing prices (including rentals) are falling faster in Austin than anywhere else in the US.
The houses got expensive because homeowners wanted housing to be an investment, so they voted for laws that make it harder to build or densify housing.
Cars are expensive because the government puts tariffs on perfectly good imports to protect the American car companies. The American car companies produce garbage, and even the electric car companies like Tesla and Rivian are producing super-high-tech luxury land yachts. The government incentives are also captured to produce huge trucks, and many states don't have regular inspections, so lifted trucks are common. The companies don't want to build and sell small cars because the perception is that a small car is going to get pancaked in a crash with a bigger, heavier car. Gas prices don't matter because the government artificially suppresses them, sometimes with war.
Corn and dairy are cheap because the government subsidizes them at the behest of the corn and dairy lobbies, which use small good ol' boy farmers who don't even exist as their marketing. A lot of the corn goes to ethanol for fuel, even though it's a crappy fuel and an acre of solar panels results in many more miles of EV driving than the same acre of corn ethanol. So you can also get a cheap soda and a cheap cheese pizza, but a lot of the food pipeline is captured by seed monopolies and middle-men. Somehow milk became a bit of a right-wing meme, and it's basically a naturally-occurring dessert, so people love milk even though it's not good for you and not a good way to get nutrients.
> Even food where normally you could walk in a shop
You aren't supposed to walk in America. You're supposed to drive. Don't get me started lol
Housing, education, and cars, all typically financed via loans, all exorbitantly expensive.
Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives.
And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data.
Judging by the stats, we haven't dug ourselves out of the post-COVID hole yet.
Even the "superstars" (Krugman, etc..) are posting this is that could have been posted on twitter, with the same level of outrage and polarization, but at least the content is well structure, and they are allowed to use sentences in paragraph, with quotes, and figures, and links, etc...
Yes, I know, it's called blogging. I'm saying that the new hot thing, in 2026, is blogging.
And we're a lot better off than median. I can't imagine how crushing it's been lower "down the ladder".
Then a couple years later, not so much.
The point I intended was that we were doing pretty great, and on paper should be doing even better now, but are actually doing less-great (though, still, can't truly complain). If that's how it's looked for us... I mean I look around and imagine trying to get by on a median household income, and holy shit. It seems a whole lot tougher now than it did when we were sitting around median, years ago.
There were major jumps in suicide during the lockdown and in the next two or three years after.
And if it's all doom and gloom and "go outside and you kill grandma" - are we surprised they get sad?
Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. I reckon it's probably one of the Pacific islands.
Yep, this. It's been worse everywhere since then. I didn't know how much I'd be missing the days of 2014-2018 right about now. If only I knew how good we had it.
>Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest.
When you have the highest rates of suicides, coffee, alcohol and antidepressant usage, you're only left with the happy people ;)
1. The fear companies had of raising prices went away thanks to inflation. It's when dynamic pricing in various forms (eg RealPage for rents) really took off. Supermarkets started engaging in essentially unspoken collusion. This tends to get labelled as "price leadership" rather than "price fixing" where the only difference is the first is legal and the second isn't but they're otherwise identical; and
2. Governments around the world engaged in massive wealth transfer to the wealthy, which creates asset price inflation, particularly with housing. Some countries tried to claw some of this back with so-called windfall profits tax. Personally, I think there should've been a corporate tax of 80%+ for 2020-2023 (at least).
The usual tool that governments use to tackle inflation is monetary policy. The theory goes that you raise interest rates, it makes borrowing more expensive and it dampens the heat in the economy. That's true but it's also a very blunt instrument. It hurts everyone from the biggest borrowers to people buying homes.
What never gets serious discussion let alone policy discussion (at least in the US) is fiscal policy, secpfically taxation. Temporarily high corporate taxes would've had a similar effect on tempering M&A, share buybacks, etc but it would've only targeted companies who were profiting from, say, a huge spike in oil prices.
But there are other factors too that existed before Covid such as private equity, which is simply buying up all the competition, making everything more expensive, paying back an LBO and then loading up a company with exploding debt so some sucker down the line can buy it before it blows up.
And also, America did nit had two years of lockdowns.
Young people should react by voting in people who will defend them. Instead, they joined the elderly un voting for Trump. Go figure.
I'd be miderable too if I learned my entire worldview, and that of my countrymen, was dangerously wrong and there's no way to really fix it.
There was no asking, if the country was asked then the term "lockdown" wouldn't have been used. On the other hand, there were no soldiers on the street forcing everyone inside. People chose to do it and maybe that's where the social strife really comes from, people realized they just do what they're told by authority and they're not the free-thinking individuals they thought they were.
I'm still amazed at the level of total, blind, compliance of the US population. I expected riots in the streets but there was nothing. At least traffic was less. And HN was especially depressing, any mention of "lockdowns" maybe not being the best idea or what Sweden was doing was totally shouted down. I'll never forget that.
Nah, no one who seriously thought this has come around to the truth.
The USA got off lockdown lightly in the main. Continental Europe, Canada and Australia all went nuts with it. Especially the Northern Territory and State of Victoria.
The Dallas County judge was driving my neighborhood berating people for walking their dogs and telling them to get inside. It was totally insane, i couldn't believe what I was seeing. I met him at a fundraiser once and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask. My wife's friend (hosting the fundraiser) asked me to leave. His little hobby authoritarian regime during that time was the stupidest thing i'd ever seen but what made me the most angry/shocked is everyone just complied.
/I live in Dallas, TX. The judge is Clay Jenkons https://www.dallascounty.org/government/comcrt/jenkins/
The complete societal inability to adapt seems to be bigger issue in USA.
Neither Europe nor Canada are as much affected despite having more lockdowns. It was not lockdown as such, but something else about Americans
No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives.
On top of that, AI is generally a demotivating entity to the majority of people. Despite all the hype of Altman and whonots, I feel like people just don't have a positive view of the future of their careers due to AI. And once you lose hope it's just downhill from there.
Also I feel like society still hasn't recovered fully from COVID, so many third places gone, restraunts closed, etc. It's getting there but people are isolating more and more. I'm in my late 20s and I just haven't felt like my social life is even half of what it used to be before COVID.
I grew up in the 80's. College in the late 90's. Start of career in the mid aughts. Went through two dot com busts, and have seen a lot of shit. The one thing that my generation (Gen X) seemed to have was always some optimism for the future. Some hope that as bad as it is now? It will eventually get better. The economy will recover, tech jobs will come back, new companies will start up, things will get back to normal.
There seemed to be so much open road with our generation. We knew we were at the forefront of something really special. The road to being successful was pretty standard. Go to college, get a degree, start a career making 40-50K. Get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after.
That seems to have dissipated with Millennials and has gotten worse with Gen Z. Even college for Gen Z is like, "I don't know, is it really worth it any more?" How do you pick a career in something that may or may not exist in a few years because of AI? It just seems like we were the last generation that really had so much hope (regardless of which party was in the White House or controlled congress) and it seems that kind on relentless optimism for the future has dimmed immensely over the past few years.
I'm grateful for the time I grew up in. I'm not sure I would be able to handle the amount of pressure and stress that young people have to deal with these days.
However, my perspective has gotten a lot worse the last couple of years. Enshittification, corporate consolidation, tech market, AI, etc. I didn't once worry during the dot com bust, or the financial crisis, or the outsourcing boom.
It feels VERY different this time.
Basically it feels like tech was the last place where you could do well and outrun the long term real wage stagnation the country's faced since the 70s. And it's not anymore.
I agree. I think we should just stop.
do you have kids? Family? That is the ancient receipt for a great and happy life.
what? We went through so many bad periods in our history..is it sarcasm?
Well then you get your 60s and your focus changes. Kids become adults. Family is the true legacy. We didnt come so far as society searching for netflix and chill.
> I didn't realize just how crushing it is to never get an extended period alone to recharge.
You cannot just relax, because guess what, some human beings depends on you. But yeah, some phases are harder than others.. but thats life.
I can't relate to any of the things you mentioned. I have deep relationships with lots of people, across entirely different types of groups. We see each other regularly (weekly, sometimes more), we do fun things together, we go to events and plan trips, we always have things to talk about, we have hobbies and communities to connect with even more people. We make new connections and friends constantly.
You probably prioritized the wrong things at some point in your life, like the values you hold or the place you choose to live in. You can still make changes to those choices.
My life and the life of everyone I know is immeasurably better since COVID. That's not meant to be a brag but I hope it serves as a wake up call that your experience is not the only one.
My id wants to be happy, but my collective unconscious wants to doomscroll.
We need to be the change we want to see.
There are significant structural issues in society that present headwinds for average people trying to build a fulfilling life.
> The culprit has to fit the crime. Most importantly, it has to fit the timing of the crime. What we’re looking for is something that happened around 2020 (uh, seems obvious) and then didn’t recover (ah, that’s the hard part). This timing rules out several otherwise plausible suspects.
You can pile straws on a camel as part of a continuous process and then observe the breaking of the camel's back as a discontinuous result.
Any explanation that doesn't fit the timing (like the "decline of religion" example he uses) may still be relevant. It can't be automatically ruled out, but the timing is a strong piece of evidence against it. The theory needs to include a solid explanation for why the timing doesn't seem to match. I don't think decline of religion has such a solid explanation, but other theories might.
We Americans are hard-working sheep, and we deserve all the motivational Corpspeak we have to suffer through on LinkedIn posts.
I've worked in this industry (tech) a very long time, and in every job I have peers that boast about off hours work.
We get what we deserve.
But we ended up having a great time. Got used to the piles of garbage, and the fires and protests were scheduled in advance so easily avoided. And I gained an appreciation for the willingness of French workers to stand up for themselves.
> We get what we deserve.
Why? You don't actually justify this reasoning in your post.
> That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries.
(Not that I agree)
Well here's my invitation: rather than resign about how everyones weak and a sheep, take on the perspective of voicing what you want and what you are doing about it and feel free to share about about how even if you've experienced bad things you would rather want to experience goods things. Maybe things could change if you focused on what you actually want over complaining about what you don't?
At the same time like everyone else here I need jobs to pay the bills, and in every job I'm faced with these workaholic types who believe "this is not a 9 to 5 job" is a great motto. You'll find many of these people here, too.
I try to be too useful to fire. But when I was younger places I worked at had brutal on-call situations and limited time off. One place had 15 days of PTO per year, and that included sick days.
For example, taking a stand against Tesla, when you go buy one right now, you really don't feel any sort of general animosity from people, even though its morally not the right thing to do.
What I am doing about it - I do not use social media apps of any kind (since 2017), do not allow my offspring to be on social media, trying to convince my wife she should do the same (she is on facebook still because of marketplace), and absolutely ridicule anyone that uses social media (in a fun way)...
That's why Epstein called us Goy-cattle that work ourselves into an early grave, while THEY operate on a different level, making money from designing and manipulating systems instead.
Every time I go out for a walk in the woods, I ask myself if my current actions are contributing to shareholder value. /s
>That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries.
Where? Which wealthy and developed western nations recently rioted over their elites fucking them over and managed to turn things around in favor of the working class?
The French riot every month, that won't change their broken retirement system only fueled by endless debt that gets handed over to the next generation to deal with. Riots can't change econ math.
Luigi shot and killed that healthcare CEO. Did your healthcare get better and more affordable after that?
People promoting local rioting and acts of violence as the magic solution to the financial issues of a globalized economy are clueless. The world that boomers built which worked wonders for them, doesn't work for us anymore. You can't riot your way out of this one unless you want another world/civil war to reshuffle the monopoly board.
If you compare apples to apples - say my average atheist friend who is a director in a FAANG and also my religious friend who is also a director in the same FAANG.
The former lives by themselves, spends their money on fun things like cars and "toys", etc. Don't get me wrong, wonderful guy (hence friend) but doesn't have those traditional things that historically have been correlated with a fulfilled life.
Meanwhile my religious-FAANG friend has 4 kids, lives in a community where everyone knows each other, lives much closer to family (intentional choice) and just overall sees his life, both the ups and the downs, as part of something purposeful and meaningful.
I would say my religious friend has much more intensity and drama/richness in his life, and maybe no time for "sadness" which I actually think is the right way to go.
I like talking about these 2 guys because outwardly they are apples to apples (same career, similar degree, etc.) but I think this generalizes well to my other friends too. At whatever level of "secular" success and safety, my religious friends just somehow seem more grounded, more belonging in their lives compared to my atheist friends, deal with setbacks better, take a more long-term view and in that traditional sense have more "to live for" than themselves which is very healthy.
America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization. When I came to the US in mid-90s (as an atheist) over half the population attended religious services regularly. Obviously that number is nothing like that today. So what registers to us as an overall change in society (fewer kids, less happy) is actually the proliferation of non religiosity in society and the corresponding magnification of the kind of challenges non-religious folks face.
As a sort of comical but sad example, most my atheist friends "would want kids" but have 30 reasons why it's impossible, between economics, politics, etc. Meanwhile my religious friends just have kids.
But if you're single, isolated, on dating apps -- or maybe caught in an unfulfilling marriage commuting from the suburbs to a job you resent -- there often doesn't seem much point to your own existence. Everything has been stripped of its meaning.
The spiritual crisis also explains why people aren't having kids. If there's no point to anything, why go through all the work and hardship? Parents often want to bring more happiness into the world. But if you're deeply unhappy, the logic changes.
The scenario you paint is one where everything has been stripped of meaning. One option is to seek more meaningful work and social relationships, on an individual level, and/or on a societal movement level. Or one can seek some supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people, to anethisize oneself to being a miserable wage slave with a miserable life.
I'm very much an atheist and a positivist too. I rejected religion growing up.
But we don't have to cede the concept of spirituality to organized religion. Spirituality is so much more than that. It's about purpose, connection, and what it means to be a human. You can practice spirituality by meditating at home, just sitting with your thoughts and feelings. No delusion or supernatural beliefs required!
When you talk about the future of mankind, our role in it, and what's the most meaningful way to live our lives -- that's what I mean by spirituality.
In my experience friends and family are the primary contributor to happiness. Provided they are good people. Else its a train wreck. It doesn't matter if they are religious or not.
I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church)
For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity.
Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about religion than about physics. In fact his view of gd as singular was considered to be heretical by the Anglican church but was perfectly aligned to the old testament - what I am getting at here is that he didn't just happen to have faith by default but had a very deep and personal one. At the conclusion of principia Mathematica he wrote tons friend that he believed this work would make it obvious to a thinking man that presence of gd.
Georges lemaitre who came up with the big bang theory was a Belgian Catholic priest. The secular science at the time was adamant about the Greek model of the eternal universe, and we owe our modern view of it to someone who came into the situation already believing a moment of creation.
Einstein was famously a non practicing jew who nonetheless at age 11 had taught himself Judaism and later in life advocated for he study of talmud. I can't claim him to be a practitioner but his own writing speaks to a certain expectation of how the universe ought to be (that was later proven out in math) and a belief in a sort of spirit of the universe. The point isn't that he was an orthodox jew but that he is very far from a modern atheist.
So I don't actually agree with this idea that religion is non scientific when we owe our deepest scientific understanding to men who saw themselves and the universe through a religious lens.
That's not to say that there's no ignorance in some religions and among some practitioners but rather that religion at its best can claim really significant contributions that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best.
> that I don't think are matched by atheism at its best
There are plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings. These are unrelated things.
Which is why if anyone starts claiming that “religion is good/bad” in simplistic terms, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. It is far too broad a label to make such declarations.
But this is a straightforwardly transparent attempt at apologetics. It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.
Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.
The usual argument at this point is a No True Scotsman. All those other religions do these things. Never the claimant's own.
But for every Pope Leo - who seems like an unusually decent example - there are five Kenneth Copelands, and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.
Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.
Community in practice should be wider than that.
There's some extra stress involved in finding your own way, especially in a culture of forced competition.
But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.
Why? Because the Christian view was that God was a reasonable God, and He made the universe. And because He also gave us reason when He made us, we should be able to understand the universe by reason. All these men, from Newton down to Faraday, looked at the universe and expected to be able to find out how it worked, because of their religion.
Their religion didn't lead them to a non-scientific worldview. Their religion led them to create the scientific worldview.
This can be good, you know. I mean that was the original purpose of religion.
The idea is that everyone will be good if they are afraid of judgement day. But science came along and took that away. But science (or should I say naive "scientists") did not substitute it with something that works as well. Not even close. It didn't even try.
No, it's not. Non-factual, non-evidence based worldview is part of the problem humanity has right now in the post-fact era.
>The idea is that everyone will be good if they are afraid of judgement day
I reject the notion that people can be good just because they are afraid of some powerful entity judging them. People are good because it's the right and rational thing to do. If they aren't good now, the environment is to blame which made them bad people.
>... "scientists") did not substitute it with something that works as well. Not even close. It didn't even try.
It's not the job of science to make sure people don't do bad things. Science can point to a problem, it's us, the people, who need to solve the problem.
I don't think you're wrong to analyse your friends, I think you're right that Americans pivot toward religion (or the ill defined "spirituality") when they feel they lack that something else.
But in many other places, including where I live, it's natural to lean on philosophy, personal connections, family, teaching, social work or any other "deep fulfillment activities", and in fact the kind of empty success you describe is frowned upon, among atheists just as much as among religious people.
Philosophy is part of the basic school curriculum from secondary school, and dealing with the big questions is not left for mass.
I am a full atheist, living in Switzerland. The community is strong, the neighborhood too and the city is a charm (Geneva). 3 kids, coding and spending my time contemplating humans at their best: having fun and getting on a higher ground. I don't have an answer regarding the bigger picture but I will surely think about it and get back to you.
EDIT As I wrote in another comment: confronting the truth (whatever the spirituality behind) in itself doesn't make someone unhappy, it's the sense of losing one's footing that does. In many ways, America was built along those lines.
Also the US is a very religious country compared to western or northern Europe where people aren't particularly sad.
If I understand correctly, connecting the dots from the article and your comment, beginning in 2020, everyone moved away from religion towards atheism in some kind of rapid shift?
Is this supported by the demographic data?
Living close to family is surely the single thing most could do to immediately improve their happiness.
(while not all of us are lucky to have welcoming family, the way people in the US are willing to uproot themselves and move across the country where they know nobody is extremely harmful to their senses of community)
Not a lot of "average" going on here.
No. When polled, half the population said they attended religious services regularly.
Researchers going to churches and estimating attendance found actual attendance was always less than what polls said. If people actually attended services like they said they did in polls, pews would be much more full (now and before).
Also, you know two people, but I could give examples as well - a normal secular family doing well compared to some evangelical family which is not doing well at all.
Also - there are suburbs which have, say, a sizeable Norwegian population. People go to some ELCA church. You talk to them, and a lot of them don't believe in the tenets of Lutheranism - miracles, the resurrection of Jesus etc. But they go to weddings, funerals, services, coffee after services. Dinners, clothing drives. Events around Easter. For many of them there is no belief at all, they just have coffee with their neighbors every week. Technically they are considered Christians, without believing in Christianity per se.
I write that as an atheist who is more isolated than I'd like. I'm working on community and connection but it's challenging when one works remotely and relocates to a new town.
While I recognize the community value of religion and the comfort it brings people, it comes at a huge cost that far outweighs the benefits. IMHO, organized religion is a cancer on modern society. I think there's other ways to get the good parts from it but that's a team effort.
That's also an extreme oversimplification of religion which describes only a very small number of individuals of most if not all faiths.
The vast majority are not hardliners, and understand the larger component of religion is community and shared purpose.
While a fall in religiosity may be part of the cause, I don't think a return to religion is the answer. We need to find ways to replicate the non-supernatural aspects of religion without the weird stuff.
There's a reason no atheist society has historically arisen and thrived in the way that you are suggesting. If it was possible why hasn't it happened. The idea of atheism is ancient - why has it not worked?
"Why has it not worked?" suggests that atheistic societies have arisen and they've failed. That's not the case. Atheism has just been historically very unpopular. It's only recently that science has advanced enough to put the "god of the gaps" in a sufficiently small box for atheism to arise on a large scale.
I think, given the knowledge available to us now, religion is obviously fiction. The only difference between worshipping Jesus and worshipping Harry Potter is that the former's authors are very long dead.
I'm not so sure of that. America has rapidly moved away from believing in some kind of magical spirit in the sky, but they most certainly haven't given up on religion in general. They have latched on to other blind faiths and rituals.
What hasn't typically come with those new religions, like you allude to, is a church; a place where fellowship occurs. That is a reasonable possibility for the decline in happiness. Research regularly suggests that most people find happiness in relationships with other people.
Nothing is ever single-faceted, though.
Is everyone in this comment chain arguing from a perspective of, "I disagree with author's assessment" or "I read the headline and I'm offering my own conjecture"?
It tried to, at least, but I'm not sure it succeeded. The growing secularization up to 2020 follows the long-term trend towards unhappiness and peak secularization and peak unhappiness line up too. Happiness has even started to improve in line with the growing return to religiosity that has occurred most recently. The data it presents as supposedly dismissing religion actually makes a reasonable case for religion.
Of course, the reality is that there never one reason. Americans are sad for millions of different reasons. The idea that if we fix that one thing all will become right with the world is pure fantasy.
I come from a highly religious Christian background and moved in the other direction without any ill will, most of my religious male friends who have families have confided in me that they think monogamy and general family values are worn out cultural artifacts and clearly regret buying in even though they love their kids and are entrenched in their communities.
Many already have a first divorce under their belt.
Meanwhile my atheist friends had their first kid right around 40 and are somewhere between 1-3 kids and after a fair amount of relationship churn when they were younger are now in very stable relationships, some very orthodox and a few semi-orthodox.
If the trajectory hold for this generation the same as I saw for my religious parents generation I think the trajectory looks not great for mental health on the religious side.
No, sadness becomes part and parcel of...everything! At least nowadays: New awesome toy! Kid got bad grade. Fun vacation last week! Friend's daughter died. PR riding bike! Dad needs help with a thing.
To your point: Life is rich with living. And yes, friends without kids, etc. talk about and buy toys. Cool! But/and no offense, gotta go now.
Life is rich and richly nuanced.
And yet we elected Jesus.
They're like people who see some pernicious "gay agenda" infiltrating all aspects of their lives just because they see two gay characters in a sitcom. Their fears are just projection. The power centers of the US have always been biased towards Christian conservatism. It's absurd to claim the US has ever been a truly secular nation when it isn't even possible for a President to get elected without professing Christian belief, because it's impossible to get elected President without the blessing of the deeply Christian south.
All the "moderate" Christians who couldn't stomach Trump before suddenly had no choice.
Essentially all Christian denominations + Mormons think abortion is murder. How can a candidate win a majority in a society where a plurality identifies as Christian and therefore probably takes that position?
Secularization of the majority, and the liberal culutral values that go with it just alienates these people more and more around abortion, gay rights, and most markedly, trans issues.
Although the devoutly religious are becoming more of a minority, they are far more homogeneously aligned on these core issues, and therefore easier to cohere around a "right wing" electoral block even when they do not think "right wing" around economic and political / international issues. They're willing to tolerate Trump on a whole pile of things as long as they feel he's accomplishing their "moral" goals -- and so far he mostly is.
Friendship and community are harder work than your job, because no one makes you do it. It pays off in peculiar ways many years later, if ever at all. It’s senseless effort, but only figuratively. The returns I get are incalculable, but only literally.
See also: the imago dei.
What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.
Ironically, this is the literal opposite of Christianity. Christianity in a nutshell is "Jesus saves people because we are incapable of saving ourselves."
So, yeah. "Must earn their worth" may sound "Christian", but it's not Christianity.
Jesus saves us from the final end destruction, and helps us who believe on him through our daily lives. Some people get along fine without religion. What happens to them when the final destruction (from God, not man) gets here depends on whether these people continue to do it all on their own and choose to not believe; or whether they choose to let him in and believe. In either case, Jesus is about the final end of humans which will be done by God and is outside our control, even outside Jesus' control; that is what Christianity is about.
This is true, until they have a medical emergency that breaks them because they can't afford it, or the furnace in their house breaks, or they are reno-evicted by their landlord, or their car breaks down or whatever
You're broadly right that money doesn't exactly buy happiness, but it does prevent or mitigate a lot of unhappiness
Its possible that some sub groups of people learned that work from home gave them more meaning than the rat race. For it to be true across the board? That creates a huge burden of proof.
My second guess would be politics. I have met few people in the last few years that do not seem unhappy as a direct result of our political battles. Families actually breaking up over it, etc.
Now I will go read the article ;-)
There's been a massive increase in high risk behaviors, an increase in road rage, and a spike in traffic fatalities since COVID.
If COVID brain damage affects motor vehicle operation, it wouldn't be so far fetched to say it negatively effects happiness and overall wellbeing. Covid causes a loss of grey matter affecting impulse control and emotional regulation.
If millions of people have brain damage affecting impulse control and we are all collectively quick to anger now, which will manifest as collective frustration and unhappiness.
Not unlike the theory of Lead poisoning causing crime in the 70s and 80s. Our generation may be suffering a similar fate as a result of COVID.
It seems this statement is not fully supported by the data. While there have been mixed studies linking COVID with impacts on grey matter, we can't conclude that COVID infections have impacted grey matter to the degree that it has "affected impulse control and emotional regulation".
It seems more likely that collective stress increased since 2020 due to economic gyrations that have inordinately benefitted the wealthy while the poor and middle class suffer. Governments and society have been quick to dismiss those financial and economic stresses, including efforts to minimize the true realities and impacts of high inflation.
Telling people "you're not financially stressed, you're just brain damaged!" seems like further perpetuation of that gaslighting happening to people in society who are legitimately suffering due to structural disadvantages in the economy.
Not to mention the COVID-era destruction of social connections, third spaces, and lockdowns that promoted increased smartphone reliance/addiction, and increased alcohol consumption. (Schools closed, liquor stores open)
Great food for thought about one's attitude towards wealth: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/climbing-the-wealth-ladder/
Seems like there might be a good lesson in there.
If you earn a mountain but rent is expensive and healthcare is expensive and tipping is expensive and you need to save for private retirement etc etc and end up living paycheque to paycheque then I can see that not being fun despite incredible top line salary.
ex: 50 years ago, everyone had seen at least an episode of "I Love Lucy" which was the most watched show in the US. With only a few networks and some very popular culture there was more cohesion. Even with political discourse it was often presented in a much less polarizing way.
I would also point the blame at a lot of what I can only summarize as excessive internalized guilt. Often over things you, personally have no impact on. As well as trends towards coddling anxiety. Where the only true way to get past anxiety is to do more of what gives you anxiety, whatever it takes to actually do that.
I'd also say that "rich" is largely subjective, and common, regular expenses have become extremely burdensome this past few years... If you look at the pricing trends in fast food, it seems to have really ramped up since around 2018-2019 and over the top during COVID... far more than inflation alone can justify, and I think is mostly plain greed. People feel squeezed out and it's hard to overcome.
Hard to not see him as an enemy of change and in-favor of elites over workers.
It was succinctly put: the top 10% of earners - those making 250k or more - do 50% of the spending. If you're a company with a product or service, are you going to cater to the 90% or the affluent 10%? Clearly the latter - so as a result the bottom 90% of the country just feels like they're "keeping up with the Joneses" all the time.
Probably a lot of hand-wavy behavioral economics here and I am sure the answer to "Why are we so sad" is more complex...
Because I live in a low cost-of-living city, locally I'm well within the top 1% of income earners here and within the top 5% nationally. My day-to-day life is not significantly different from my next door neighbors who earn 1/4 or less than what I do. Where the difference in spending happens is primarily in three ways:
1. Quality of goods and services
This is expressed in many ways, but maybe the most obvious is basic daily necessities. Health is wealth, and we invest in our health by being much more conscientious about what food we eat, where it comes from, and how its prepared. We cook at home, as do our neighbors. But our neighbors do it to save money vs eating out, we do it to emphasize our health vs eating out. It would probably be cheaper for us to eat out every meal vs cooking at home, but by eating at home we only consume high quality groceries packaged in a way to minimize our exposure to microplastics and other environmental contaminants (although it literally rains microplastics now, so it's basically impossible to eliminate). We have tens of thousands of dollars in equipment installed in our home to filter the water we get from the city so that we are drinking, cooking, and showering with effectively "perfect" water, where our neighbors just use what the city provides that is technically "safe" but contains PFAS, microplastics, and pesticide contamination.
This also comes about in other aspects, for instance I recently replaced the tires on my car. I replaced them on time, within the appropriate wear levels for replacement. I bought the highest quality tires that were available, without consideration of cost. Most of my neighbors drive on tires until they start to wear through to the steel belts, well past being bald, and buy the cheapest tires available. It was $1250 for new tires on my car, mount and balanced and installed. It would have been $380 for the cheapest tires with the same service, so I spent almost 4x as much but have significantly better tires (and I understand the importance of this).
2. Non-essential services that improve our quality of life
We have a company that manages our mowing and landscaping so I don't have to do it myself during hot Texas summers. I am a competent DIYer but hired people to fix my roof, retile my shower, and do various other home repairs I could have done myself but could afford to hire out. We have bi-weekly house cleaning, because while we keep a fairly clean house ourselves, it's nice to have someone come in and clean every single surface on a regular basis which goes far beyond what we do day-to-day, we even pay extra for a housekeeping service that uses ecofriendly products with minimal direct environmental impact (e.g. are not bad for you to be around, like just using plain vinegar in many cases) and trains their staff specifically on using these types of products which require specific workflows to work effectively as the trade-off to being much safer. I have a mobile detailer come by once in awhile to clean and detail my car and my wife's car inside and out, both of our vehicles are ceramic coated and tinted, we got our home windows tinted as well. It's nice being able to get into a clean car that isn't an oven without having to invest a lot of effort yourself. When I was younger I'd go to a self-spray car wash and feed in $8 in quarters and spend 2 hours going at it myself, but now I don't have to deal with it. My neighbor DIYes all their fixes and spends a Saturday doing a 3-bucket wash on their truck when they get time, they clean their own house and do annual spring cleaning around the time the city does bulk pickup.
3. Additional expenses related to health and hobbies
My neighbor has weights in his garage and a treadmill and works out every day. I have a gym membership, my wife does pilates and yoga classes. My neighbors have several hobbies, but they're hobbies that mostly involve minimal equipment and can be done in public places like parks. I have several hobbies, and while some are pretty cheap, several are fairly expensive and require private memberships or land lease/ownership to participate in. I don't know how often my neighbor goes to the doctor, we don't really discuss that, but my family has a Direct Primary Care membership, goes to the doctor when we need to without any concern, and in a few instances we'd use in-home/concierge health services like nurses on-call that can come give you an IV at home w/ fluids + Zofran when you've got a stomach illness. I would guess my neighbors avoid going to the doctor unless strictly necessary and when they do, they go down the street to urgent care and wait in line.
From the outside, or even inside our home, we don't live a significantly different life than our neighbors. We don't life an particularly affluent gated community, we just live in a normal neighborhood in the city in a normal house with mostly blue collar workers as neighbors. But because we can afford it we spend on our health and on ensuring if we're going to buy something its of the highest quality we can acquire. We don't have a lot of "stuff", we don't need a lot of "stuff", but if we get something it's the best of that thing available.
> I wonder just how much of that 50% of spending is stuff that the bottom 90% would actually be competing for
My observation anecdotally is that everyone wishes they had better stuff and could afford to spend on their health, and they may do so sporadically. You don't need to be rich to get a gym membership or to do yoga, you don't need to be rich to shop at a farmer's market or high-end grocery store for /some/ things. But you pretty much do need to be rich in order to prioritize these things over cost and budgeting. Normal groceries are already expensive for most people, so spending even more to get healthier quality groceries is out of the price range to do for every meal, but it's something people do when they feel they can. Does that qualify as "competing for"? I don't know. But I think the economic gap, partly driven by out-sized inflation, is real, and it is absolutely damaging to most people.
EDIT: Just to add on, I've moved around a bit, but lived in this same city nearly 15 years ago and live here again now. The differences in what the average person can afford are astounding. I think most people had access to higher quality food, for one thing, 15 years ago. Groceries are so absurdly expensive now that the average person is struggling to afford anything, much less high quality things. That's just unacceptable as a country, and if you can't get your basis necessities met in a way which enhances your health it is completely understandable to feel bad about the world. I feel bad about the world and I'm far wealthier than most people around me. Our system in the US is broken, and I feel powerless to fix it, even as I am personally advantaged by it.
Our money, aside from basics on which we don't spend so differently from when we made a lot less money, mostly goes to:
1) Optional but advantage-conferring or life-improving things for our kids. This is probably the biggest single category, by a long shot. This takes the form of lots of stuff.
- Mental health care that we'd have had to forego or spend a whole lot less on when we had lower income. YMMV but this one has hit us hard and we'd feel awful if we couldn't afford to at least try all reasonable options—which has been goddamn expensive. Guessing it's similar for anyone with a kid with chronic physical issues, too. There are things you can spend money on above what insurance will pay for, or to get way faster than the months it might take to work through processes insurance is happy with. If you can, you'll feel like you must. If you can't, you just... can't.
- Taking the kids to the doctor or urgent care just about every time they probably ought to go but it's not strictly necessary ("this laceration ain't gonna kill them... but if they get stitches, it won't scar nearly so badly, so let's take them in" or "I bet that's a hairline-fractured finger bone, and we can do just as well splinting that at home with like $30 or less in supplies... but let's go let them x-ray it just in case it's something worse" or "they might get over this infection but it's trending worse and I'm starting to see red lines in the skin... so instead of rolling the dice, let's go pay the gatekeeping fee to get the antibiotics I'm 100% sure they'll be prescribed after a 5-minute chat with a nurse practitioner, and that'll clear this up in 36 hours flat even though it'll cost us a few Benjamins since we haven't hit our deductible for that kid yet").
- Spending on optional education stuff.
- Spending on lots of activities that might cost as much as $200/wk or require a couple hundred dollars up-front in equipment, giving the kids a broader set of experiences without having to go "no, you can't try all three of those, you just have to guess which one you'll like and then that is what you do for at least a few years" or just "no, that's too expensive" (though, to be clear, many things still are. Most of the more-interesting summer camps still give us pause, by which I mean we have yet to send any of our kids to any of those because they're so friggin' expensive, though it's not quite out of reach of even being a discussion. Though, if we had only one kid to pay for on the same income, that'd be another matter...).
2) Spending at local businesses of a kind and degree we definitely didn't engage in when we had lower incomes, earlier in our life. Gives a feeling of satisfying a kind of noblesse-oblige to help keep local businesses alive, and we get really nice chocolates or great pastries or whatever in exchange.
3) House improvements or repairs that we'd have never done or have tried to defer as long as possible when we were poorer. Sometimes, paying to have a thing done that we'd have DIY'd before. This can be a really big category some years.
4) We don't do a ton of traveling, and don't do any remotely luxury-tier stuff (I think a $150 hotel room is expensive no matter where it is or how nice the room, LOL) but we rarely decide we want to take some kind of trip and then have to abort because we can't find any route to doing it at a price we find tolerable. So we do travel more (mostly stuff like visiting family and friends, or little weekend get-aways in the summer) and spend more on it than we probably would if had a significantly lower household income, though it's a relatively small proportion of our spending.
5) A couple summers when we had a frustratingly-healthy lawn and a goddamn HOA we paid someone to mow our lawn. We definitely wouldn't have done this when we made less money. Tiny amount of spending in the scheme of things, and not something we kept doing, but an example of the kind of little service we occasionally splurge on. Some people spend on this sort of thing basically full-time (or house cleaners, say—we've done that, too, though only occasionally, and wow does that feel weird and uncomfortable to someone who came from a sub-upper-middle-class midwestern background... actually, so did the lawn mowing, and so does hiring e.g. plumbers, I always feel like I ought to be helping them) but we just keep it in mind as something we can periodically pay for to make our lives a little easier for a while, in some circumstances. Damn nice to be able to, but not a big-ticket spending thing for us. It is a category of thing that sees almost zero spending under that 90th percentile mark, though, I bet, is why I bring it up.
6) When basic consumer goods break we usually replace them basically instantly (maybe used if we can, not new, but still). Even if the cost is in the hundreds of dollars. No delays or long stretches of going without like when we were poorer. I'm sure this causes a higher overall rate of spending. Minor, compared to some of the above, but it's a thing.
No clue if we're representative. We spend like we're fairly poor on stuff like cars, and lots of people in our income-range definitely spend way more on that than we do. Ditto the travel thing, I think we probably spend less overall on that than many folks with similar household incomes.
No hugely-expensive hobbies, which is where some folks' money goes I think. None we couldn't have supported about as well when we were at more like the 60th percentile, none that we've opened up the money-spigot on just because we can. We cut down or eliminate collections of stuff we accumulated in earlier years far more than we accumulate that sort of thing, having almost-but-not-quite no active collecting habits between us. Not big collectors. We thrift clothes, still, a lot. I buy most of mine aside from socks, underwear, and knits on ebay, LOL.
A lot of our money also goes to paying for a house in a nice school district (file under: "technically-optional spending on the kids to improve their life prospects") without compromising tremendously on size or house quality, but I don't think that counts as "consumer spending".
For example, if you expected your country to have checks and balances and not empower people who tried to damage the democracy, the reality would sadden you.
If you expected to be able to have 2 kids, afford healthcare, not worry about loss of income, live near family in a 2k+ sq ft home, and fly to Disneyworld and Hawaii for vacation, then chances are reality would not have met your expectations. Perhaps TV shows/movies gave you those impressions? Or seeing others' instagram posts?
But if you expected a smaller home, not eating avocados everyday, driving a few hours for your vacations, limited amounts of healthcare, etc, then maybe reality would exceed expectations for more people.
I imagine they are just as, if not more expensive, in places further from Mexico.
It used to be oranges that were the luxury fruit.
In the interests of being purely descriptive: married, college-educated Republican usually meant "someone who in the mainstream who had made it." You were happy with this country and where it was going.
Now, everyone is despairing about where this country is headed, albeit in different ways. No one seems particularly optimistic.
But I choose the original, abstract one - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No house needed; Diogenes can hang. I still think that's a message anyone can get behind, no matter where they are, and if they want to get behind that they're a fellow American in my heart at least.
I don't recommend moving here, but taking the time to travel for a good month across America on train or by RV could be interesting.
* Almost all of the productivity gains over the past three decades have been captured by the 1%(0.1% really). Rank and file workers (yes that includes tech workers) have seen a very minuscule portion of that. Tech got by for a while because the gains were so large and that for a while, the overall pie expanded faster than the growth in developers.
* The elites used the excess surplus to capture the govt(e.g Citizens United)and ensure favourable policy like being able to socialize losses and privatize profits which resulted in even more of the gains going to them.
* In search of ever increasing profits, the elites also funneled those gains into buying up more and more of the economy starting at the top (P.E driven consolidation) and increasingly moving lower and lower on Maslow's hierarchy (housing, food/farmland, medicine).
The lowest sections of our society started getting squeezed way before(notice where the most support for a promise to return to a 'glorious' past is), but it has now reached a point where even the upper middle class is getting squeezed and can't easily afford basic needs like housing and healthcare.
History shows that these situations are inherently unstable and don't last very long. Unfortunately for the elites, in the extreme cases they don't tend to do well in the aftermath once the proles decide they have had enough.
The best hope is that they voluntarily realize that the situation is untenable.
The key is virtue. Ethics is the science of the good. You cannot be happy as an immoral person. That's where you should look for sources of misery or unhappiness.
(We could also distinguish between happiness and joy, where, according to this distinction, happiness fluctuates because it is dependent on circumstance, while joy is grounded in permanence.)
There's a stigma against just doing something for nothing, or even doing nothing and being lazy.
Italian and French grandmothers make far better food without calling themselves "foodies" and a 15 year old from those countries has better knowledge and breadth of food.
There are so many studies showing that if you just get off of social media, everything about your life gets better. Anxiety, depression too.
There’s money in creating the perception of problems that don’t exist or creating the idea that small problems are much larger than they really are.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
- 71% of adults say that their monthly debt payments prevent them from saving.
When we say America, we can't just mean the 20% who are ok. It has to mean the 70% who aren't. America is not rich. It used to be. It is not now.
Not for any meaningful definition of "living paycheck to paycheck". Per Federal Reserve studies, the percentage of the population with no excess income after paying for necessary expenses is 10-15%. That's still a lot of people but it isn't 76%.
For everyone else, it is a lifestyle choice.
Per the BLS, the median household has ~$1,000 leftover every month after all ordinary (not necessary) expenses. That includes rent, car payments, healthcare, etc.
Americans have a crazy amount of discretionary income compared to the rest of the world.
This phrase is used so often, but I don't know how meaningful it is supposed to be
A family might make $300,000 a year and be living "paycheck-to-paycheck" while also maxing out 401k contributions, paying a mortgage on a $2 million home, and paying $80,000 a year in private school tuition.
Are we supposed to think that such a family is in worse financial shape than a family making $40,000 a year but with minimal expenses and a few months of living costs in a savings account?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/may/16/facebook-p...
A lot of people are "see money spend money". Regardless of their paycheck amount, they find ways to spend it all. This does not mean they are poor.
Pro football players, for example, are famous for quickly spending their $millions into bankruptcy.
People don't like saying America is rich because it defies their beliefs, but the actual stats don't lie. Every American I know that has moved to Europe (and I have lived there as well, in Munich) moved there with, shock...American money and savings. So they don't actually get the initial start many Europeans do and it clouds their view to think that's just how all Europeans live.
That doesn't guarantee that this will always be true, but given Europe's current trajectory, even with the US's many shortcomings...it's hard to say Europe will catch up anytime soon.
What is so sad is how much better it could be in the U.S.… but for some odd notion that Billionaires and Corporations are thought to owe so little and the people of this country thought to deserve so little.
The top 10 individually have more wealth than Iceland, which is 83rd.
The top 25 combined have a wealth of $3.2t, more than Belgium, which is 20th.
An American can get a very sad and bad sandwich for about $20 in a mid sized American city. They can get a full meal with fresh ingredients in most of the rest of the world for $10 (no tip either). Some places even under $5.
An American can rent a dump in a high crime city for $2000 a month. They can get a nice home for $500 a month in many other countries.
An American can pay hundreds a month for health insurance that rejects their claims and covers absolutely nothing, resulting in a medical bill of tens of thousands of dollars. Medicines can cost thousands as well. They can pay out of pocket for treatment in another country and it'll cost hundreds, and medicine will cost a few bucks.
The only thing in your list that could be cheaper without underpaying local workers are pharmaceuticals.
The fact that you simply can't save enough to get medical care is foundationally depressing.
Americans need to stop telling ourselves this lie. We get so little for our money compared to other countries, and we should be furious.
But I think the average resident of Taipei would trade their street food for a 3000 sqft house with a yard and a pool and a quiet neighborhood and 2 large luxury vehicles.
And then ask your if that person on the median salary has a lot of disposable income?
They might be richer than someone in a poorer country, but the median in the USA, is not rich _in_ the USA.
This seems to be true if I'm flipping burgers at McDs or if I'm on a first-name basis with Warren Buffett.
And by lack of taste I don't mean McMansions. The entire country is a little bit of a corporate dystopia. It's the end result of capitalism running with very little restraint. Sure, lots of people make great paycheques. But cities look and feel like crap, lack good mass transit, lack human scale, public education is on the ropes, healthcare is rationed according the level of wealth rather than need and people make individual choices that are just textbook cases of the Tragedy of the Commons. Good (at least in the short term) for them individually and disastrous for the society as a whole.
america has a wealth per adult of 551,350 germany has a wealth per adult of 256,180
if you exclude the top 10 highest wealth holders in each country its 543,385 vs 252,811.
america's a rich country compared most other countries its also got huge wealth in equality because its top .001% is something that doesn't exist anywhere else
The most luxurious hotels in the world, the most decadent, aren't in Washington. They're in places like Teheran. Like Islamabad. Like Kinshasa. Things like, hotels where 5 prostitutes on standby per room is standard.
The richest people in the world are people like Putin and Xi Jinping. Communists "defending the rights of the people". And whoever it is in the US at the moment don't remotely compare to them in wealth.
And what people are complaining about, in the US, but equally in Germany (well I only know about the Netherlands firsthand, but ... look at the map) is not how good or bad they have it. Simply about "how bad it's getting". In other words, they're complaining this year it's a little bit worse than last year. A tiny little bit. THAT, they can't deal with. Absolute level of wealth? Income inequality? Doesn't really matter.
And the scary question is if they'll go to war over that. They certainly have in the past.
Housing is actually quite liquid as it is incredibly easy to mortgage. More likely you are overestimating how much housing value is actually there. The majority of American homeowners have already tapped into that liquidity. Owning a house that is worth, say, $1MM on the open market doesn't necessarily mean that your net worth is $1MM.
The gist: the statistics used to define poverty are old and inaccurate.
Funny, considering this is an article by an economist. But, isn't "psychology" responsible for investigating this?
> It’s probably not just about phones and social media
The other reasons were eliminated with confidence. This one comes with a "just."
Is it really improbable that "The Sadness" isn't just phones/SM/etc? These do act on core levers of happiness, optimism, anxiety and suchlike. They are social or social-like. Our relationships are big levers on happiness. Otoh you can think through a crude neural stimulus lens. Being someplace noisy, dark, unpleasant or whatnot can also affect mood. Tech usage is pervasive enough that it can plausibly be the factor. It's uncertain, but I don't think this can be eliminated as a possible cause... even a singular cause.
It's also parsimonious (I think) with the anglophone stats,"permapandemic theory"and most of the article.
I'm actually intuitively sympathetic to the writers' economics argument. I agree. Structurally, there is a structural difference between a "chill" economy and a "highly stressful" that isn't much related to GDP (or inflation). I don't think stratification or inequality affect people as much as risk/anxiety... I imagine average happiness will be higher.
But... as this article itself points... the evidence is kind of pointing at "it's not the economy, stupid"
Luckily (or tragically, as the case may be), I think we're at the start of a new media paradigm shift. AI may replace current mediums in large parts of people's lives... and we shall see what changes.
And in some cities you actually have both. Where I live we have these big, wealthy suburbs (New Albany for example), Delaware County in central Ohio is one of the top countries by income in the whole country - all suburban. Yet we also have some absolutely fantastic and premier neighborhoods in the Columbus area with prices to reasonably match given the scarcity of actual neighborhoods and such, though I actually think the homes in these areas are a bit under-priced and the large suburban homes a bit over-priced.
the suburbs around new york are some of the richest in the world. Scardsale, every town near the ct border, rye, huge parts of li, montclair nj and the towns around it.
the average household net worth in westchester which is a huge county is $1m, thats on the same tier as wealthy parts of any major city.
Sames true of the suburban sprawl of the bay area and dc.
Some of these people meet a certain definition of "rich", as in they never have to worry about money. Most suburbanites are not rich by that definition, there's a mix of negative net worth "keeping up with the joneses" types and the single digit millionaires who are a little less flashy and careful with their money.
A useful example - I knew a guy who lived in Naperville and owned an insurance company, drove a hot Jaguar and lived in a huge house. When the housing market crashed, he gutted it and sold off all the parts he could before the bank foreclosed on it.
Think Hillsborough/Atherton/Palo Alto, Carmel IN, Newton/Brookline MA, Beverly Hills, Greenwich County CT, River Oaks in Houston, Boulder CO, Scottsdale AZ, etc
This and a few other places like it are where most wealthy people in Houston live. A suburb like Katy is great for a “rich” petroleum engineer and what not. But wealth is something else.
The wealthiest people I see don't live in any particular place. They have houses everywhere — inner city, the spacious suburbs you mention, rural, and everything in between. They don't limit themselves to living in just one country either.
Having one home and seeing your entire life revolve around it is what poor people do.
[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/table
Having a house that is large enough to support whatever hobby(/ies) one takes up is an underappreciated aspect of suburban living.
Growing up, (moderately wealthy) in a comparatively decent sized apartment, in a decent area, the biggest reason to not take up something like woodworking, or say working on a car, or for that matter gardening.
So, as soon as I graduated, I moved out of the city, into a suburb. I get 80% of the benefits of the density (there is a denser suburb 1km away), so I get walkable shops, and all the hep places to eat/drink are just 30 minutes away by car :)
Did I mention the ability to stretch my arms without punching someone in the face while travelling? (because public transport when successful (highly utilized) is crowded, and that is just plain painful)
> eating bad manufactured food
Things have changed dramatically in the last two decades. Food quality has never been better in suburban areas. Every Publix and Kroger has oat milk (I'm using this as a proxy for variety). Produce is fresher and longer-lasting. Consolidation and urbanization has left many rural towns without a local grocery store, requiring longer trips to get food, but suburbia has great variety. Overall food quality and access is better.
If you really want to understand something you need to integrate all the evidence, of course, and not just the parts that support the easy conclusion.
It's under-discussed, because we, the technocratic class, have no tools to measure it and not much language to talk about it.
Just going off of my personal experience, the same highrise I used to rent is roughly 50% more. 2k to 3k. Two of the entire nightlife districts that were very close are completely gone, torn down and converted to high rise buildings with very boring very expensive ground level retail. The few places that remain are expensive, $12 for a drink is normal, maybe a draft beer is $8. In contrast, I could go out any night and find $2-3 drinks. $5 pitcher of beer, and get a solid meal for under $10. Almost all of the sports leagues at the park next to the highrise are gone. The only festivals that can afford to operate depend on high ticket sales and drawing people from out of town which makes huge annoying crowds.
And I'm not even going back 10 years, this was like 7-8 years ago. If you go back to like 2010 things were even cheaper and more fun.
Suburbs more crowded than a city? Is this for real?
It's like that here in Canada too. Poor people rent apartments in places with easy access to transit, and if they "make it" then the next step is to buy a house in a bedroom community where if you want to do literally anything you need to pile into the car, but hey at least your kids have a yard to play in.
The next step up is being able to afford either a detached home in a upscale desirable neighbourhood, or a nice condo downtown in Toronto/Vancouver, and then again the next step after that is giant mansions outside the city centres.
80% of Canada's population lives along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor and the bulk of that is in suburbs.
Used to just be a middle class thing.
If they are making a concerted effort to drive the narrative in English speaking online communities, it would make sense that English speakers would be most affected.
Of course, access to cheap and addictive food is likely the first trigger.
At the same time obesity seems largely involuntary while not being desirable for most people, and yet, before the help of Ozempic style medication, obesity was rampant in the US.
Populations in different countries often have very different pyschologies and societal customs, including propensity or reluctance to be outspoken, to express "feelings", to complain, etc. Populations may differ in how they respond to questions about "happiness"
For example, a country with relatively high "self-reported happiness" may also have a relatively high rate of suicide
If a "happy" population is the objective, then there may be more to examine than simply "self-reported happiness"
Our energy levels are lower. This makes us more sedentary, which makes muscles atrophy, which attracts injuries at even moderate exertion, when we try to climb out of the pit.
According to the first ranking I found[0], Germany is in the the "very high proficiency" group, and actually ranked ahead of Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. And Denmark isn't on the graph. Smells a bit of cherry-picked data.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index#2...
See, in university we were in close contact to many people, in our age range, with our interests, in both academic and recreational contexts. In work, we are strictly there in professional contexts. That's not to say you can't make friends from work, I do have several people I consider friends that I met like that, but none of them live near, so spending time with them is not going to happen on a regular basis.
The main way I see people involve themselves with others seems to be through what I'd describe as "activity groups", could be the gym you go to, could be a structured class like dancing or tennis clubs, whatever. But these things are usually at most, a few times a week, for about an hour or two at a time. Nothing compared to what being at university with your peers for multiple hours every day was. I think that physical presence near other people is a hugely important driver of establishment of friendships and social groups.
Plus pretty much all of these things require you to invest additional money towards (usually in the form of a monthly bill), just to access. I didn't have to pay anything additional to join a club at university (of which I was involved with probably close to half a dozen, even if I didn't stick with all of them for all 4 years of my time there).
I probably would feel less isolated if I lived closer to my existing friends, but everyone has spread out a lot and there's not much I can do about that. The new friends I've met are usually not that (geographically) close to me either. Everyone is a 30min drive or farther away now it seems.
I've always scoffed at paying for those "activity groups" (what kind of loser would pay for friends?), but recently I've started reconsidering.
At work, you are all set one against each other to get the good projects, to be promoted, or to be spared from the next round of culling.
The workplace is a retrograde hierarchical system that is not far from feudalism.
The same demographics that are the most likely to have gone from working in the office to working from home...
As seen from a European (often going to US, have friends and relatives there) I am surprised the author does not mention how the US became so much more polarised (on the usual race/guns/abortion/sex/gov topics).
Covid fragilised people social networks (isolation, job market shifts) and they’re left herding around the usual divisive topics.
It’s not just politics. It’s throughout daily life. And it’s unfortunately amplified by core tenet of the USA - freedom : ie do whatever you want for what you believe in or want . That translates into intensity about key topics unlike other societies where core tenets have a constructive tension btw each other (eg France : liberté , égalité, fraternité) which means people are more tolerant of each other.
Finally Americans low educational standards (before university) esp in history-geography make it difficult to make sense of a more crisis-prone and multipolar world.
Europeans on the other hand have a much lower standard with what they can do (less work or ambition in anything) and more used to and taught about that shitshow you have no/little control of (=life) .. so more or less as happy as before ..
https://wtfhappened2012.com
I am an optimist, so I do think things will improve eventually, and we're going through a tough transition.
E.g., does the Mississippi Miracle translate into something notable? https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississi...
Our response to it (Iraq war, forever wars, etc.) combined with the realization that the USA are be "the baddies" and we've been lied to since forever, probably might have been the thing that set all the dominos up.
COVID was the straw that broke the camel's back. Had we _not_ had the disastrous response to 9/11, I suspect we could've weathered COVID better (like the rest of the world has.)
This is pretty intuitive. Its nice not to have to worry about money, but what is the difference between having 1M NW and 100M? If you're a mentally normal person, it just more mental burden.
And also. Up to a certain point is still a correlation. Getting a lot of downvotes by people not knowing what a correlation is.
People are happy when they are secure and unhappy when they are insecure. Who can you name is secure in all of their physical, social, mental, spiritual, etc needs right now?
money and happiness are correlated.
Also sadness is a natural and ok state of being. Being a gronked out happy zombie is unnatural and should be suspect.
I've suffered from and been successfully treated for depression. I would describe it more as an addiction to feeling low than anything.
I suspect that in the EU there can very well have been a lot of overprescription of SSRI for conditions other than depression, however. Many times, people are just melancholy because of external life factors, and no drug could improve those.
In the 2016 election it began to appear likely that this figure is closer to 30%. That impression was reinforced -- cast in concrete, really -- in 2024.
So yes, I'm sadder, because I honestly didn't think I was surrounded by so many shitheels.
Maybe policymakers who come from wealth and are thoroughly insulated from life upheavals, just don't get that and should take that into account - public information/propaganda system should project some sense of stability.
I like to think being rich is FU money to do what you want, “fuck being taxed, I have enough wealth to live in NY anyways.” I feel that the culture pressuring you to hoard wealth even at loss of happiness obviously makes for unhappy people.
Canada has fallen from 5th in 2015 to 25th in 2025 on that same World Happiness Report, but if you break it down by age demographics, over 60 are still in the top 10, and under 25's are 71st. That is the largest demographic gap of every developed country. During that time, Canada's economy has been propped up by debt, high levels of immigration leading to cheap foreign workers, and the housing market, all of which benefit the older demographics and sacrifice the wellbeing and future of younger generations.
I agree strongly with the author that inflation pays a massive role. Canada has seen even worse inflation than the USA, especially with housing and food prices. The youth unemployment rate is 14%. Canada is different from the states it appears, where the rise in unhappiness is mostly coming from the youth whereas in the States it seems to be a more general phenomenon. It's interesting how split Canada is on age demographics.
Interestingly enough, the author points to Quebec as an outlier. While they point to the language spoken as a differentiator, I think it's more likely that Quebec is simply shielded from some of the economic factors facing the rest of Canada since they hold massively disproportionate political power over the rest of Canada and receive a ton of extra federal funding from other provinces.
One factor is that there are just enough smart monolingual francophones that they cannot really effectively leave, which means that the brain drain effect, while present, is nothing like as extreme as in the rest of Canada.
The future used to look bright, and now it doesn't. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, employed, unemployed, engaged in politics, or politically apathetic -- you can still feel it.
Damn, spiritual rot, such a good way to put it. I'm gonna steal that for sure.
When your streaming service subscriptions keep going up and up and up and up, you tend to notice that you're getting the same product at a crappier value. What's more, most products and services are actually declining at the same time that prices go up as profits extract more by making the goods cheaper and the services less responsive. People are aware they're getting the short end and it's really piling up in ways that are hard to ignore.
Sure, money doesn't buy happiness. But you need some minimum. The Maslow's Pyramid. Food, Shelter.
The Rich, probably just need to get a grip, and stop complaining. "boo hoo, your life is so empty".
The Poor, probably just need security.
But the truth is everyone is less happy. Maybe there's something else going on.
There is no particular reason my personal preferences matter, but I have had a nagging feeling that all English speaking nations have been bedeviled by the fallout of the journalistic disaster that Murdoch has fostered.
> It’s not that I think the decline of institutional trust and the rise of solitary individualism ought to produce unhappiness for all who experience it. But trust, companionship, and community are shock absorbers in times of personal and national crisis. And the final thing that must be said about the 2020s is that it really has been one damn crisis after another.
https://usdebtclock.org/
In terms of global trade currency policy, many are drafting a long term policy to trade in Yuan.
Pokemon cards and Bitcoin are better bets than most current bond markets.
People that can do the math, are less happy with the obvious implications. =3
And when you only pursue material wealth, well... that is "the root of all evil"
I'm probably the happiest now than I've been in my entire life. It's all about perspective.
Average median hourly wage is not everything, but it is a sign of where the priorities of the US is, and it's not fir those who work and create wealth. As property prices soar and young couples can't afford to buy, the heirs and rentiers are doing better than ever.
Being as the bedrock of MAGA'S base is white evangelical Protestants, as Michael Harrington pointed out long ago it leads to a continuing cycle of Christianity becoming more reactionary and politically reactionary, as the rest of society secularizes. Whether or not that is a good thing, it is what is happening.
Also, with regards to phones, social media etc. and circling back to young couples, studies show married couples met 30 years ago via friends, family, church, school, bars etc. Nowadays the majority, with the number only growing, are meeting via corporations - swipe left and swipe right apps. People stay honest and play video games and watch Netflix instead of going out
The three things said not to be it are part of a shift to increasing alienation, as working people are immiserated. There was an economist 150 years ago who predicted this happening.
His job is to present compelling, interesting narratives about why the world is the way it is and what we should do about it that have one specific attribute.
The attribute is that we must never actually do anything to address the real problem, which is that the lion's share of the wealth and resources are being claimed by a tiny group of people who use monopolies, coercive tactics, buying up politics and technology to hoard and protect their wealth and power.
Needless to say his job is a great job to have because those people will be happy to pay him and promote him. It's how he makes a living.
The reason people are so sad is because they realize there's one set of rules for them and one set of rules for the people in charge with money and power. It's become absolutely obvious that if you ever get any kind of edge or get ahead on a smaller scale level, one of those people from the Epstein class or Wall Street will soon come along and take it away from you.
They'll make you pay a subscription to use your own car. They'll use algorithms to increase your rent. They'll get you hooked on streaming services, buy up all the competitors, and then raise the price. They'll take away your rights to complain about it through an arbitration clause, use non-competes to stop you from hiring people if you're a small business trying to compete. If you do manage to compete with them directly they'll use access to incredibly low-cost subsidized capital to undercut you. If you somehow navigate all of that and manage to succeed they'll buy you and turn around and consolidate your company with what they're doing to go back to their extractive profit model.
The delusion of this article is the idea that people don't really understand what's happening to them, or what the causes are, or that it's this big mystery. People actually are pretty intuitively connected to what's happening, and they'll lurch towards anyone who seems to be, at least sort of, trying to do something about it.
The problem is they don't have any choices who will actually fight for them.
Yes, thank you for saying this. Truly the "Steven Pinker" of these times. "There is actually something wrong with you if you're not loving this".
Although saying this on this platform, unfortunately, won't get much traction.
I guess I can think of worse audiences to try to get this message across to, somehow, one person at a time.
2. Our healthcare system remains a Frankenstein of a half-government sanctioned oligopoly, half-capitalist nightmare. Driving up the cost of healthcare.
3. Our governments are at best incompetent, at worst corrupt. SF spends $100k/person per year on homelessness. NY spends $80k. Where is all that money going?? Would be better to give that money directly to the homeless.
What I think everyone in this country knows intuitively is that relative quality of life is constantly getting worse, there’s no indication that it will improve any time soon, and there are plenty of indications that it will continue to get worse.
How do you measure that in a way economists can understand? I don’t know. But I trust my own intuition, and the lived experience of myself and my peers, more than an excel spreadsheet of aggregate GDP.
"Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel."
Sure a single anecdote is unreliable, but common feelings of a generation probably point to the data not capturing reality well
Relative to what?
Then it would be an absolute change, not a relative one.
- relative to peers in other countries
- relative to my parents when they were my age
- relative to how hard I’m working to find housing or a job
- relative to the way braindead economists talk about the economy in their newsletters
We remain dominant in aerospace and computer science but we're losing edge. And for computer science aka programming the techniques are easily learned and replicable so having an edge here doesn't really mean shit. Not to mention a good portion (aka majority) of the top CS engineers are either indian or chinese.
IQ in the US has also been declining in the last 2 decades as well. It's all going down. This article shouldn't be about a contrast between a great country and happiness, it should be about overall decline of an empire and a new one that may or may not take it's place (China).
The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.
We normalized children working in sweatshops making our things overseas. We made their suffering a cheap punchline and labeled comedians gritty for normalizing it. Extended the apathy to seniors working Walmart to not starve. Extended it to Amazon workers literally forced to piss in soda bottles/dying on the warehouse floor as managers tell co-workers they can't perform CPR to try to keep them alive until an ambulance comes, it's more important they just work around the body. We lost all moral compass and are horrific people. That horribleness/acceptance of horribleness is leaking from consumerism and into more and more just being what our society is now. And cheap social commentary humor absorbed the energy that would have been put to changing things and instead just normalized bad behavior. You don't get Donald Trump without Jon Stewart/Joe Rogan both normalizing behavior and building apathy. We went from serious talk about societal problems in our papers/magazine/church groups/social clubs to nodding our heads as consumed negative/lowest value humor from comedians, the most depressed/live horrible disgusting lives people in our country.
We made eagle scouts the but of jokes (again crappy humor with crappy results) and convince kids they are too cool for programs that foster everyone coming together and doing shared programs/experiences. We removed so much experiential growth/community that was baked into being a youth in the past. Instead of community sports it's fancy paid programs for the cool kids that get accepted or have high talent. You can't do anything with friends that is cheap let alone a revenue driver (buy fix junk cars, do yardword, do sidework for a friends parent who have their own business). So much we value later in life came from doing things that weren't cool or maybe we didn't want to do when we were kids or we needed to be guided into. Now we let children choose but also don't guide them to making growth choices or protect them so they can do uncool things (other than distracting games maybe or 'cool in a geeky way' things).
We slavishly worshiped the tech economy that pushed bits around in machines but don't really do anything other than replaced workers jobs or figure out how to suck money out of systems as a middle man, and made that our ideal 'dream and future'. Efficiency goes up for what was there, but we arent' really creating new just optimizing while tech bros suck the moving dollars out of the system causing entropy.
Current culture inflicts a horrific level of sexual abuse against young women. Maybe it was always that way and I was naive, but the amount of manipulation/lieing/emotional betrayal by men is unacceptable and beyond anything I experienced in the past. Add in so many more women doing sex work either online but also lots more irl. That really burns someone out/detaches. Between the two our previous social construct is gone and in the new one I personally expect women to just give up on men.
I think that there is something very medically wrong that got waived away as an 'obesity epidemic'. I hope Ozempic will lead to figuring it out and not let it be waived away as 'fat people' one the people impacted has lost the weight but still have problems. I've watched my mom and so many others go from happy, healthy, energtic to putting on weight and every day life just being very very hard that it doesn't make sense.
There's a lot going on. Past America would have addressed things as they came up. But we stopped doing that. We've looked away for so long/from so many things we no longer have a direction to look away to.
However, I think this explanation is too simplistic in that it tries to compress everything into a single recent event.
From the perspective of an outsider, I believe there is a more fundamental cause. To me, the core issue lies in the structural illusion created by capitalism and meritocracy.
Capitalism, at its core, operates very differently from the moral frameworks that shaped pre-modern societies. In earlier narratives, labor and virtue were tied to value. In capitalism, value is increasingly tied to capital itself — capital generates more capital. In that sense, the subject is no longer the human, but the holder of capital.
The problem is that this creates a legitimacy gap. To justify this system, meritocracy is introduced as a kind of narrative “MSG”:
“Anyone can rise if they have the ability.”
But reality increasingly diverges from that story. Within this framework, people are encouraged to interpret failure not as a structural issue, but as a lack of ability.
Of course, ability matters. But what counts as “ability”? Even on Hacker News, people disagree. Some argue that only low-level programmers are “real” programmers. But I work at a higher level, assembling systems and libraries to provide convenience for others. Does that make me less of a programmer? I don’t think so.
This is where the real problem begins: how ability is defined, and whether that definition actually justifies who gets access to capital and power. In my view, it does not.
From what I can see, those positions are only open to a very small minority who were not born into them. That “opportunity” functions more as a symbolic opening — a narrow door that exists to legitimize the system, rather than to truly enable mobility.
From my perspective as someone from Korea, the U.S. appears deeply unequal. It often feels as though your path is largely determined by which family you are born into, which in turn shapes which university you attend. Beyond that, the only visible escape routes seem to be extreme outliers, like becoming a YouTube star.
If I reflect on my own experience — working outside formal academia and taking contract work from Western and Chinese clients — I see similar patterns. In academia, lineage matters: which professor you studied under. In industry, being part of certain organizations confers authority, which is then passed down and reinforced. What we are seeing now, especially among those born in the 1990s and 2000s, is the first generation fully experiencing the consequences of systems that were solidified during the baby boomer era.
Capital has a gravitational property. Once accumulated, it attracts more of itself. Initial conditions matter more and more over time.
Within this structure, individual effort and ability are not meaningless — but they are no longer decisive.
Yet society continues to maintain the belief that success is determined by merit. This creates a gap between expectation and reality.
People begin to feel:
“It’s not that I failed — it’s that I was placed in a game I could never win.”
At that point, what emerges is not just dissatisfaction, but resentment and cynicism.
And this feeling does not come only from those at the bottom. In fact, it can be even stronger among those who are educated and who believed in the system — those who tried to play by the rules.
This helps explain why unhappiness in the U.S. is not confined to a single class, but appears broadly across society.
The hostility we see on platforms like YouTube or social media — and even the strange satisfaction some people feel at the decline of other groups — can be understood in this context. It is less about simple malice, and more about a reaction to a broken promise.
From this perspective, the pandemic and inflation are not root causes, but triggers. They exposed tensions that were already present.
And this is where meritocracy becomes particularly problematic.
Meritocracy appears fair on the surface, but in practice it reduces failure to individual responsibility. It reframes structural problems as personal shortcomings, leaving people without a language to explain their situation.
What remains are two responses:
self-blame or anger toward the system
And that anger rarely expresses itself in a clean or rational way. It can manifest as political extremism, hostility toward other groups, or deep cynicism.
So the real issue is not simply that “the economy is bad.”
It is that the belief that “this system is fair” has collapsed.
And once that belief collapses, no amount of positive economic data is enough to restore people’s sense of stability.
From this perspective, I also begin to understand why communities like MAGA can become so extreme. As people are pushed to the margins, they lose not only economic stability but also social connections. Without work, it becomes harder to meet others; as people age, their social world narrows. What remains, at the edge, is often religion — one of the last forms of community that still provides meaning and identity.
I do not believe in God. But I can understand why they do — and why they fight to defend that sense of legitimacy.