As an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted.
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.
The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop around 2020 specifically, which long-term trends don't explain.
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.
I have a complicated lisfranc injury that's taken years now to sort due to covid. My partner is still dealing with autoimmune issues. We will be dealing with the aftermath for decades.
I agree the article is smarter than the title makes it seem. And honestly, much better than comments on HN. The articles keeps diving deeper and asking questions. The comments here take hold of a single theory, without even thinking about the counters that article mentions. This is probably the best example of read the article, and not the comments.
I suspect that for many people, the pounding outside is what mainly affects their happiness - if everything reported in the news is sunshine and happiness, they tend happier.
And if it's all doom and gloom and "go outside and you kill grandma" - are we surprised they get sad?
I do feel this trend in my life. I have a job which I'm grateful for but nothing feels satisfying anymore, and I feel like it is much harder to connect to people or form deep relationships, especially in this field, unless you already have a clique in your workplace.
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 sense your lack of hope and see it in a lot of younger people these days.
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.
At some point you have to take some responsibility for your 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.
Relentless striving without any kind of real meaning isn't healthy. Even people who aren't deeply Christian in the religious sense are still inherited of much of the values. I.E. people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic.
I would argue that individualism is the root, more than the work ethic. I’m someone with a 50th percentile work ethic but a 99th percentile focus on community. I only have so much energy, but I make sure I reserve a good portion of it (say, at least 30%) on acts that have no “direct” benefit to me at all. Hosting a party and not worrying if the invitee’s contributions are equitable. Paying a nephews rent for a month so he can travel. Mowing the yard for a neighbor in need. Buying presents for people I see 2x a year. Calling up a distant friend just to remind them how much I like them.
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.
Christian orthodoxy begins with the assertion you cannot ever work hard enough to be made right with God but that your value is imputed by Christ’s death and never once earned.
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.
> people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic
Ironically, this is the literal opposite of Christianity. Christianity in a nutshell is "Jesus saves people because we are incapable of saving ourselves."
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.
something being within gods control but not within Jesus is a little heretical, to my understanding of the Trinity. You might want to talk through that with your priest sometime?
Or, not a popular opinion, as a country we had a kind of solidarity when things were universally tough. For me (I'm old enough) that was the 1970's with inflation, the Iran hostage situation… During that Bicentennial I remember the country pulling together more.
If that’s how you feel then you might have an unreasonable standard. People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect. Even though there are extreme downsides and externalities to being relatively poor, being lonely is not one of them.
> People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect
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
Striving without meaning being unhealthy is always true. As per the article, for some reason, Americans became unhappy across all groupings, post 2020.
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.
I feel like this is an easily answerable question, but I can see this because I grew up an atheist (and travel in those typically atheist/educated/professional circles) and have become much more aware/educated in/embracing of religion later in life myself.
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.
Yeah, I agree. I think we're deep into a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning. A lot of people are blind to the trend because those aren't easy things to measure.
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.
> 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 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 sone supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people, to anethisize oneself to being a miserable wage slave with a miserable life.
> lives much closer to family (intentional choice)
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)
Counterpoint: I know plenty of very religious families with multiple kids who are deeply unhappy.
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.
Religion has nice side effects (community), but vast downsides (non-scientific worldview, brainwashing). I think you can get the community feeling also by simply meeting with people you know, in hackerspaces for instance.
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.
Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries.
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.
>> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.
Can you justify that claim?
>> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings.
Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc.
As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
"Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."
> > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion.
I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview.
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.
That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."
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.
> America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization.
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?
Secularism in the US began rising steadily in 1990 and has actually been declining since 2020. That trend doesn't line up well with any of the data we're talking about.
I think it's a symptom of American mentality that atheism and deep meaning are considered opposites.
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.
What I should have said is the two guys are fairly representative and more importantly line up to the story: if we are so Rich how are we so sad. So I used to relatively rich friends as the example:)
The counterpoint of the example I used is that among my religious friends wealth has not degraded family/community.
Small personal example - we are undergoing home renovation right now to create a larger dining room that can accommodate better our extended family. I see this kind of behavior among friends and family who are religious and can afford to.
Not to be snide, but did you read the article? The article explicitly removes decline in religion as an explanation for this particular bout of unhappiness.
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"?
> When I came to the US in mid-90s (as an atheist) over half the population attended religious services regularly.
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 fo 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.
Because the article's question is 'how did America get so sad' and the answer is 'because it lost Christianity' because Christianity makes people less sad.
People who are lucky in life never question their faith, because why would they? That's why Christians are happier. I grew up Christian, but I was not lucky in life. Christianity did fuck all to help me. Actually, I find more peace in my lack of faith now. But everyone is different.
I'm not even sure it's Christianity that makes people less sad (I would argue that it isn't). It's the civic community that churches often create that breed purpose & happiness. Churches aren't the only types of communities that do this, but they're by far the most common.
I think the value add of religion per the top comment is that it typically has a built in community and sense of connection. Church's bring people together in multiple ways.
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.
America is swinging even more towards theocracy -- the Military Prayer Meetings say killing people is a mission from god, the White House Faith Office 1) exists, and 2) says that saying no to the rapist running government is "saying no to god"
Absolutely nothing. Religious people just tend to think they have it all figured out because they've been well trained in following tradition and avoiding questioning the status quo.
I doubt it's quite that simple, but this does seem likely to be a big factor. I say this as an atheist myself. Religion does seem to give people a purpose and a community that's difficult to find elsewhere, and that translates to happiness. Sometimes I wish I could do it, but I can't.
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.
I think this is a common reaction that I used to agree with but no longer. I think religion tends to capture something essential about reality that atheism excluded by definition.
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?
Well for one obvious example is both of those societies are only recently atheist (<100 years) and that they both have an absolute dismal birth rate that makes it hard to imagine how they will look like a hundred years from now.
Every society has had gods at some point in the past. Why didn't every society improve then? And China's growth has been very recent(after the 80s). And birth rates have absolutely collapsed across the world. It's not some unique Chinese/Japanese situation. Before their silly 1 child policy change China had insane population growth. As non religious people. Almost like these aren't really connected at all.
This is your second post in this thread insisting things are unconnected which is of course a commendable attempt to validate the atheist religious belief that everything is random and pointless. I don't subscribe to your religion.
I'll give you one data point about birth rate collapse. In the US atheists have fertility rate of 1.2 (half of replacement) somewhat religious people have the rate of 3.3 and "orthodox" closer to 6.
So you can for example visit a neighborhood on Brooklyn that suffers from a fertility crisis and then cross the road onto a neighborhood that doesn't. Across incomes and education levels - religion and lack thereof correlate almost perfectly with birth rate.
So if you told me China is atheist and suffering demographic collapse - I would say of course. If you told me there are demographic groups within China that are more religious and manage to have more kids that wouldn't surprise me as well although I don't know China well enough. I do see that exact pattern in the US both anecdotally among my vast peer group and in the stats I cited.
PS: I just looked it up. In China religious groups (eg Muslim uighurs, tibetan Buddhists and Christians are obviously prosecuted minorities that manage to have 2x the kids vs national average. Completely predictable in my framework, completely "not connected" in yours.
I think you've got this backwards. People are inherently religious. We evolved to see intent behind everything. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is psychologically powerful.
"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 mean we have academia, which is essentially secular study. Moreover Atheist don't need to go to church together to indoctrinate their beliefs, that happens every day when no miracles happen and the world continues to be kill or be killed anywhere animal intelligence has not overcome that reality in some small pocket. Atheist also tend to understand that their is no forgiveness and they have to sit with their actions for the rest of their limited days, so it's not a great idea to go out and do terrible things for treasure.
No time for sadness? HA! War and suffering continues unabated, "surprise"!
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.
The fact that so many Americans listened to and followed those religious nutjobs and they were able to sweep the government with such little effort suggests no such "secularization" ever took place.
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.
The US was 90% Christian and 5% None just 35 years ago. Today it's 63% Christian and 29% None. That seems pretty rapid to me. It has not reached anything close to a majority yet, so the religious still hold great sway. And the perceived threat from their decreasing belief share pushes extremism.
I think this is def part of it. Trump was not doing well in 2016 at all until the final debate when he cornered Clinton into a (legitimate) strong defense of her pro-choice position.
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.
The specific decline in happiness in English speaking countries is very interesting. My first guess is that non-English speakers have to use their own news sources and don't fall prey to the same doom and gloom, everything is terrible, "news" sources on cable and the internet.
When I see a sudden drop in 2020, my first reaction is "COVID." For a lot of people that was a pivotal moment with persistent consequences.
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.
I'm actually sure COVID is a big part of it. It causes neurological changes that affect behavior. Look at road safety data since 2020, it strongly supports that something is wrong.
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.
COVID is highly correlated with many other things that would increase dangerous behavior. For example, COVID saw an increase in alcohol use, which in turn would result in increases in road rage and traffic fatalities. I think so much was going on at the time that it's hard to decide what is a first degree effect versus a downstream effect, or even unrelated to COVID and more related to, say, political turmoil of the time that was already ongoing.
>Covid causes a loss of grey matter affecting impulse control and emotional regulation.
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)
I once aspired to American citizenship, and was dazzled by its wealth, opportunity, can-do attitude and freedom. Now I can't imagine wanting to go there - everything I see or hear, from both American and other sources, right or left, suggests a deeply unhappy country at war with itself.
If you just don't partake in the omniscient, pervasive, manufactured negativity in the news cycle and online, America is objectively fucking awesome. I love living here.
Most of the complaints you see in the media about America are nonsense. America is not fascist, for example. The only "royalty" we have in America are the sad remnants of the Kennedys.
It's getting to the point where I search "K-shaped" and "Cohort" in these kinds of articles before I even read them. I'm not even saying these are why, exactly, but failure to wrestle with the intellectual effort of rejecting that as a hypothesis is a frustrating omission.
One thing I realized over time America is very expensive to live in. Everything is so expensive that only the rich are rich and everyone from middle class and down are on the poor spectrum. It’s done purposefully under the cover of freedom, choice and taxes. It’s impossible to change now at least I am very pessimistic about it. It doesn’t help that the population density is very low and so many of the services just don’t have the ROI they do in other countries.
This is why GDP isn't a good measurement of the wealth of citizens. Americans get paid more but also pay more for things. Even if we assume the two perfectly cancel each other out, the net result is the same, but GDP is higher.
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...
I'd like to see a spending breakdown. I wonder just how much of that 50% of spending is stuff that the bottom 90% would actually be competing for -- eg: an expensive bathroom remodel, a luxury car, etc, vs something basic such as tennis shoes or groceries from the local market.
We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income.
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".
Happiness = Reality minus Expectation (and sadness is the negative values).
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.
Right. We just need to kill off three key unrealistic expectations: democracy, medical care, and avocados. Once we relax and give up on those three things, we'll be happy again.
I'm in Washington, and they're usually at least $1 each in season, and even close to $2 out of season at Costco. Factor in some amount not being good, 20% at least, and I probably spend at least $1,000 per year just on avocados for a family of 4.
I imagine they are just as, if not more expensive, in places further from Mexico.
Because all the boomers and a lot of genX grew up with them being something that was ludicrously expensive due to rapid transit costs that now no longer exist now that we know how (other than sheer speed) to keep them from spoiling between tree and grocery store and around the same time that we got good at that we lifted a ban on mexican imports.
The avocado meme started in Australia, where avocados are expensive due to their water requirements, and where there’s been a housing crisis for at least twenty years.
I like how the graphs suggest that prior to 2020 a certain "holy trinity" for happiness existed of being married, graduating college, and voting Republican. This passes the sniff test even though I am only 2 for 3, I was not having a great time at 1 and was downright glum at 0.
I suspect much of it was simply... believing in the American dream. And it's not just about the house in the suburbs, it's believing you're building something worthwhile, beautiful, and enduring.
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.
I could see that making sense. For what it's worth, I still believe in the American dream even though I moved overseas five years ago, more than ever in fact. Many Europeans call me the most American guy they've ever met, which I read as a tremendous compliment.
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.
> If you are looking for a sympathetic ear to explain this phenomenon, certainly do not seek counsel from your local economist
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.
The top 10% of American families own close to 70% of america's wealth. So if "America" is rich. Those are the folks who are rich. 90% of Americans are not rich.
There's a mentality I see in Americans as well as in the big European cities where everything has to be goal-oriented or you have to have accomplished something, even when taking vacations.
There's a stigma against just doing something for nothing, or even doing nothing and being lazy.
That's a cultural thing. Perhaps it's part of the Protestant work ethic. My favorite are Americans who call themselves "foodies", which means taking instructions from Tiktok influencers, visiting tourist traps, waiting in line to eat and overpaying on "Michelin" restaurants.
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.
> Around 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
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.
71% of adults say that their monthly debt payments prevent them from saving.
So why don't they take it out of that thousand they have at the end of each month? America is suffering economically and I don't think we help anything when we pretend it's not.
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?
It's somewhat of a mindset question and somewhat of a wealth question.
Mr $300k may have zero months in an emergency account, but be stable in his job as a doctor and not worry about finding work - and may actually "feel poor" because he barely has any "fun money" to waste and feels he can't buy coffee in the morning.
Mr $40k a year may have 6 months of expenses in the bank, saving half his income to FIRE, and know that anytime he wants to he can buy that coffee - and sometimes he does.
Net worth likely says Mr $300k is worth more than Mr $40k - but that may not be true forever, and Mr $40k may be "retired" at 50 while Mr $300k is perpetually working until death.
Who is rich, who has wealth, and who is happy? There are no clear answers.
You're missing the third question which is of definitions. There's an other person Mr $65k who after all their necessary expenses has $1k left over each paycheck that they spend on dinners out, concert tickets, vacations, etc so that at the end of the month they are left with no additional savings. Are they living paycheck to paycheck?
One bullet point down: "But there is no clear definition for the phrase "paycheck to paycheck," so people should be skeptical of statistics based on the concept, one economist said."
America is very very rich, the average person is much wealthier than the average European. 76% of Americans do not live paycheck to paycheck. That is a self reported stat and not reliable. It's a media sensationalist headline grabber which virtually every economist ignores.
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.
All of this stuff tries to be factual and scientific about something that is a feeling, really - if you're $80k in debt (not that I know ANYONE like that no, sirreeeeee!) and have no plan and don't even know how much you owe each month, you're going to be stressed and pissed and always surprised.
If you're in the exact same situation but have it all documented and budgeted and planned for (what I call "knowing exactly how fucked you are") you'll be much better off mentally even if not financially (at first, that will follow).
Most people in America don't live paycheck to paycheck or rack up massive debt because they're poor. They do it because they're financially illiterate, over-consume, or both. A few watch-through's of Caleb Hammer's financial audit show will disabuse you of this belief.
While it's a key indicator, even PPP adjusted income metrics are insufficient to compare happiness. e.g even if PPP may adjust for some aspects of outsized US health care costs, the risk and unreliability of access and affordability of US healthcare is not reflected in median income values.
Every single court case is two sides bringing forward only "objective facts" by definition. It's not that one side brings lies and the other facts. They both bring objective facts.
So why does it always end with the judgement falling on one side? Because facts do not a complete case make.
I have no quibble with the objective facts, but we are talking about happiness, and answers are being returned about wealth, and the discussion was talking about how wealth does not equate to happiness in some measures - particularly in terms of factors of life stability, like reasonable access to healthcare...
This is not terribly informative until expenses and safety nets are taken into account. Someone living in the Netherlands may have that 20% lower median income but being able to rely on public healthcare and get around without a personal vehicle does wonders for one's sense of peace and agency. That likely counts a lot more towards personal wellbeing than the addtional dollars in your account especially when health concerns can turn into financial concerns quite quickly.
The comment I am responding to is "because America's not rich; like 100 people here just have more money than most countries" not whatever you think I am responding to.
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 wealth of the top 100 individuals is not the claim, the claim is that the rest of the nation is actually poor if you don't include them, which is total nonsense.
That isn't a coherent argument; the latter does not support the former. The median American has a lot of money and disposable income compared to almost any other country.
America is in a weird situation where people have a lot of money in terms of the number and it converts well to other currencies. But it feels worthless within American borders.
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.
That's not weird at all it's the difference in most cases between products and services produced by local labor vs products and services produced by more abundant, cheaper labor elsewhere. I don't complain about $20 meals because I think inequality is bad enough.
The only thing in your list that could be cheaper without underpaying local workers are pharmaceuticals.
Labor is cheaper elsewhere, yes. But people getting paid lower salaries in other countries are still getting health care, affording rent, affording restaurant meals, etc. America has a strong problem where local salaries are high and prices far outpace them, despite the country being dependent upon things produced by salaries that are a fraction of typical salaries (underpaid farm labor, restaurant staff being paid under the table below minimum wage, meat plants employing children, technology all produced in "cheap" Asian countries where locals can afford rent and get health care, clothes produced in countries that pay pennies per hour, etc).
The health insurance is the part that just is hard to relate to much of the world which is where the fear/sadness comes from. It is the undertone in any wealth discussion. So many people in the US see their family and friends get medically bankrupted for one reason or another and insurance being tied to employment makes everything awful.
The fact that you simply can't save enough to get medical care is foundationally depressing.
Health insurance should have little effect on children's happiness (both because the USA provides baseline child healthcare to all, effectively, and because kids don't and shouldn't even know what "health insurance" is).
So perhaps we can cross-reference that to see if health insurance is causal (also 60% of Americans have health insurance and 'losing job' is way more about losing income than insurance).
I’m tired of people saying this. I was in Taipei recently and had to do a reality check, because obviously, the exchange rate means the food seems cheap, but I checked again against local incomes, and yes, it turns out: Taipei has abundant cheap food relative to local incomes, beyond the wildest dreams of most American cities.
Americans need to stop telling ourselves this lie. We get so little for our money compared to other countries, and we should be furious.
so you think restaurants are the most important indicator of wealth? Americans are rich in land and cars. Whether thats important to you is a different question.
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.
The average American doesn’t have this. The average resident of Taipei would not trade their quality of life for the actually equivalent quality of life in the United States. Source: multiple Taiwanese immigrants I know personally, planning to return home for this reason.
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
Now compare what you can get for that money in both countries, and you will inevitably discover that the German is wealthier in every way that matters.
ssshhhh ... in reality it's of course the case that the poorer a country is, the more unequal it is. In Pakistan the gulf between rich and poor is easily 100x what it is in the US.
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.
There's a point somewhere where the money becomes a scorecard - once you can afford the best room at the Kinshasa luxury hotel, you can't really "go higher" on that axis, you need something else.
Of course you can go higher. Haven't you read how Kim Jong Un does it? Well, communism of course, and [1]
Sure you can afford the best room. But can you afford 100 prostitutes on standby? Choice matters.
Sure you can afford the best room with 100 prostitutes. But can you afford to give 100 of your "friends" rooms with 10 prostitutes each? Can you afford to have the hotel just kick every other guest out at your whim?
Can you afford to just own the entire hotel, have it fully staffed in case you drop by with 100 friends, 24/7? (ie. what Putin does) [2]
How about 1000? (totally not a reference to Erdogan's Palace that one) [3]
To go back to North Korean "socialism"'s accomplishments: can you have such a hotel on wheels?
How about 1000, but give each of those 1000 servants in addition to the prostitutes.
I would wager a lot of "wealth" is in the value of the homes they live in. That is it is illiquid wealth they cannot use. When you factor in medical debt, their liquid wealth is a lot less rosy.
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.
Don't they usually take out the primary residence when doing the calculation? It still doesn't mean someone is completely liquid as I'm guessing many people have their money in tax deferred accounts they can't access until old age.
This discussion skips any consideration of the underlying premise that "self-reported happiness" is always significant
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"
I feel like wealthy americans live like poor Europeans - they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs, no amenities walking distance so they have to drive everywhere, having to commute an hour to their job, eating bad manufactured food... I'm American but moved to Europe years ago. It may be even better being poor here because at least you might live in a village and you'll have healthcare and your government won't be trying to kill you with polluted air and dangerous food standards.
As an American, I don’t think of the suburbs when I think of rich people. I think of what’s left of our middle class just trying to do their best. Many of them probably have negative net worth when debt is considered. But they need public schools, they need big (relatively) affordable housing, they need strip centers with the same 5 restaurants every exit of the highway. When I think of wealth, I think of mostly inner city old money areas or neighborhoods that have had gentrification (not underway). They live near their work/business, near poverty even, but they don’t commute far because they value their time and they will pay for private schools and create their own sports leagues and stuff for their kids and private security to keep out the riff raff. These areas were probably a far out suburb 50-100 years ago but a city grew around them but their wealth was enough to isolate themselves. That’s where the wealthy people live.
It varies by location and by what we mean by rich. In New York, for example, you're totally right. But for most of America the model is country club + suburb, 6,000 sqft house with a pool, big public school district that is very well funded, SUVs, &c. for the "rich".
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.
Have you been to NY? It’s both. There are wealthy folks in the city but also some of suburbs are also some of the wealthiest places on the planet. Folks forget that you drive 30 minutes from the city center and you’re basically driving through neighborhoods of $1M+ homes that go on for miles and miles. It flies below the radar, which is precisely why so many wealthy folks hang out there.
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.
I'm not sure you're contradicting the parent. There are "elite" suburbs/coastal towns surrounding a lot of "elite" cities. There's something of a preference (and life stage) whether someone has a nice condo in a city or a nice suburban/exurban home (or admittedly both in some cases). The balance doubtless varies depending on the locale; there are some cities that aren't generally considered very desirable while some of thee suburbs/exurbs/nearby smaller cities are.
Net worth means little when you have to spend 2+ hours commuting via public transit 5 out of 7 days per week, so that you basically only live for weekends. Obviously, it's a choice to give up your 30s/40s for a secure 50s/60s or whatever, but the definition of "wealth" is not so clear to me in that scenario.
The suburban wealthy are a little more McMansion/nouveau riche.
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.
As a SDM, something about being able to retire immediately changes you. That violently brings into focus a new most important aspect of wealth.
I’m still working (I enjoy it!). But, having a job is no longer stressful. Small stuff completely doesn’t matter and big stuff barely moves the needle.
I screw up at work? What are they gonna do, fire me? lol who cares.
Doing salary or raise negotiations? Max the band out. What are they gonna do, not hire me? lol who cares.
It’s even more extreme in the Bay Area. While San Francisco is a job center, there are also major suburban job centers such as Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The problem is living close to work is painfully expensive for all but the most well-off employees. A Google executive could comfortably afford a nice house in Los Altos or Palo Alto and have an easy commute. A Google engineer could commute from Fremont or Pleasanton, which would be grueling in a car, but is comfortable on a Google shuttle bus with leather seats and WiFi. But if you’re a teacher working for a school in Mountain View, my condolences. If you want to afford to buy, you’re looking at a grueling commute from either a middle-class exurb like Tracy or from a high-crime, impoverished area like East Oakland. Even renting an apartment closer to work would be daunting in terms of cost.
Eh, the wealthiest in America mostly live in spacious suburbs. They aren't very city-like, but they're not the same suburbs as GP mentioned either. In every wealthy metro, there will be a couple areas that the wealthiest coalesce around.
Think Hillsborough/Atherton/Palo Alto, Carmel IN, Newton/Brookline MA, Beverly Hills, Greenwich County CT, River Oaks in Houston, Boulder CO, Scottsdale AZ, etc
I’m from Houston originally and tried to describe River Oaks exactly. It’s an old money suburb that is now “in the loop” before 40 miles of sprawl in every direction.
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.
Ah, when I reread it, your description is fairly aligned. I think it was the description of "inner-city" that threw me off. I don't think people think "inner-city" when thinking of these wealthy suburban enclaves. I thought you were implying a more dense and urban environment, when these suburban enclaves are barely walkable at all.
> the wealthiest in America mostly live in spacious suburbs.
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.
This reads a lot like "the way I choose to live is the best and everyone else is sad." Anyone in a dense suburb is getting all the fresh food they want from a choice of 6 different grocery stores. And it's silly to complain about suburbs being crowded in comparison to cities.
Especially since America is happier than most European countries [1]. And the ones that are happier are the Nordics and Ireland which are more suburban and less dense.
I live in a nice suburb outside of Austin in the hills, and it's incredible. If I moved to Europe, I would still live outside of the city with some land where I have privacy. Living in a dense area is cool for some people, but not others.
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)
Are you implying 30 minutes away by car is a short / good thing? That's adding an hour to anything you want to do. Assuming you work 8 hours and sleep 8 hours that's taking like 15% of your free time just in getting somewhere.
I totally agree with your analysis of suburban Americans' lifestyles! Social isolation is endemic in suburbs.
> 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.
You might use oat milk as a proxy for ultra-processed food. I used to live next door to a farm and I know how milking works - don’t ask me to milk an oat, though.
It's the combination, young people are supposed to be doing fun stuff, and the idea was you needed to live in the city to do it. And you went for a less desirable living situation because it was cheap but near the fun stuff which was also cheap. Now the amount of fun stuff in cities is drastically reduced, it costs way more to live and the fun stuff is unreasonably expensive.
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.
Quibble, Europe has worse air quality than the US. Not sure what 'dangerous food standards' you're referring to either. A lot of European food regs serve more as protectionist schemes for their local industry than things that actually have an impact on public health.
The suburb move is sort of a nouveau-riche/upper middle class thing.
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.
It's similar in Canada as well, I think that is simply the outcome of massive countries. Not everyone can afford to live in the big cities, whereas in Europe it's much harder to even find a place to live that isn't either a big city or right next to one.
Kinda lost me when he got to the bit about English proficiency.
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.
The wealth of America may not be the money held by the average population but the buying power and choices available to the average population. I just spent 5 months in the richest country in the Caribbean and the purchasing choices are limited in all but the largest cities. The largest cities still don't have selection of consumer products available in most of the USA. I understand that this doesn't buy happiness but it is eye opening. I never really understood this measure of consumerism before but it is clear to me now.
Trust is a major theme & I agree.
Beyond trust, I think individualism is another major theme, especially from the perspective of an Eastern cultural background. If too much of my time and energy is spent turning inward and focusing on myself, that feels completely opposite to what Buddhism teaches: letting go of self-grasping is the path to happiness.
So the whole mechanism of capitalism is based on the fact that there are haves, and have-nots, albeit with freedom to move upward. The system literally does not work with everyone being a "have", if that happens, the newly minted "haves" just bring down the existing "haves" into a new class of "have-nots". That's essentially what's happened, the lowest of the "have-nots" have risen, which has led to everything being more expensive for the preexisting "haves".
> What’s more, Peltzman’s analysis finds that some of the largest declines in happiness seem concentrated among well-to-do demographics, like older people, white people, and college graduates.
The same demographics that are the most likely to have gone from working in the office to working from home...
Any "aggregate" statistic needs to be broken out until it is understood. Is everyone dropping, or is it a certain subset of poor, etc that is dropping?
Life is about habits. The pandemic interrupted many good habits people had--going outside, doing sports, meeting people--and many people haven't restarted these habits, in part due to a collective cold start problem.
I find it interesting that all the trend lines start going negative around 2001. I wonder why that's not remarked upon? 9/11 itself was - obviously - epically terrible, but the impact of the event was recoverable.
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.)
I see one real thing here - since 2017, the sense of stability in everyone's lives has been throughly upended - and perhaps, stability really matters for people to the point that rich, but unstable and precarious life feels worse than poorer, but predictable one. Too many things change too fast and no one knows what comes next. A lot of those things were actually positive changes, but people are afraid and bitterly unhappy anyway.
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.
But really that contrasts with the previous ~15 years during which literally nothing changed. Smartphone was basically the only invention that went mainstream between 2002 and 2017 that had any sizeable social or economic consequences. That was comfy, but not good for the future.
Stereotypes of extrema in wealth are attached to images of extrema in happiness. The poor sad person vs the rich happy one. Cliché are often great tools to make quick judgment, but of course quick judgements often fail miserably when it comes to scale the idea.
Only up to a certain point, no? I remember it was something around 100k USD, maybe 10ish years ago.
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.
It's worth noting that while the curve flattens above a threshold, it doesn't level off completely at that threshold, there is still a positive correlation, just a smaller one.
And when is that exactly? It definitely isn't making (unadjusted for inflation) the $70k that study suggests.
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?
Having been covered a good deal of the wealth across my life, I disagree. (Although it is possible of course that I was just happier when I was younger—poverty being beside the point.)
I listened to a podcast recently which mentioned a rich person living in Florida for tax reasons but really wanting to live in New York. They had an app that counted down how long they needed to be in Florida day-by-day. They hated Florida.
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.
Very interesting article, and I can't help but compare with Canada.
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.
Boomers have ridden the wave of post-WWII success and now they're cashing in. Young people can't afford housing, sure, but even wealthier young people are affected by the spiritual rot beneath it.
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.
I recently realised that I can no longer imagine my future. I used to dream about the possibilities, things I would do and be, and I simply cannot do that anymore. It's just living day to day now. I truly have no expectations for the future. It's bleak and depressing and I'm slowly losing my will to live. But hey, the boomers' housing investments are going up! So thats great.
Damn, spiritual rot, such a good way to put it. I'm gonna steal that for sure.
What an asinine question. The wealth is all in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population and they care nothing for the rest of us beyond how to exploit us for even more. Sure, we have a ton of nice stuff that benefits ordinary people like access to some of the coolest consumer gadgets at effectively-subsidized prices through exploitation of the workers in other countries, but that doesn't nullify the high visibility of how we're being treated by corps and the mega-wealthy.
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.
At the US hotel I stayed at they had a waffle machine so that you could eat waffles for breakfast. To make waffles you took a plastic cup to the "faucet" of the waffle machine, filled it with paste and then poured it into the waffle frying pan. Then you threw the cup away. Apparently, there was no need for a more efficient way. Americans seem to be very, very good at working very, very hard but not so good at efficiency.
It would probably be less efficient to have a more complicated waffle machine with a dispenser attached that costs more. Having a re-usable glass or metal cup, would require cleaning, and waffle batter is kind of annoying clean. Instead you buy a big ole sleeve of paper cups that are used one time and cost $.01 each. It is more efficient than paying someone making $20/hr to spend 5 minutes a day scrubbing it.
Presumably in a general survey, there are a lot more poor, than rich. Hence they are the 1%. So 1% of the survey respondents are rich, and unhappy. Versus the 99% that are poor and unhappy.
The Rich, probably just need to get a grip, and stop complaining. "boo hoo, your life is so empty".
But this just sounds like you're sticking to a viewpoint regardless of the facts presented. "Poor people are unhappy due to their lack of money, and rich people should be happy due to their money."
But the truth is everyone is less happy. Maybe there's something else going on.
There are plenty of real studies, not just this one, that people's happiness dramatically increases with money, up to a plateau, past that plateau happiness doesn't increase.
Last I checked, I think it was 70-80K Salary was a baseline. Below that, yes, happiness was really impacted by being without money.
And since this one was 'generic', across the population, and there are a lot of people <80K salaries, then yes, it is a big variable.
This was a great article. I particularly like that it even identified English speaking nations as a cohort.
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.
One of the clear detriments of a secular culture is you lose the source code that tells you in clear words: pursuit of material wealth is only a small part of a full life
And when you only pursue material wealth, well... that is "the root of all evil"
Social media destroyed people's happiness. It not only created echo chambers for people to reaffirm their mental illnesses (instead of getting real help for it), but also a real loneliness epidemic.
I'm probably the happiest now than I've been in my entire life. It's all about perspective.
The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US has fallen over the past 50 years. With productivity and wealth gains, the median worker working for an hour is making less. Meanwhile, the heirs and rentiers and "rich kids of Instagram" are doing better than ever. Trump just sued the SPLC for investigating neo-nazis and the Ku Klux Klan while Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, Gaza etc. are bombed, blockade and whatnot. We"re not living under the Bew Deal or Great Society any more. Things are not going back, this is the new future. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists of America just cracked 100,000 members, and people might be surprised how active they are in many smaller (and bigger) cities around the US.
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.
Because it creeped up on us in the last decade, the US is not the technological powerhouse it was once before. It's not that it's so sad here, overall America is a declining country and losing dominance along every possible vector.
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).
Every time I read one of these it’s the same. No one ever even tries to look at quality of life measurements, or cost of living relative to income, or measurements of precarity (e.g. How secure is my job? How secure is my housing?).
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.
I've seen plenty of people look at those metrics and they certainly do tell a story of growing inequality and instability. To me, it seems more obvious that those issues are largely unaddressed by the people in power because they're more concerned with growing their wealth than taking care of their people. I suspect that's obvious to Americans given their overwhelming distrust for institutions, politicians, etc. Unfortunately Americans seem to lack the ability to discern who actually cares about them. By seeking change we've ironically bolstered the opposition to our basic human needs.
Is this not addressing quality of life getting worse?
"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."
Yeah, the "economist" view of a country's state always seems awfully reductionists: "Those few KPIs look good, so there can't possibly be a way in which things are bad. So the rest must be 'feelings'."
I'm speaking colloquially, not statistically. More literally, I mean "absolutely, but also relative to various things." See the parent's reply to you for concrete examples.
Important thing to know about Derek Thompson is that he has a very specific job in the culture.
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.
> 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.
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.
You’re going to get downvoted for this, but you’re right. Literally any international travel to an actual first world country will ruin America for you. This country is a backwater in terms of infrastructure, culture and quality of life.
I partly agree with the argument that American unhappiness cannot be explained purely by economic indicators, and that the “Tragic Twenties” emerged from a combination of pandemic shock, accumulated inflation, declining trust in institutions and other people, increasing isolation, and a negative media environment.
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.
As an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted.
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.
Our CEOs are happily, gleefully, boasting about how we're replaceable. That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries.
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.
The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop around 2020 specifically, which long-term trends don't explain.
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.
These are the secondary and tertiary bad effects of lockdowns which were ignored at the time.
I have a complicated lisfranc injury that's taken years now to sort due to covid. My partner is still dealing with autoimmune issues. We will be dealing with the aftermath for decades.
[delayed]
I agree the article is smarter than the title makes it seem. And honestly, much better than comments on HN. The articles keeps diving deeper and asking questions. The comments here take hold of a single theory, without even thinking about the counters that article mentions. This is probably the best example of read the article, and not the comments.
I suspect that for many people, the pounding outside is what mainly affects their happiness - if everything reported in the news is sunshine and happiness, they tend happier.
And if it's all doom and gloom and "go outside and you kill grandma" - are we surprised they get sad?
>Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives.
No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives.
I do feel this trend in my life. I have a job which I'm grateful for but nothing feels satisfying anymore, and I feel like it is much harder to connect to people or form deep relationships, especially in this field, unless you already have a clique in your workplace.
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 sense your lack of hope and see it in a lot of younger people these days.
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.
At some point you have to take some responsibility for your 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.
Both can be true—
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.
Relentless striving without any kind of real meaning isn't healthy. Even people who aren't deeply Christian in the religious sense are still inherited of much of the values. I.E. people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic.
I would argue that individualism is the root, more than the work ethic. I’m someone with a 50th percentile work ethic but a 99th percentile focus on community. I only have so much energy, but I make sure I reserve a good portion of it (say, at least 30%) on acts that have no “direct” benefit to me at all. Hosting a party and not worrying if the invitee’s contributions are equitable. Paying a nephews rent for a month so he can travel. Mowing the yard for a neighbor in need. Buying presents for people I see 2x a year. Calling up a distant friend just to remind them how much I like them.
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.
well said. Thanks for this comment. I am trying to be more like this.
Christian orthodoxy begins with the assertion you cannot ever work hard enough to be made right with God but that your value is imputed by Christ’s death and never once earned.
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.
As Benjamin noted, “Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite […] capitalism.”
> people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic
Ironically, this is the literal opposite of Christianity. Christianity in a nutshell is "Jesus saves people because we are incapable of saving ourselves."
In addition, people have intrinsic worth/value/identity because they are made in the image of God.
So, yeah. "Must earn their worth" may sound "Christian", but it's not Christianity.
Given where the world is headed, I'm starting to see the wisdom in that more and more.
You're understanding falls far short.
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.
something being within gods control but not within Jesus is a little heretical, to my understanding of the Trinity. You might want to talk through that with your priest sometime?
Or, not a popular opinion, as a country we had a kind of solidarity when things were universally tough. For me (I'm old enough) that was the 1970's with inflation, the Iran hostage situation… During that Bicentennial I remember the country pulling together more.
More Protestant than Christian.
I think that’s only one aspect, the other is the economics make it so you have to be extraordinary to live ordinary.
If that’s how you feel then you might have an unreasonable standard. People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect. Even though there are extreme downsides and externalities to being relatively poor, being lonely is not one of them.
I don't think I do when the average low-income worker makes $<40k/yr but the income required to live in a 1-bedroom apartment is $58k/yr.
> People you might consider to be living in abject poverty might not be so downtrodden as you suspect
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
I wouldn't call that 'Christian'. The 'extraordinary work ethic' exists in Japan, too. Not very Christian over there.
Striving without meaning being unhealthy is always true. As per the article, for some reason, Americans became unhappy across all groupings, post 2020.
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.
I feel like this is an easily answerable question, but I can see this because I grew up an atheist (and travel in those typically atheist/educated/professional circles) and have become much more aware/educated in/embracing of religion later in life myself.
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.
Yeah, I agree. I think we're deep into a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning. A lot of people are blind to the trend because those aren't easy things to measure.
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.
> 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 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 sone supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people, to anethisize oneself to being a miserable wage slave with a miserable life.
> lives much closer to family (intentional choice)
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)
Counterpoint: I know plenty of very religious families with multiple kids who are deeply unhappy.
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.
Religion has nice side effects (community), but vast downsides (non-scientific worldview, brainwashing). I think you can get the community feeling also by simply meeting with people you know, in hackerspaces for instance.
"non-scientific worldview"
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.
Of course you can cherry pick famous scientists from the past to support your point, especially when it's an historical fact that theism was the default for centuries.
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.
They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.
> 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.
>> They were scientific in spite of being religious. Not because of it.
Can you justify that claim?
>> plenty of scientists including Feynman and Hawkings.
Feynman is a good example of that. He was raised in a religious family and went to synagogue every week. His dad challenged him to continuously challenge the orthodox knowledge which I suspect the father himself saw within the talmudic tradition etc.
As feynman rejected Judaism and religion in general he nonetheless hung on and hugely benefited from the approach his religious father instilled on him. Similar to what I said about Einstein above I am not trying to claim feynman for religion but I think he's very far from "today's atheists" if that makes sense. If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
>> These are unrelated things
As per above I don't see it that way.
> Can you justify that claim?
Can you?
> Feynman is a good example of that.
"Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this."
> > If feynman didn't have his father (for whom religion was integral) I doubt he'd turn out who he was.
Right. If we are just gonna reach for stuff like this then I'm gonna say Feynman wouldn't turn out to be who he was if he believed in religion.
> As per above I don't see it that way.
Belief without evidence. Hey I get it now!
I'll go further. Oppenheimer and Whitehead (neither Christian) have stated, in their respective histories of science, that the Judeo-Christian world view was absolutely necessary for the start of real science, that it could not have originated in a society with a different worldview.
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.
That's an interesting take. Many years ago, I was chatting with a coworker who had emigrated from China; we got into topics like these, and something he said stuck with me all these years. He basically lamented that Chinese civilization is so deeply driven by Confucius thought, and expressed envy at the Western world's Christian underpinnings saying that it was better at driving people to search for "the truth."
>non-scientific worldview, brainwashing
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.
> America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization.
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?
Secularism in the US began rising steadily in 1990 and has actually been declining since 2020. That trend doesn't line up well with any of the data we're talking about.
Unless the data is a lagging indicator
I think it's a symptom of American mentality that atheism and deep meaning are considered opposites.
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.
> say my average atheist friend who is a director in a FAANG
Not a lot of "average" going on here.
What I should have said is the two guys are fairly representative and more importantly line up to the story: if we are so Rich how are we so sad. So I used to relatively rich friends as the example:)
That's totally fair. I think to the extent that wealth degrades community you're going to have a clear trend.
The counterpoint of the example I used is that among my religious friends wealth has not degraded family/community.
Small personal example - we are undergoing home renovation right now to create a larger dining room that can accommodate better our extended family. I see this kind of behavior among friends and family who are religious and can afford to.
Not to be snide, but did you read the article? The article explicitly removes decline in religion as an explanation for this particular bout of unhappiness.
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"?
90% of the top-level comments here are people proffering explanations disputed in the article.
> When I came to the US in mid-90s (as an atheist) over half the population attended religious services regularly.
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 fo 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.
What has atheism anything to do with this?
Because the article's question is 'how did America get so sad' and the answer is 'because it lost Christianity' because Christianity makes people less sad.
People who are lucky in life never question their faith, because why would they? That's why Christians are happier. I grew up Christian, but I was not lucky in life. Christianity did fuck all to help me. Actually, I find more peace in my lack of faith now. But everyone is different.
Modern christianity in America is a primary contributor to my sadness.
Can you explain that?
In my experience many of them are breathtakingly judgmental hypocrites.
https://kepetersen.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-hypocrisy-ho...
I am aware of this view, I am curious how it's the primary driver of sadness for the guy I replied to.
I'm not even sure it's Christianity that makes people less sad (I would argue that it isn't). It's the civic community that churches often create that breed purpose & happiness. Churches aren't the only types of communities that do this, but they're by far the most common.
Religion is a symptom of irrational belief and groundless hope.
Which is seemingly the superior strategy for happiness and survival.
I think the value add of religion per the top comment is that it typically has a built in community and sense of connection. Church's bring people together in multiple ways.
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.
America is swinging even more towards theocracy -- the Military Prayer Meetings say killing people is a mission from god, the White House Faith Office 1) exists, and 2) says that saying no to the rapist running government is "saying no to god"
Ok. And in parallel the average American is disconnected from religion and increasingly miserable as per the article.
Absolutely nothing. Religious people just tend to think they have it all figured out because they've been well trained in following tradition and avoiding questioning the status quo.
Which would make someone less sad by default, no? I certainly sort of wish I thought I had it all figured out - I'd be way happier!
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.
I doubt it's quite that simple, but this does seem likely to be a big factor. I say this as an atheist myself. Religion does seem to give people a purpose and a community that's difficult to find elsewhere, and that translates to happiness. Sometimes I wish I could do it, but I can't.
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.
I think this is a common reaction that I used to agree with but no longer. I think religion tends to capture something essential about reality that atheism excluded by definition.
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?
Large sections of China, Japan, etc are atheists. Why do you think it hasn't worked?
Well for one obvious example is both of those societies are only recently atheist (<100 years) and that they both have an absolute dismal birth rate that makes it hard to imagine how they will look like a hundred years from now.
Every society has had gods at some point in the past. Why didn't every society improve then? And China's growth has been very recent(after the 80s). And birth rates have absolutely collapsed across the world. It's not some unique Chinese/Japanese situation. Before their silly 1 child policy change China had insane population growth. As non religious people. Almost like these aren't really connected at all.
This is your second post in this thread insisting things are unconnected which is of course a commendable attempt to validate the atheist religious belief that everything is random and pointless. I don't subscribe to your religion.
I'll give you one data point about birth rate collapse. In the US atheists have fertility rate of 1.2 (half of replacement) somewhat religious people have the rate of 3.3 and "orthodox" closer to 6.
So you can for example visit a neighborhood on Brooklyn that suffers from a fertility crisis and then cross the road onto a neighborhood that doesn't. Across incomes and education levels - religion and lack thereof correlate almost perfectly with birth rate.
So if you told me China is atheist and suffering demographic collapse - I would say of course. If you told me there are demographic groups within China that are more religious and manage to have more kids that wouldn't surprise me as well although I don't know China well enough. I do see that exact pattern in the US both anecdotally among my vast peer group and in the stats I cited.
PS: I just looked it up. In China religious groups (eg Muslim uighurs, tibetan Buddhists and Christians are obviously prosecuted minorities that manage to have 2x the kids vs national average. Completely predictable in my framework, completely "not connected" in yours.
I think you've got this backwards. People are inherently religious. We evolved to see intent behind everything. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is psychologically powerful.
"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 mean we have academia, which is essentially secular study. Moreover Atheist don't need to go to church together to indoctrinate their beliefs, that happens every day when no miracles happen and the world continues to be kill or be killed anywhere animal intelligence has not overcome that reality in some small pocket. Atheist also tend to understand that their is no forgiveness and they have to sit with their actions for the rest of their limited days, so it's not a great idea to go out and do terrible things for treasure.
No time for sadness? HA! War and suffering continues unabated, "surprise"!
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.
Sounds like you have two happy well-adjusted friends?
"America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization"
And yet we elected Jesus.
A reaction to that very same secularization. Religious nutjobs feel threatened and this is their answer.
The fact that so many Americans listened to and followed those religious nutjobs and they were able to sweep the government with such little effort suggests no such "secularization" ever took place.
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.
The US was 90% Christian and 5% None just 35 years ago. Today it's 63% Christian and 29% None. That seems pretty rapid to me. It has not reached anything close to a majority yet, so the religious still hold great sway. And the perceived threat from their decreasing belief share pushes extremism.
I think this is def part of it. Trump was not doing well in 2016 at all until the final debate when he cornered Clinton into a (legitimate) strong defense of her pro-choice position.
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.
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
The specific decline in happiness in English speaking countries is very interesting. My first guess is that non-English speakers have to use their own news sources and don't fall prey to the same doom and gloom, everything is terrible, "news" sources on cable and the internet.
Seems like there might be a good lesson in there.
When I see a sudden drop in 2020, my first reaction is "COVID." For a lot of people that was a pivotal moment with persistent consequences.
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 ;-)
I'm actually sure COVID is a big part of it. It causes neurological changes that affect behavior. Look at road safety data since 2020, it strongly supports that something is wrong.
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.
COVID is highly correlated with many other things that would increase dangerous behavior. For example, COVID saw an increase in alcohol use, which in turn would result in increases in road rage and traffic fatalities. I think so much was going on at the time that it's hard to decide what is a first degree effect versus a downstream effect, or even unrelated to COVID and more related to, say, political turmoil of the time that was already ongoing.
>Covid causes a loss of grey matter affecting impulse control and emotional regulation.
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)
I once aspired to American citizenship, and was dazzled by its wealth, opportunity, can-do attitude and freedom. Now I can't imagine wanting to go there - everything I see or hear, from both American and other sources, right or left, suggests a deeply unhappy country at war with itself.
If you just don't partake in the omniscient, pervasive, manufactured negativity in the news cycle and online, America is objectively fucking awesome. I love living here.
Where else have you lived?
I agree that you should stay where you are (in general) - but America is not what you hear about on the news or online - unless you make it so.
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.
Most of the complaints you see in the media about America are nonsense. America is not fascist, for example. The only "royalty" we have in America are the sad remnants of the Kennedys.
It's getting to the point where I search "K-shaped" and "Cohort" in these kinds of articles before I even read them. I'm not even saying these are why, exactly, but failure to wrestle with the intellectual effort of rejecting that as a hypothesis is a frustrating omission.
The article shows that the decrease in happiness is across the board, so even the wealthy cohort (the upper arm of the K-shaped chart) is unhappy.
One thing I realized over time America is very expensive to live in. Everything is so expensive that only the rich are rich and everyone from middle class and down are on the poor spectrum. It’s done purposefully under the cover of freedom, choice and taxes. It’s impossible to change now at least I am very pessimistic about it. It doesn’t help that the population density is very low and so many of the services just don’t have the ROI they do in other countries.
This is why GDP isn't a good measurement of the wealth of citizens. Americans get paid more but also pay more for things. Even if we assume the two perfectly cancel each other out, the net result is the same, but GDP is higher.
The earlier NYT article on the topic was interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/opinion/economy-attitudes...
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...
I'd like to see a spending breakdown. I wonder just how much of that 50% of spending is stuff that the bottom 90% would actually be competing for -- eg: an expensive bathroom remodel, a luxury car, etc, vs something basic such as tennis shoes or groceries from the local market.
Does it matter? Most people need a car in the US. But if cars are marketed and designed for the 10%, this squeezes out everyone else.
We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income.
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".
I would add in social media. It's a huge cancer on happiness.
Yup, it's digital fentanyl.
Happiness = Reality minus Expectation (and sadness is the negative values).
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.
Right. We just need to kill off three key unrealistic expectations: democracy, medical care, and avocados. Once we relax and give up on those three things, we'll be happy again.
I wonder how avocados became the poster child for unreasonably expensive food. They're not actually that costly.
Hard to say. They're much cheaper per pound than ground beef here in the Northeast.
I'm in Washington, and they're usually at least $1 each in season, and even close to $2 out of season at Costco. Factor in some amount not being good, 20% at least, and I probably spend at least $1,000 per year just on avocados for a family of 4.
I imagine they are just as, if not more expensive, in places further from Mexico.
Because all the boomers and a lot of genX grew up with them being something that was ludicrously expensive due to rapid transit costs that now no longer exist now that we know how (other than sheer speed) to keep them from spoiling between tree and grocery store and around the same time that we got good at that we lifted a ban on mexican imports.
It used to be oranges that were the luxury fruit.
What the hell is wrong about avocados really? They are a cheap staple food.
The avocado meme started in Australia, where avocados are expensive due to their water requirements, and where there’s been a housing crisis for at least twenty years.
I like how the graphs suggest that prior to 2020 a certain "holy trinity" for happiness existed of being married, graduating college, and voting Republican. This passes the sniff test even though I am only 2 for 3, I was not having a great time at 1 and was downright glum at 0.
I suspect much of it was simply... believing in the American dream. And it's not just about the house in the suburbs, it's believing you're building something worthwhile, beautiful, and enduring.
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.
I could see that making sense. For what it's worth, I still believe in the American dream even though I moved overseas five years ago, more than ever in fact. Many Europeans call me the most American guy they've ever met, which I read as a tremendous compliment.
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.
> If you are looking for a sympathetic ear to explain this phenomenon, certainly do not seek counsel from your local economist
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.
The top 10% of American families own close to 70% of america's wealth. So if "America" is rich. Those are the folks who are rich. 90% of Americans are not rich.
America's wealth is not a pie that gets divvied up. For example, Musk created the wealth he has. It wasn't distributed to him from others.
> 90% of Americans are not rich.
Compared to 250 years ago, about 99% of Americans are rich.
There's a mentality I see in Americans as well as in the big European cities where everything has to be goal-oriented or you have to have accomplished something, even when taking vacations.
There's a stigma against just doing something for nothing, or even doing nothing and being lazy.
That's a cultural thing. Perhaps it's part of the Protestant work ethic. My favorite are Americans who call themselves "foodies", which means taking instructions from Tiktok influencers, visiting tourist traps, waiting in line to eat and overpaying on "Michelin" restaurants.
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.
because America's not rich; like 100 people here just have more money than most countries
That's just objectively untrue.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
- Around 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
- 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.
> Around 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
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.
71% of adults say that their monthly debt payments prevent them from saving.
So why don't they take it out of that thousand they have at the end of each month? America is suffering economically and I don't think we help anything when we pretend it's not.
> living paycheck to paycheck.
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?
It's somewhat of a mindset question and somewhat of a wealth question.
Mr $300k may have zero months in an emergency account, but be stable in his job as a doctor and not worry about finding work - and may actually "feel poor" because he barely has any "fun money" to waste and feels he can't buy coffee in the morning.
Mr $40k a year may have 6 months of expenses in the bank, saving half his income to FIRE, and know that anytime he wants to he can buy that coffee - and sometimes he does.
Net worth likely says Mr $300k is worth more than Mr $40k - but that may not be true forever, and Mr $40k may be "retired" at 50 while Mr $300k is perpetually working until death.
Who is rich, who has wealth, and who is happy? There are no clear answers.
You're missing the third question which is of definitions. There's an other person Mr $65k who after all their necessary expenses has $1k left over each paycheck that they spend on dinners out, concert tickets, vacations, etc so that at the end of the month they are left with no additional savings. Are they living paycheck to paycheck?
> Around 76% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
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.
Fun fact, that's also untrue or at least dubious.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/may/16/facebook-p...
"Data from 2020 through 2022 found that between 50% and 63% of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck."
(Well, that's a relief.)
One bullet point down: "But there is no clear definition for the phrase "paycheck to paycheck," so people should be skeptical of statistics based on the concept, one economist said."
You are responding to data about the median American.
income data about the median american.
income data alone does not tell a very complete story.
Income is by far the dominant term, you're being ridiculous.
No I'm not. I'm responding to data about median income adjusted for PPP, and not adjusted for social services such as healthcare. Big difference.
America is very very rich, the average person is much wealthier than the average European. 76% of Americans do not live paycheck to paycheck. That is a self reported stat and not reliable. It's a media sensationalist headline grabber which virtually every economist ignores.
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.
One quick correction, it's not a self reported stat, it's a stat from a viral tiktok that comes from maybe a 2013 survey on a personal finance site.
> 2013 survey on a personal finance site
E.g, self-reported but with TikTok noise added.
All of this stuff tries to be factual and scientific about something that is a feeling, really - if you're $80k in debt (not that I know ANYONE like that no, sirreeeeee!) and have no plan and don't even know how much you owe each month, you're going to be stressed and pissed and always surprised.
If you're in the exact same situation but have it all documented and budgeted and planned for (what I call "knowing exactly how fucked you are") you'll be much better off mentally even if not financially (at first, that will follow).
Most people in America don't live paycheck to paycheck or rack up massive debt because they're poor. They do it because they're financially illiterate, over-consume, or both. A few watch-through's of Caleb Hammer's financial audit show will disabuse you of this belief.
Median doesn't say anything about the extremes and income isn't wealth.
While it's a key indicator, even PPP adjusted income metrics are insufficient to compare happiness. e.g even if PPP may adjust for some aspects of outsized US health care costs, the risk and unreliability of access and affordability of US healthcare is not reflected in median income values.
Yeah I totally agree that income and happiness are not interchangeable, I'm just really tired of people lying about objective facts.
Every single court case is two sides bringing forward only "objective facts" by definition. It's not that one side brings lies and the other facts. They both bring objective facts.
So why does it always end with the judgement falling on one side? Because facts do not a complete case make.
I have no quibble with the objective facts, but we are talking about happiness, and answers are being returned about wealth, and the discussion was talking about how wealth does not equate to happiness in some measures - particularly in terms of factors of life stability, like reasonable access to healthcare...
That's super cool, in this particular comment thread that's not what we're talking about.
This is not terribly informative until expenses and safety nets are taken into account. Someone living in the Netherlands may have that 20% lower median income but being able to rely on public healthcare and get around without a personal vehicle does wonders for one's sense of peace and agency. That likely counts a lot more towards personal wellbeing than the addtional dollars in your account especially when health concerns can turn into financial concerns quite quickly.
The comment I am responding to is "because America's not rich; like 100 people here just have more money than most countries" not whatever you think I am responding to.
I see Norway on that list (no surprise).
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.
If only the US was a petrostate, that would solve all our problems.
Slightly exaggerated
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.
The wealth of the top 100 individuals is not the claim, the claim is that the rest of the nation is actually poor if you don't include them, which is total nonsense.
That isn't a coherent argument; the latter does not support the former. The median American has a lot of money and disposable income compared to almost any other country.
America is in a weird situation where people have a lot of money in terms of the number and it converts well to other currencies. But it feels worthless within American borders.
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.
That's not weird at all it's the difference in most cases between products and services produced by local labor vs products and services produced by more abundant, cheaper labor elsewhere. I don't complain about $20 meals because I think inequality is bad enough.
The only thing in your list that could be cheaper without underpaying local workers are pharmaceuticals.
Labor is cheaper elsewhere, yes. But people getting paid lower salaries in other countries are still getting health care, affording rent, affording restaurant meals, etc. America has a strong problem where local salaries are high and prices far outpace them, despite the country being dependent upon things produced by salaries that are a fraction of typical salaries (underpaid farm labor, restaurant staff being paid under the table below minimum wage, meat plants employing children, technology all produced in "cheap" Asian countries where locals can afford rent and get health care, clothes produced in countries that pay pennies per hour, etc).
The health insurance is the part that just is hard to relate to much of the world which is where the fear/sadness comes from. It is the undertone in any wealth discussion. So many people in the US see their family and friends get medically bankrupted for one reason or another and insurance being tied to employment makes everything awful.
The fact that you simply can't save enough to get medical care is foundationally depressing.
Health insurance should have little effect on children's happiness (both because the USA provides baseline child healthcare to all, effectively, and because kids don't and shouldn't even know what "health insurance" is).
So perhaps we can cross-reference that to see if health insurance is causal (also 60% of Americans have health insurance and 'losing job' is way more about losing income than insurance).
I’m tired of people saying this. I was in Taipei recently and had to do a reality check, because obviously, the exchange rate means the food seems cheap, but I checked again against local incomes, and yes, it turns out: Taipei has abundant cheap food relative to local incomes, beyond the wildest dreams of most American cities.
Americans need to stop telling ourselves this lie. We get so little for our money compared to other countries, and we should be furious.
so you think restaurants are the most important indicator of wealth? Americans are rich in land and cars. Whether thats important to you is a different question.
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.
The average American doesn’t have this. The average resident of Taipei would not trade their quality of life for the actually equivalent quality of life in the United States. Source: multiple Taiwanese immigrants I know personally, planning to return home for this reason.
You have to look at net migration flows and whether things are constrained.
Look at the US median and consider again how many times that figure your own salary is.
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.
Rich is relative, it's always somewhere around "makes twice what I do" and poor is "makes half what I do" - and I'm, of course, solidly middle class.
This seems to be true if I'm flipping burgers at McDs or if I'm on a first-name basis with Warren Buffett.
Yes, lots of money and no taste.
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.
A lot of money, but disposable? HCOL takes up the slack in so many cases.
this isn't accurate.
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
Now compare what you can get for that money in both countries, and you will inevitably discover that the German is wealthier in every way that matters.
ssshhhh ... in reality it's of course the case that the poorer a country is, the more unequal it is. In Pakistan the gulf between rich and poor is easily 100x what it is in the US.
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.
There's a point somewhere where the money becomes a scorecard - once you can afford the best room at the Kinshasa luxury hotel, you can't really "go higher" on that axis, you need something else.
Of course you can go higher. Haven't you read how Kim Jong Un does it? Well, communism of course, and [1]
Sure you can afford the best room. But can you afford 100 prostitutes on standby? Choice matters.
Sure you can afford the best room with 100 prostitutes. But can you afford to give 100 of your "friends" rooms with 10 prostitutes each? Can you afford to have the hotel just kick every other guest out at your whim?
Can you afford to just own the entire hotel, have it fully staffed in case you drop by with 100 friends, 24/7? (ie. what Putin does) [2]
How about 1000? (totally not a reference to Erdogan's Palace that one) [3]
To go back to North Korean "socialism"'s accomplishments: can you have such a hotel on wheels?
How about 1000, but give each of those 1000 servants in addition to the prostitutes.
How about ...?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_B52kyj-vA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQbCOYnp_fA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVrZQmR1Syg
The US is broadly wealthier. Folks like to bash the US, but it is wealthier.
there's over 20 million millionaires in the USA, that's like, what, 1 in 20?
I would wager a lot of "wealth" is in the value of the homes they live in. That is it is illiquid wealth they cannot use. When you factor in medical debt, their liquid wealth is a lot less rosy.
> That is it is illiquid wealth they cannot use.
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.
A net worth millionaire nowadays is just a person who bought a single family home at least 10 years ago. A million bucks is not what it used to be.
Don't they usually take out the primary residence when doing the calculation? It still doesn't mean someone is completely liquid as I'm guessing many people have their money in tax deferred accounts they can't access until old age.
I'm sorry a million dollars is still a huge amount of money for normal people, whether it comes from their home or otherwise.
This discussion skips any consideration of the underlying premise that "self-reported happiness" is always significant
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"
I feel like wealthy americans live like poor Europeans - they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs, no amenities walking distance so they have to drive everywhere, having to commute an hour to their job, eating bad manufactured food... I'm American but moved to Europe years ago. It may be even better being poor here because at least you might live in a village and you'll have healthcare and your government won't be trying to kill you with polluted air and dangerous food standards.
As an American, I don’t think of the suburbs when I think of rich people. I think of what’s left of our middle class just trying to do their best. Many of them probably have negative net worth when debt is considered. But they need public schools, they need big (relatively) affordable housing, they need strip centers with the same 5 restaurants every exit of the highway. When I think of wealth, I think of mostly inner city old money areas or neighborhoods that have had gentrification (not underway). They live near their work/business, near poverty even, but they don’t commute far because they value their time and they will pay for private schools and create their own sports leagues and stuff for their kids and private security to keep out the riff raff. These areas were probably a far out suburb 50-100 years ago but a city grew around them but their wealth was enough to isolate themselves. That’s where the wealthy people live.
It varies by location and by what we mean by rich. In New York, for example, you're totally right. But for most of America the model is country club + suburb, 6,000 sqft house with a pool, big public school district that is very well funded, SUVs, &c. for the "rich".
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.
Have you been to NY? It’s both. There are wealthy folks in the city but also some of suburbs are also some of the wealthiest places on the planet. Folks forget that you drive 30 minutes from the city center and you’re basically driving through neighborhoods of $1M+ homes that go on for miles and miles. It flies below the radar, which is precisely why so many wealthy folks hang out there.
1M is not a lot of money for a home in the NYC suburbs, at least where the schools are OK. I'm referring to the nice NJ towns, Westchester, etc.
1M is also the price of a one bedroom apartment in the city of 8.6M. That is, if you don't want a 45 minute one way commute.
in new york you're not remotely right.
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.
I'm not sure you're contradicting the parent. There are "elite" suburbs/coastal towns surrounding a lot of "elite" cities. There's something of a preference (and life stage) whether someone has a nice condo in a city or a nice suburban/exurban home (or admittedly both in some cases). The balance doubtless varies depending on the locale; there are some cities that aren't generally considered very desirable while some of thee suburbs/exurbs/nearby smaller cities are.
Net worth means little when you have to spend 2+ hours commuting via public transit 5 out of 7 days per week, so that you basically only live for weekends. Obviously, it's a choice to give up your 30s/40s for a secure 50s/60s or whatever, but the definition of "wealth" is not so clear to me in that scenario.
The suburban wealthy are a little more McMansion/nouveau riche.
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.
As a SDM, something about being able to retire immediately changes you. That violently brings into focus a new most important aspect of wealth.
I’m still working (I enjoy it!). But, having a job is no longer stressful. Small stuff completely doesn’t matter and big stuff barely moves the needle.
I screw up at work? What are they gonna do, fire me? lol who cares.
Doing salary or raise negotiations? Max the band out. What are they gonna do, not hire me? lol who cares.
Rumors of layoffs? lol who cares.
What is SDM?
I assume he means "Software Development Manager".
Single digit millionaire
It’s even more extreme in the Bay Area. While San Francisco is a job center, there are also major suburban job centers such as Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The problem is living close to work is painfully expensive for all but the most well-off employees. A Google executive could comfortably afford a nice house in Los Altos or Palo Alto and have an easy commute. A Google engineer could commute from Fremont or Pleasanton, which would be grueling in a car, but is comfortable on a Google shuttle bus with leather seats and WiFi. But if you’re a teacher working for a school in Mountain View, my condolences. If you want to afford to buy, you’re looking at a grueling commute from either a middle-class exurb like Tracy or from a high-crime, impoverished area like East Oakland. Even renting an apartment closer to work would be daunting in terms of cost.
Eh, the wealthiest in America mostly live in spacious suburbs. They aren't very city-like, but they're not the same suburbs as GP mentioned either. In every wealthy metro, there will be a couple areas that the wealthiest coalesce around.
Think Hillsborough/Atherton/Palo Alto, Carmel IN, Newton/Brookline MA, Beverly Hills, Greenwich County CT, River Oaks in Houston, Boulder CO, Scottsdale AZ, etc
I’m from Houston originally and tried to describe River Oaks exactly. It’s an old money suburb that is now “in the loop” before 40 miles of sprawl in every direction.
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.
Ah, when I reread it, your description is fairly aligned. I think it was the description of "inner-city" that threw me off. I don't think people think "inner-city" when thinking of these wealthy suburban enclaves. I thought you were implying a more dense and urban environment, when these suburban enclaves are barely walkable at all.
> the wealthiest in America mostly live in spacious suburbs.
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.
Sure, they have their city pied-a-terre and rural chateau, but they spend most of their time in their suburban Beverly Hills-esque mansion
This reads a lot like "the way I choose to live is the best and everyone else is sad." Anyone in a dense suburb is getting all the fresh food they want from a choice of 6 different grocery stores. And it's silly to complain about suburbs being crowded in comparison to cities.
Especially since America is happier than most European countries [1]. And the ones that are happier are the Nordics and Ireland which are more suburban and less dense.
[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/table
I live in a nice suburb outside of Austin in the hills, and it's incredible. If I moved to Europe, I would still live outside of the city with some land where I have privacy. Living in a dense area is cool for some people, but not others.
Exactly!
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)
Are you implying 30 minutes away by car is a short / good thing? That's adding an hour to anything you want to do. Assuming you work 8 hours and sleep 8 hours that's taking like 15% of your free time just in getting somewhere.
I totally agree with your analysis of suburban Americans' lifestyles! Social isolation is endemic in suburbs.
> 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.
You might use oat milk as a proxy for ultra-processed food. I used to live next door to a farm and I know how milking works - don’t ask me to milk an oat, though.
I would suggest that grocery quality is higher in the suburbs than in the city, but restaurant quality typically isn't.
That's probably true but a lot of people don't really eat out at restaurants regularly.
Young people with good jobs who live in dense urban areas seem uniquely unhappy, though.
So then the obvious follow up question is whether it's the young, the job or the urban area (or all three) that's making them unhappy?
It's the combination, young people are supposed to be doing fun stuff, and the idea was you needed to live in the city to do it. And you went for a less desirable living situation because it was cheap but near the fun stuff which was also cheap. Now the amount of fun stuff in cities is drastically reduced, it costs way more to live and the fun stuff is unreasonably expensive.
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.
Plenty of wealthy Americans live in big cities
> they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs
Suburbs more crowded than a city? Is this for real?
Quibble, Europe has worse air quality than the US. Not sure what 'dangerous food standards' you're referring to either. A lot of European food regs serve more as protectionist schemes for their local industry than things that actually have an impact on public health.
The suburb move is sort of a nouveau-riche/upper middle class thing.
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.
>The suburb move is sort of a nouveau-riche/upper middle class thing.
Used to just be a middle class thing.
Counterpoint, suburbs are awesome. Can’t wait to watch all my fruit trees about to bloom.
It's similar in Canada as well, I think that is simply the outcome of massive countries. Not everyone can afford to live in the big cities, whereas in Europe it's much harder to even find a place to live that isn't either a big city or right next to one.
Kinda lost me when he got to the bit about English proficiency.
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...
The wealth of America may not be the money held by the average population but the buying power and choices available to the average population. I just spent 5 months in the richest country in the Caribbean and the purchasing choices are limited in all but the largest cities. The largest cities still don't have selection of consumer products available in most of the USA. I understand that this doesn't buy happiness but it is eye opening. I never really understood this measure of consumerism before but it is clear to me now.
Trust is a major theme & I agree. Beyond trust, I think individualism is another major theme, especially from the perspective of an Eastern cultural background. If too much of my time and energy is spent turning inward and focusing on myself, that feels completely opposite to what Buddhism teaches: letting go of self-grasping is the path to happiness.
So the whole mechanism of capitalism is based on the fact that there are haves, and have-nots, albeit with freedom to move upward. The system literally does not work with everyone being a "have", if that happens, the newly minted "haves" just bring down the existing "haves" into a new class of "have-nots". That's essentially what's happened, the lowest of the "have-nots" have risen, which has led to everything being more expensive for the preexisting "haves".
> What’s more, Peltzman’s analysis finds that some of the largest declines in happiness seem concentrated among well-to-do demographics, like older people, white people, and college graduates.
The same demographics that are the most likely to have gone from working in the office to working from home...
It all shifted in 2012:
https://wtfhappened2012.com
I am an optimist, so I do think things will improve eventually, and we're going through a tough transition.
This graph on that page was very interesting to me: "Below-Basic Reading Levels". People's education levels are dropping.
Any "aggregate" statistic needs to be broken out until it is understood. Is everyone dropping, or is it a certain subset of poor, etc that is dropping?
E.g., does the Mississippi Miracle translate into something notable? https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississi...
Life is about habits. The pandemic interrupted many good habits people had--going outside, doing sports, meeting people--and many people haven't restarted these habits, in part due to a collective cold start problem.
I find it interesting that all the trend lines start going negative around 2001. I wonder why that's not remarked upon? 9/11 itself was - obviously - epically terrible, but the impact of the event was recoverable.
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 the expected result of a society optimizing for GDP and quarterly results.
I see one real thing here - since 2017, the sense of stability in everyone's lives has been throughly upended - and perhaps, stability really matters for people to the point that rich, but unstable and precarious life feels worse than poorer, but predictable one. Too many things change too fast and no one knows what comes next. A lot of those things were actually positive changes, but people are afraid and bitterly unhappy anyway.
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.
But really that contrasts with the previous ~15 years during which literally nothing changed. Smartphone was basically the only invention that went mainstream between 2002 and 2017 that had any sizeable social or economic consequences. That was comfy, but not good for the future.
Interesting, have they not tried youtube?
Good article with a weird title. Why assume wealth and happiness are correlated?
Richard Easterlin found a correlation in 1974, and subsequent studies have reinforced that. See the Introduction in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9802463/.
Stereotypes of extrema in wealth are attached to images of extrema in happiness. The poor sad person vs the rich happy one. Cliché are often great tools to make quick judgment, but of course quick judgements often fail miserably when it comes to scale the idea.
Because it is mostly true? I've seen wealth and happiness in society a lot more than poverty and happiness.
Because research on this topic supports it. Happiness and wealth are correlated.
Only up to a certain point, no? I remember it was something around 100k USD, maybe 10ish years ago.
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.
Recent research disproves the old limit which has grabbed headlines like that old half a glass of red wine is good for you paper.
And also. Up to a certain point is still a correlation. Getting a lot of downvotes by people not knowing what a correlation is.
Really? Last I read the correlation breaks above a certain threshold, roughly that of "I don't need to worry about food or bills".
It's worth noting that while the curve flattens above a threshold, it doesn't level off completely at that threshold, there is still a positive correlation, just a smaller one.
No, that study was constantly misreported on. There's a nice correlation all the way up.
And that threshold would set someone in among richest 1 percent in the world.
And when is that exactly? It definitely isn't making (unadjusted for inflation) the $70k that study suggests.
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?
It's how Americans think life works (I've fallen victim to it as well).
it is how life works
money and happiness are correlated.
Having been covered a good deal of the wealth across my life, I disagree. (Although it is possible of course that I was just happier when I was younger—poverty being beside the point.)
it is well established that they are correlated.
that doesnt mean that wealth is the only factor of happiness, nor is it the strongest. but it is correlated.
Our per-capita SSRI consumption is lower than more than a few EU countries'.
Also sadness is a natural and ok state of being. Being a gronked out happy zombie is unnatural and should be suspect.
we'd be better off if this type of liberal read mark fisher
I listened to a podcast recently which mentioned a rich person living in Florida for tax reasons but really wanting to live in New York. They had an app that counted down how long they needed to be in Florida day-by-day. They hated Florida.
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.
Isn't that what Britain used to do? "Tax exiles" living in exotic places for years at a time?
Very interesting article, and I can't help but compare with Canada.
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.
Boomers have ridden the wave of post-WWII success and now they're cashing in. Young people can't afford housing, sure, but even wealthier young people are affected by the spiritual rot beneath it.
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.
I recently realised that I can no longer imagine my future. I used to dream about the possibilities, things I would do and be, and I simply cannot do that anymore. It's just living day to day now. I truly have no expectations for the future. It's bleak and depressing and I'm slowly losing my will to live. But hey, the boomers' housing investments are going up! So thats great.
Damn, spiritual rot, such a good way to put it. I'm gonna steal that for sure.
Wealth inequality.
What an asinine question. The wealth is all in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population and they care nothing for the rest of us beyond how to exploit us for even more. Sure, we have a ton of nice stuff that benefits ordinary people like access to some of the coolest consumer gadgets at effectively-subsidized prices through exploitation of the workers in other countries, but that doesn't nullify the high visibility of how we're being treated by corps and the mega-wealthy.
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.
At the US hotel I stayed at they had a waffle machine so that you could eat waffles for breakfast. To make waffles you took a plastic cup to the "faucet" of the waffle machine, filled it with paste and then poured it into the waffle frying pan. Then you threw the cup away. Apparently, there was no need for a more efficient way. Americans seem to be very, very good at working very, very hard but not so good at efficiency.
It would probably be less efficient to have a more complicated waffle machine with a dispenser attached that costs more. Having a re-usable glass or metal cup, would require cleaning, and waffle batter is kind of annoying clean. Instead you buy a big ole sleeve of paper cups that are used one time and cost $.01 each. It is more efficient than paying someone making $20/hr to spend 5 minutes a day scrubbing it.
The obvious solution is to reuse the same plastic cup for all customers each morning. Voila, now you save 309 plastic cups/day.
I am failing to make the connection with the topic of the article. Are Americans sad because they are not efficient with their waffle-batter cups?
Hello. Inflation. Wage Contraction.
Sure, money doesn't buy happiness. But you need some minimum. The Maslow's Pyramid. Food, Shelter.
Relatively well off people seem very unhappy now too, so that's not enough to explain what's going on.
Presumably in a general survey, there are a lot more poor, than rich. Hence they are the 1%. So 1% of the survey respondents are rich, and unhappy. Versus the 99% that are poor and unhappy.
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 this just sounds like you're sticking to a viewpoint regardless of the facts presented. "Poor people are unhappy due to their lack of money, and rich people should be happy due to their money."
But the truth is everyone is less happy. Maybe there's something else going on.
Because money is a big issue.
There are plenty of real studies, not just this one, that people's happiness dramatically increases with money, up to a plateau, past that plateau happiness doesn't increase.
Last I checked, I think it was 70-80K Salary was a baseline. Below that, yes, happiness was really impacted by being without money.
And since this one was 'generic', across the population, and there are a lot of people <80K salaries, then yes, it is a big variable.
This was a great article. I particularly like that it even identified English speaking nations as a cohort.
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.
Every man, woman, and child... are $113k in debt.
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
One of the clear detriments of a secular culture is you lose the source code that tells you in clear words: pursuit of material wealth is only a small part of a full life
And when you only pursue material wealth, well... that is "the root of all evil"
If you're secular and simple-minded, sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff2jQGz6DxM
Social media destroyed people's happiness. It not only created echo chambers for people to reaffirm their mental illnesses (instead of getting real help for it), but also a real loneliness epidemic.
I'm probably the happiest now than I've been in my entire life. It's all about perspective.
Man, it's almost like materialism actually is a root of suffering. Who'da thunkit?
The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US has fallen over the past 50 years. With productivity and wealth gains, the median worker working for an hour is making less. Meanwhile, the heirs and rentiers and "rich kids of Instagram" are doing better than ever. Trump just sued the SPLC for investigating neo-nazis and the Ku Klux Klan while Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Lebanon, Gaza etc. are bombed, blockade and whatnot. We"re not living under the Bew Deal or Great Society any more. Things are not going back, this is the new future. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists of America just cracked 100,000 members, and people might be surprised how active they are in many smaller (and bigger) cities around the US.
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.
Because it creeped up on us in the last decade, the US is not the technological powerhouse it was once before. It's not that it's so sad here, overall America is a declining country and losing dominance along every possible vector.
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).
Every time I read one of these it’s the same. No one ever even tries to look at quality of life measurements, or cost of living relative to income, or measurements of precarity (e.g. How secure is my job? How secure is my housing?).
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.
I've seen plenty of people look at those metrics and they certainly do tell a story of growing inequality and instability. To me, it seems more obvious that those issues are largely unaddressed by the people in power because they're more concerned with growing their wealth than taking care of their people. I suspect that's obvious to Americans given their overwhelming distrust for institutions, politicians, etc. Unfortunately Americans seem to lack the ability to discern who actually cares about them. By seeking change we've ironically bolstered the opposition to our basic human needs.
Is this not addressing quality of life getting worse?
"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."
Yeah, the "economist" view of a country's state always seems awfully reductionists: "Those few KPIs look good, so there can't possibly be a way in which things are bad. So the rest must be 'feelings'."
I mean there’s that quote from Bezos: “ When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right”
Sure a single anecdote is unreliable, but common feelings of a generation probably point to the data not capturing reality well
> relative quality of life
Relative to what?
Relative to itself. I.e. the QoL for the upper, middle, and poor are each getting worse.
> Relative to itself
Then it would be an absolute change, not a relative one.
I'm speaking colloquially, not statistically. More literally, I mean "absolutely, but also relative to various things." See the parent's reply to you for concrete examples.
I asked because if a coworker gets a bigger raise than Bob, then Bob is relatively poorer. But Bob isn't actually poorer.
- relative to last year
- 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
Healthcare.
The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.
Having to read about the crazy things Donald Trump is doing for 10 straight years hasn’t been good for my emotional health.
crony capitalism is the root cause
Important thing to know about Derek Thompson is that he has a very specific job in the culture.
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.
> 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.
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.
America's a shit hole
You’re going to get downvoted for this, but you’re right. Literally any international travel to an actual first world country will ruin America for you. This country is a backwater in terms of infrastructure, culture and quality of life.
I partly agree with the argument that American unhappiness cannot be explained purely by economic indicators, and that the “Tragic Twenties” emerged from a combination of pandemic shock, accumulated inflation, declining trust in institutions and other people, increasing isolation, and a negative media environment.
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.
This trend will continue as long as tax payers money is wasted in useless and unnecessary wars …