If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so

by momentmaker • 3 months ago

564 1071 3 months ago

derekthompson.org

functionmouse• 3 months ago

because America's not rich; like 100 people here just have more money than most countries

some_random10• 3 months ago

That's just objectively untrue.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

david9274• 3 months ago

- 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.

CorrectHorseBat• 3 months ago

Median doesn't say anything about the extremes and income isn't wealth.

dv_dt2• 3 months ago

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.

JKCalhoun5• 3 months ago

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.

iso16312• 3 months ago

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.

abraxas2• 3 months ago

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.

jandrewrogers2• 3 months ago

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.

metalliqaz2• 3 months ago

A lot of money, but disposable? HCOL takes up the slack in so many cases.

ljf• 3 months ago

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.

kdheiwns2• 3 months ago

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.

mbgerring5• 3 months ago

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.

abraxas2• 3 months ago

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.

fl4regun7• 3 months ago

there's over 20 million millionaires in the USA, that's like, what, 1 in 20?

QuantumFunnel• 3 months ago

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.

rawgabbit• 3 months ago

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.

eloisant7• 3 months ago

"Millionnaire" is meaningless.

There is a huge difference between someone with a net worth of 1M (owns a small home, still needs to work for a living) and a net worth of 30M (can get more than 1M per year of capital revenue without working).

And I'm not even talking about billionaires.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Its 1 in 70

cmiles82• 3 months ago

The US is broadly wealthier. Folks like to bash the US, but it is wealthier.

lanthissa2• 3 months ago

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

mbgerring5• 3 months ago

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.

spwa43• 3 months ago

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.

rootusrootus3• 3 months ago

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 ;-)

thewebguyd• 3 months ago

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.

brandon272• 3 months ago

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)

peacebeard2• 3 months ago

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.

Induane• 3 months ago

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.

reactordev2• 3 months ago

I think that’s only one aspect, the other is the economics make it so you have to be extraordinary to live ordinary.

justonceokay2• 3 months ago

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.

metalliqaz2• 3 months ago

I wouldn't call that 'Christian'. The 'extraordinary work ethic' exists in Japan, too. Not very Christian over there.

amunozo• 3 months ago

More Protestant than Christian.

justonceokay2• 3 months ago

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.

foobar_______• 3 months ago

well said. Thanks for this comment. I am trying to be more like this.

JKCalhoun5• 3 months ago

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.

ARandomerDude• 3 months ago

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."

newsoftheday3• 3 months ago

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.

spwa43• 3 months ago

Given where the world is headed, I'm starting to see the wisdom in that more and more.

AnimalMuppet4• 3 months ago

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.

intended3• 3 months ago

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.

ordinaryradical• 3 months ago

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.

bugglebeetle• 3 months ago

As Benjamin noted, “Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite […] capitalism.”

comrade1234• 3 months ago

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.

conductr2• 3 months ago

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.

ericmay2• 3 months ago

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.

reducesuffering3• 3 months ago

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

linguae• 3 months ago

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.

bluedino• 3 months ago

Plenty of wealthy Americans live in big cities

slopinthebag3• 3 months ago

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.

themanualstates4• 3 months ago

The stats say different. Canada has a higher urbanisation rate than Europe, defined as the percentage of the population that lives in cities.

If you look at sattelite images, a large part of Canada seems covered by native forests / mountains. That's different to EU where almost all land is divided in squares of varying colours, because a much larger part of nature was destroyed for agriculture.

asdfman12312• 3 months ago

Young people with good jobs who live in dense urban areas seem uniquely unhappy, though.

cucumber37328428• 3 months ago

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?

alexashka• 3 months ago

Corporate jobs and happiness are incompatible.

If it's any consolation - older people at corporate jobs are also unhappy.

stackghost• 3 months ago

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.

cucumber37328428• 3 months ago

The suburb move is sort of a nouveau-riche/upper middle class thing.

Used to just be a middle class thing.

kcb• 3 months ago

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.

gpt5• 3 months ago

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

linkregister• 3 months ago

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.

eitally2• 3 months ago

I would suggest that grocery quality is higher in the suburbs than in the city, but restaurant quality typically isn't.

blipvert2• 3 months ago

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.

wing-_-nuts• 3 months ago

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.

sealthedeal• 3 months ago

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.

samarthr1• 3 months ago

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)

MisterTea• 3 months ago

they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs

Suburbs more crowded than a city? Is this for real?

nsxwolf2• 3 months ago

Counterpoint, suburbs are awesome. Can’t wait to watch all my fruit trees about to bloom.

cpburns2009• 3 months ago

My pink crabapple is developing beautiful buds this year. Last year there was a windstorm that blew off all the flowers right before it reached full bloom.

lbrito2• 3 months ago

Good article with a weird title. Why assume wealth and happiness are correlated?

ambicapter3• 3 months ago

It's how Americans think life works (I've fallen victim to it as well).

john_strinlai3• 3 months ago

it is how life works

money and happiness are correlated.

strulovich2• 3 months ago

Because research on this topic supports it. Happiness and wealth are correlated.

drcongo• 3 months ago

Really? Last I read the correlation breaks above a certain threshold, roughly that of "I don't need to worry about food or bills".

lbrito2• 3 months ago

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.

geodel2• 3 months ago

Because it is mostly true? I've seen wealth and happiness in society a lot more than poverty and happiness.

jackcosgrove2• 3 months ago

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/.

psychoslave• 3 months ago

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.

zepppotemkin• 3 months ago

Interesting, have they not tried youtube?

jazz9k• 3 months ago

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.

pkilgore2• 3 months ago

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.

warkdarrior2• 3 months ago

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.

shimman5• 3 months ago

Yeah but the point is that Derek Thompson commonly rejects political materialism in favor of supporting the capitalist class and attacking unions (see his comments at Centristfest 2025).

Hard to not see him as an enemy of change and in-favor of elites over workers.

pkilgore2• 3 months ago

Did I miss the breakdown by class/wealth? I saw a bunch of other cross tabs. Not that one.

detourdog• 3 months ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn2• 3 months ago

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.

asdfman12312• 3 months ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn2• 3 months ago

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.

Arodex2• 3 months ago

"Voting Republican" being of course highly correlated, and thus a good proxy, to "being White".

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Minorities elected Trump in the last election. The counties that most swung from historical expected averages towards Trump were all majority minority and were all heavy Dem strongholds. So keep up with this type of rhetoric, it just makes more Republicans.

testplzignore• 3 months ago

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...

slackfan4• 3 months ago

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.

voxadam2• 3 months ago

What percentage of the US population that finds themselves in need of an SSRI or similar medication can afford to obtain and fill such a prescription as compared with citizens of EU countries that enjoy universal healthcare?

slackfan4• 3 months ago

I realize that you're baiting, but it's just a google search away. We're at about 10%, vs some EU countries' 13-14%. Considering that - it's highly unlikely that anybody who needs access to SSRIs does not have it.

Findecanor• 3 months ago

One should not trivialise depression. It is a lot different than just a feeling.

I've suffered from and been successfully treated for depression. I would describe it more as an addiction to feeling low than anything.

I suspect that in the EU there can very well have been a lot of overprescription of SSRI for conditions other than depression, however. Many times, people are just melancholy because of external life factors, and no drug could improve those.

slackfan4• 3 months ago

If you haven't stared at a wall deciding whether to continue living or not - you have not lived. No trivialization here.

tyleo• 3 months ago

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.

ilamont• 3 months ago

Isn't that what Britain used to do? "Tax exiles" living in exotic places for years at a time?

etchalon• 3 months ago

Healthcare.

The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.

quantum_state• 3 months ago

This trend will continue as long as tax payers money is wasted in useless and unnecessary wars …

cynicalpeace• 3 months ago

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"

0x1ceb00da• 3 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff2jQGz6DxM

ambicapter3• 3 months ago

If you're secular and simple-minded, sure.

slopinthebag3• 3 months ago

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.

asdfman12312• 3 months ago

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.

slopinthebag3• 3 months ago

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.

fidotron2• 3 months ago

I've been living in Quebec a long time, and the language thing is far more profound than most outside appreciate. It really does function as a de facto barrier for anything they want to use it for, and fairly effectively. In that sense living here can be a bit like being in a time warp.

One factor is that there are just enough smart monolingual francophones that they cannot really effectively leave, which means that the brain drain effect, while present, is nothing like as extreme as in the rest of Canada.

anonu2• 3 months ago

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...

lotsofpulp9• 3 months ago

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.

nyeah4• 3 months ago

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.

wat100007• 3 months ago

I wonder how avocados became the poster child for unreasonably expensive food. They're not actually that costly.

anovikov5• 3 months ago

What the hell is wrong about avocados really? They are a cheap staple food.

abirch• 3 months ago

I would add in social media. It's a huge cancer on happiness.

toephu2• 3 months ago

Yup, it's digital fentanyl.

everdrive3• 3 months ago

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.

anonu2• 3 months ago

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.

lamasery4• 3 months ago

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".

tristor• 3 months ago

I'd like to see a spending breakdown.

Because I live in a low cost-of-living city, locally I'm well within the top 1% of income earners here and within the top 5% nationally. My day-to-day life is not significantly different from my next door neighbors who earn 1/4 or less than what I do. Where the difference in spending happens is primarily in three ways:

1. Quality of goods and services

This is expressed in many ways, but maybe the most obvious is basic daily necessities. Health is wealth, and we invest in our health by being much more conscientious about what food we eat, where it comes from, and how its prepared. We cook at home, as do our neighbors. But our neighbors do it to save money vs eating out, we do it to emphasize our health vs eating out. It would probably be cheaper for us to eat out every meal vs cooking at home, but by eating at home we only consume high quality groceries packaged in a way to minimize our exposure to microplastics and other environmental contaminants (although it literally rains microplastics now, so it's basically impossible to eliminate). We have tens of thousands of dollars in equipment installed in our home to filter the water we get from the city so that we are drinking, cooking, and showering with effectively "perfect" water, where our neighbors just use what the city provides that is technically "safe" but contains PFAS, microplastics, and pesticide contamination.

This also comes about in other aspects, for instance I recently replaced the tires on my car. I replaced them on time, within the appropriate wear levels for replacement. I bought the highest quality tires that were available, without consideration of cost. Most of my neighbors drive on tires until they start to wear through to the steel belts, well past being bald, and buy the cheapest tires available. It was $1250 for new tires on my car, mount and balanced and installed. It would have been $380 for the cheapest tires with the same service, so I spent almost 4x as much but have significantly better tires (and I understand the importance of this).

2. Non-essential services that improve our quality of life

We have a company that manages our mowing and landscaping so I don't have to do it myself during hot Texas summers. I am a competent DIYer but hired people to fix my roof, retile my shower, and do various other home repairs I could have done myself but could afford to hire out. We have bi-weekly house cleaning, because while we keep a fairly clean house ourselves, it's nice to have someone come in and clean every single surface on a regular basis which goes far beyond what we do day-to-day, we even pay extra for a housekeeping service that uses ecofriendly products with minimal direct environmental impact (e.g. are not bad for you to be around, like just using plain vinegar in many cases) and trains their staff specifically on using these types of products which require specific workflows to work effectively as the trade-off to being much safer. I have a mobile detailer come by once in awhile to clean and detail my car and my wife's car inside and out, both of our vehicles are ceramic coated and tinted, we got our home windows tinted as well. It's nice being able to get into a clean car that isn't an oven without having to invest a lot of effort yourself. When I was younger I'd go to a self-spray car wash and feed in $8 in quarters and spend 2 hours going at it myself, but now I don't have to deal with it. My neighbor DIYes all their fixes and spends a Saturday doing a 3-bucket wash on their truck when they get time, they clean their own house and do annual spring cleaning around the time the city does bulk pickup.

3. Additional expenses related to health and hobbies

My neighbor has weights in his garage and a treadmill and works out every day. I have a gym membership, my wife does pilates and yoga classes. My neighbors have several hobbies, but they're hobbies that mostly involve minimal equipment and can be done in public places like parks. I have several hobbies, and while some are pretty cheap, several are fairly expensive and require private memberships or land lease/ownership to participate in. I don't know how often my neighbor goes to the doctor, we don't really discuss that, but my family has a Direct Primary Care membership, goes to the doctor when we need to without any concern, and in a few instances we'd use in-home/concierge health services like nurses on-call that can come give you an IV at home w/ fluids + Zofran when you've got a stomach illness. I would guess my neighbors avoid going to the doctor unless strictly necessary and when they do, they go down the street to urgent care and wait in line.

From the outside, or even inside our home, we don't live a significantly different life than our neighbors. We don't life an particularly affluent gated community, we just live in a normal neighborhood in the city in a normal house with mostly blue collar workers as neighbors. But because we can afford it we spend on our health and on ensuring if we're going to buy something its of the highest quality we can acquire. We don't have a lot of "stuff", we don't need a lot of "stuff", but if we get something it's the best of that thing available.

I wonder just how much of that 50% of spending is stuff that the bottom 90% would actually be competing for

My observation anecdotally is that everyone wishes they had better stuff and could afford to spend on their health, and they may do so sporadically. You don't need to be rich to get a gym membership or to do yoga, you don't need to be rich to shop at a farmer's market or high-end grocery store for /some/ things. But you pretty much do need to be rich in order to prioritize these things over cost and budgeting. Normal groceries are already expensive for most people, so spending even more to get healthier quality groceries is out of the price range to do for every meal, but it's something people do when they feel they can. Does that qualify as "competing for"? I don't know. But I think the economic gap, partly driven by out-sized inflation, is real, and it is absolutely damaging to most people.

EDIT: Just to add on, I've moved around a bit, but lived in this same city nearly 15 years ago and live here again now. The differences in what the average person can afford are astounding. I think most people had access to higher quality food, for one thing, 15 years ago. Groceries are so absurdly expensive now that the average person is struggling to afford anything, much less high quality things. That's just unacceptable as a country, and if you can't get your basis necessities met in a way which enhances your health it is completely understandable to feel bad about the world. I feel bad about the world and I'm far wealthier than most people around me. Our system in the US is broken, and I feel powerless to fix it, even as I am personally advantaged by it.

BrenBarn• 3 months ago

But if that stuff is stuff the bottom 90% wouldn't be competing for, it's even worse in a way, because it means that portion of the market is entirely focused on stuff that's entirely out of reach for that 90%. If there are people out there who could be making tennis shoes but are instead making luxury cars, that's a problem.

amadeuspagel• 3 months ago

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.

eBombzor3• 3 months ago

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.

pb74• 3 months ago

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.

ewjt• 3 months ago

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.

jbxntuehineoh2• 3 months ago

Great, you figured it out, this society-wide collapse in happiness was caused by people simply deciding to be sad, simultaneously. No external factors were involved. Everyone just decided they didn't want to be happy anymore.

eBombzor3• 3 months ago

Yes, you are absolutely right in the sense that I did not actively consider human connection to be a priority in my early years. I'm working on that now. And I as well know a lot of people who's lives got better after COVID. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that even if I wasn't that type of person, it was still easy to make friends across places, but the general trend nowadays is that there a lot more barriers to break into social circles, and a lot of social circles are not as easily accessible. And maybe it's also because I live in Seattle.

burningChrome• 3 months ago

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.

rconti• 3 months ago

Huh. I'm a successful person in my mid 40s, just a year or two behind you. Objectively things are going great.

However, my perspective has gotten a lot worse the last couple of years. Enshittification, corporate consolidation, tech market, AI, etc. I didn't once worry during the dot com bust, or the financial crisis, or the outsourcing boom.

It feels VERY different this time.

Basically it feels like tech was the last place where you could do well and outrun the long term real wage stagnation the country's faced since the 70s. And it's not anymore.

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

I remember New Year's Eve in 2000. It felt like people really believed in a better future and they looked forward to experience the new millenium.

In retrospective this looks like a depressing joke to me.

ThrowawayR22• 3 months ago

"The one thing that my generation (Gen X) seemed to have was always some optimism for the future."

The vibe among Gen X was that the west was going to get invaded / nuked by the Soviets or economically crushed by the Japanese.

pelasaco4• 3 months ago

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.

do you have kids? Family? That is the ancient receipt for a great and happy life.

cyclopeanutopia4• 3 months ago

Yeah, it was, but now we have AI and there is no future for our kids, so it's even worse.

mothballed4• 3 months ago

If you're already happy you should think carefully about having kids though. I was extremely, extremely satisfied with my life before children. My kid is wonderful and healthy but as an introvert I didn't realize just how crushing it is to never get an extended period alone to recharge.

qwerpy• 3 months ago

I had a job, was relatively happy. Then I had kids, less happy due to severe lack of time. Now, have no job and still have my kids. Happiest I’ve ever been.

ButlerianJihad7• 3 months ago

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/The-Smiths/Heaven-Knows-I-...

  Two lovers entwined pass me by
  And Heaven knows I'm miserable now
  I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
  And Heaven knows I'm miserable now

  In my life, oh, why do I give valuable time
  To people who don't care if I live or die?

globular-toast4• 3 months ago

On top of that, AI is generally a demotivating entity to the majority of people.

I agree. I think we should just stop.

RationPhantoms• 3 months ago

I don't think the majority of people have given it a passing thought to be fair. For folks that grew up with the advent of being the "designated family googler" (and rested the success of their careers on such), it is an incredible time for information.

You're telling me there is a faceless, non-judgemental, never exhausted tutor just sitting there waiting for my curiosity to strike up a conversation? How absolutely fantastic. We're spoiled with information.

dlivingston4• 3 months ago

The only way out is through. This transition sucks but (1) is necessary (and INEVITABLE) to become an advanced civilization, and (2) the cat is out of the bag, it is not going back in, and burying one's head in the sand is no solution at all.

mips_avatar• 3 months ago

I think if modern LLMs were invented in the mid 2010s it would have been promoted in more positive ways, but because everyone is afraid for their economic security saying scary things gets more of a response. I think it's kind of gross that it's a race to scare ordinary people and especially Dario Amodei should feel kind of ashamed of himself.

pizzafeelsright2• 3 months ago

Children would change that, instantly.

I wasn't a father until late in life and then all of a sudden, everything is easy.

The moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, every moment has meaning and purpose. Nothing, no meal, no evening, no dollar is wasted.

As my children grow - the only question is how long do I have until I have grandchildren. After that - how long until I no longer have skin in the game?

I do full time AI stuff and it is meaningless other than the provision it provides.

I would not recommend avoiding the biological imperative. Reproduce. Everything else after that moment is clarity.

alex435784• 3 months ago

What a testimony to the tricks your brain chemistry plays on you.

NoGravitas5• 3 months ago

I would not recommend avoiding the biological imperative. Reproduce. Everything else after that moment is clarity.

I'd like to point out that experience is far from universal. Parenting beyond "feed and shelter them" is a minefield of ambiguity and conflicting evidence.

eBombzor3• 3 months ago

I'm not even on step 0 for that. Dating is f*ked for ordinary young men in 2026

lambdaone• 3 months ago

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.

bombcar10• 3 months ago

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.

czscout2• 3 months ago

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.

hoipaloi• 3 months ago

Where else have you lived?

krapp3• 3 months ago

"If you ignore reality, reality is awesome!"

traderj0e5• 3 months ago

This is like when I was in college and you'd think from the Facebook groups that everyone is depressed and failing classes. Then got a cushy tech job where the internal forums made it seem like it's slave labor.

fidotron2• 3 months ago

Anyone with the opportunity to visit the US that hasn't done so absolutely should. Admittedly now maybe not the greatest time in history for that, but the place is almost nothing like how the media like to portray it, especially once you leave almost any major city.

AuthAuth• 3 months ago

Yes the land is beautiful but the media portrays it pretty accurately. I visted LA before covid ~2018 and it was dystopian. It was dirty, the infrastructure was very poor and the wealth divide was unlike anything id seen before. I had a great time still because I had money to spend.

xyzelement14• 3 months ago

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.

asdfman12312• 3 months ago

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.

regularization4• 3 months ago

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 some supernatural mental delusions, an opiate for the people, to anethisize oneself to being a miserable wage slave with a miserable life.

nathan_compton2• 3 months ago

I don't know, I'm a die hard nihilist and atheist and I'm married, have kids, friends, and think life is beautiful and generally ok. I don't see why people need to believe in imaginary stuff and I don't really see how it makes people happy.

maerF0x03• 3 months ago

on your point about meaning... this is america: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us_M... (book by Chris Hedges)

testing223212• 3 months ago

Everything has been stripped of its meaning.

A friend j got the epic ski pass, so he skied at 43 resorts this winter with his wife and kid all across the US. From Baltimore to Tahoe through about 25 states.

I thought it would be awesome, he said it was shit. Because one corporation owns all of it, they’re all identical. Same signs, same food, same rules. No adventure, nothing new at each resort . Giant monoculture.

That’s how I feel when I’m in the US.

nice_byte• 3 months ago

Sounds like you have two happy well-adjusted friends?

noelsusman• 3 months ago

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.

cvwright• 3 months ago

Unless the data is a lagging indicator

FrustratedMonky4• 3 months ago

"America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization"

And yet we elected Jesus.

z500• 3 months ago

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

wat100007• 3 months ago

A reaction to that very same secularization. Religious nutjobs feel threatened and this is their answer.

mcphage2• 3 months ago

And yet we elected Jesus.

You mean that doctor?

bigtex885• 3 months ago

What?

725686• 3 months ago

What has atheism anything to do with this?

tempaccount50508• 3 months ago

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.

BJones12• 3 months ago

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.

iso16312• 3 months ago

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"

pstuart• 3 months ago

I think the value add of religion per the top comment is that it typically has a built in community and sense of connection. Churches 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.

everdrive3• 3 months ago

say my average atheist friend who is a director in a FAANG

Not a lot of "average" going on here.

xyzelement14• 3 months ago

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:)

JALTU2• 3 months ago

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.

wat100007• 3 months ago

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.

xyzelement14• 3 months ago

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?

regularization4• 3 months ago

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 go to weddings, funerals, services, coffee after services. Dinners, clothing drives. Events around Easter. For many of them there is no belief at all, they just have coffee with their neighbors every week. Technically they are considered Christians, without believing in Christianity per se.

lpcvoid3• 3 months ago

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.

xyzelement14• 3 months ago

"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.

qsera3• 3 months ago

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.

monideas2• 3 months ago

non-scientific worldview

Existence itself is beyond science and this is trivial to prove. Everyone with an above room temperature IQ can understand Aristotle's Prime Mover argument.

Note that this concept (which again, is at least as old as Aristotle) has nothing to do with religion.

tock8• 3 months ago

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.

stringfood5• 3 months ago

I also know many religious families who have disowned their kids for being gay - it is not a one way street of great benefits. Let alone the mental gymnastics required to claim to know the creator of the universe

qgin2• 3 months ago

The idea of kids being a get-out-of-jail-free card to happiness and existential turmoil has never made sense to me. Kids are wonderful, but not because they’re not a magical gateway to happiness.

NoGravitas5• 3 months ago

They're more motivated to pretend everything is okay, at least.

torben-friis• 3 months ago

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.

benjaminends• 3 months ago

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"?

ambicapter3• 3 months ago

90% of the top-level comments here are people proffering explanations disputed in the article.

9rx5• 3 months ago

The article explicitly removes decline in religion as an explanation for this particular bout of unhappiness.

It tried to, at least, but I'm not sure it succeeded. The growing secularization up to 2020 follows the long-term trend towards unhappiness and peak secularization and peak unhappiness line up too. Happiness has even started to improve in line with the growing return to religiosity that has occurred most recently. The data it presents as supposedly dismissing religion actually makes a reasonable case for religion.

Of course, the reality is that there never one reason. Americans are sad for millions of different reasons. The idea that if we fix that one thing all will become right with the world is pure fantasy.

neogodless• 3 months ago

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?

JeremyNT• 3 months ago

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)

retired3• 3 months ago

As someone that can’t afford to live close to family this hits me in the feelings. Would love it if the government would do something about it.

eloisant7• 3 months ago

It's also something that has nothing to do with religion. I am always surprised to see how religion people sometimes think you can't care about other people or your family if you don't believe in a bearded guy in the sky.

yodsanklai2• 3 months ago

What a generalization!! plenty of religious people are sad, not all of them are particularly frugal, and not all atheists think of buying toys.

Also the US is a very religious country compared to western or northern Europe where people aren't particularly sad.

stringfood5• 3 months ago

Hey he noticed it in his 6 friends he has, maybe it holds true as N grows to 8 billion? /s

Not like the entire point of the Renaissance was to ignore the scripture and stop acting like it was true and to start actually doing experiments in reality

fellowniusmonk• 3 months ago

Weird, ok, my anecdote flows in almost the exact opposite direction.

I come from a highly religious Christian background and moved in the other direction without any ill will, most of my religious male friends who have families have confided in me that they think monogamy and general family values are worn out cultural artifacts and clearly regret buying in even though they love their kids and are entrenched in their communities.

Many already have a first divorce under their belt.

Meanwhile my atheist friends had their first kid right around 40 and are somewhere between 1-3 kids and after a fair amount of relationship churn when they were younger are now in very stable relationships, some very orthodox and a few semi-orthodox.

If the trajectory hold for this generation the same as I saw for my religious parents generation I think the trajectory looks not great for mental health on the religious side.

9rx5• 3 months ago

America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization.

I'm not so sure of that. America has rapidly moved away from believing in some kind of magical spirit in the sky, but they most certainly haven't given up on religion in general. They have latched on to other blind faiths and rituals.

What hasn't typically come with those new religions, like you allude to, is a church; a place where fellowship occurs. That is a reasonable possibility for the decline in happiness. Research regularly suggests that most people find happiness in relationships with other people.

Nothing is ever single-faceted, though.

Bengalilol• 3 months ago

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 am a full atheist, living in Switzerland. The community is strong, the neighborhood too and the city is a charm (Geneva). 3 kids, coding and spending my time contemplating humans at their best: having fun and getting on a higher ground. I don't have an answer regarding the bigger picture but I will surely think about it and get back to you.

EDIT As I wrote in another comment: confronting the truth (whatever the spirituality behind) in itself doesn't make someone unhappy, it's the sense of losing one's footing that does. In many ways, America was built along those lines.

alphawhisky4• 3 months ago

That's crazy, because as a 25 year old in the US with religious family, I can promise you that churchgoing folks are the least generous people out there. I don't know what organized religion is like in other countries, but in the US churches are abused as tax havens, religious private schools are sucking up funding meant for disadvantaged children (in public schools), and the president is claiming the mandate of god as he spends tax money blowing up foreign children.

xyzelement14• 3 months ago

I live in a very different reality I guess.

// religious private schools are sucking up funding meant for disadvantaged children (in public schools),

What does that mean. In our case we pay about 20k a year in town school taxes only to send our kids to a private religious school. So the fact that my kids go to a religious school literally makes my money available to educate other people's kids in the school.

// churches are abused as tax haveans

Anything can be abused I guess. My synagogue is constantly raising money for secular causes like disaster relief and feeding the homeless. The fact that a congregant gets 3k back in taxes on a 10k donation still means he's out 6.

thewillowcat3• 3 months ago

Even though I am personally agnostic, I do structure my life around the traditionally meaningful things you're talking about, and I do see the cultural mood a kind of spiritual crisis.

What's less clear to me is why the actual fall in happiness happened so rapidly with the pandemic. People were living spiritually vacant lives well before that!

stringfood5• 3 months ago

yes but to truly enjoy the religious lifestyle you have to believe in very hard to believe things - without that true belief I feel like an imposter. I feel it is very well known that religious people have the ability to be extremely extremely happy, healthy, and well-adjusted in their community, but it comes at a cost I feel. I do not know God and I do not know where I came from or where I will go. I would choose this than to pretend I know and join a group in pursuit of the lifestyle benefits it brings. And yes I spend all my time alone playing with toys I bought and not being fulfilled as my religious friends. 100% of my religious friends feel extremely fulfilled but it does not make it right choice for everyone. I don't want to believe I want to know and if I cannot know then so be it I will remain in the dark forever.

kelnos16• 3 months ago

Oh jeez, here we go again with this. Secularization isn't the problem. Isolation is the problem. Avoiding community and treating others as strangers to be feared is the problem.

Maybe read the article? It covers all this, and points out that secularization has been going on for far longer than this happiness crisis. Your assertion just doesn't fit the data.

And let's stop with the whole "just have kids and you'll be happy" garbage. It's lazy thinking, and such a tired argument, and falls flat in the face of actual data. As for anecdotes, I know plenty of people with and without kids with levels of happiness that run the gamut. There's plenty to be happy about with or without kids, and also plenty to be unhappy about with or without kids.

lastofthemojito• 3 months ago

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...

CPLX2• 3 months ago

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.

gypsy_boots• 3 months ago

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.

CPLX2• 3 months ago

Yes, I am well aware that I have posted my comment on the promotional website for a multi-billion dollar private equity fund.

I guess I can think of worse audiences to try to get this message across to, somehow, one person at a time.

shimman5• 3 months ago

Someone once described Derek Thomas as a dumber Malcom Gladwell and it felt so perfect.

mbfg2• 3 months ago

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.

WalterBright8• 3 months ago

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.

jbxntuehineoh2• 3 months ago

Wow, with his own two hands?? Incredible! How did he do it???

bean4692• 3 months ago

For example, Musk created the wealth he has. It wasn't distributed to him from others.

The jokes write themselves

mbfg2• 3 months ago

This collection of people, well actually, more like the 1% set the tax rules. Compare the tax rules from 1970s, to today, and you will definitely see that wealth is a zero sum game.

kilroy123• 3 months ago

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.

newsoftheday3• 3 months ago

This graph on that page was very interesting to me: "Below-Basic Reading Levels". People's education levels are dropping.

bombcar10• 3 months ago

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...

mykowebhn• 3 months ago

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.

mancerayder5• 3 months ago

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.

stuxnet79• 3 months ago

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.

Well you should know that foodie culture in the US, like almost everything else in this country, is maximally consumerist. This explains the bizarre behavior you've pointed out.

Many of the self-described foodies I've met lacked a genuine appreciation of the cuisine they consumed. It was simply another avenue for them to moralize and project their socio-economic status in a subtle way. Subtle being necessary because this country is supposed to be one of equals.

Identity in the US is tied up not with the relationships in your life or the values that you live by but by what you consume. Food is the ultimate consumable good.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

The first batch of Michelin restaurants (back in the 1920s I think) and chefs were all French grandmothers in (I want to say) Lyon. Just though that was interesting.

Joel_Mckay• 3 months ago

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

woodydesign• 3 months ago

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.

intended3• 3 months ago

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.

Taikonerd• 3 months ago

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.

kenjackson• 3 months ago

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.

pepperoni_pizza• 3 months ago

The HN comments are sadly mostly just people pushing their favorite thing, whether COVID denialism, "everything is going bad because people are atheists" or whatever, without engaging with the article at all.

phtrivier4• 3 months ago

Substack tends to select for this kind of author. Not daily posts about their life and their latest hot take, but a few deep articles every few weeks, that make you think "hey, that's interesting". Although there is not necessarily an easy way to know where the author is talking from, whether they're entirely relevant, etc...

Even the "superstars" (Krugman, etc..) are posting this is that could have been posted on twitter, with the same level of outrage and polarization, but at least the content is well structure, and they are allowed to use sentences in paragraph, with quotes, and figures, and links, etc...

Yes, I know, it's called blogging. I'm saying that the new hot thing, in 2026, is blogging.

j-bos• 3 months ago

Thank you kindly.

bombcar10• 3 months ago

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?

autoexec3• 3 months ago

In my experience most people don't care about what the news tells them anywhere near as much as what's going on in their personal lives.

If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life.

When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.

nslsm• 3 months ago

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.

amanaplanacanal• 3 months ago

Plenty of people cut back on socializing, separate from whatever local lockdown policies might have been in place.

mcphage2• 3 months ago

No, it was government mandates that played hell with peoples' social lives.

What did the government mandate about your social life?

sophrosyne42• 3 months ago

These are the secondary and tertiary bad effects of lockdowns which were ignored at the time.

ZunarJ5• 3 months ago

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.

mindslight• 3 months ago

Have you found any studies showing long-term differences between the half of states that had "lockdowns" versus the half that did not?

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

A lot of things were, and continue to be ignored about lockdown. It killed a lot of addicts — alcoholics and drug addicts alike, probably online gamblers too.

There were major jumps in suicide during the lockdown and in the next two or three years after.

mvdtnz• 3 months ago

I wonder if COVID revealed to Americans how toxic their individualistic culture is. For a long time it kind of seemed like individualism was working well for you but COVID was the first crisis since WW2 where the country was asked to pull in the same direction together and it really just fell apart.

I'd be miderable too if I learned my entire worldview, and that of my countrymen, was dangerously wrong and there's no way to really fix it.

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

Lockdown, not "Covid". And that Covid lockdown was a little taste of the extreme form of top down collectivism. (Covid was around both before and after the lockdowns.)

The USA got off lockdown lightly in the main. Continental Europe, Canada and Australia all went nuts with it. Especially the Northern Territory and State of Victoria.

chasd004• 3 months ago

where the country was asked to pull in the same direction together

There was no asking, if the country was asked then the term "lockdown" wouldn't have been used. On the other hand, there were no soldiers on the street forcing everyone inside. People chose to do it and maybe that's where the social strife really comes from, people realized they just do what they're told by authority and they're not the free-thinking individuals they thought they were.

I'm still amazed at the level of total, blind, compliance of the US population. I expected riots in the streets but there was nothing. At least traffic was less. And HN was especially depressing, any mention of "lockdowns" maybe not being the best idea or what Sweden was doing was totally shouted down. I'll never forget that.

traderj0e5• 3 months ago

But individualism turned out to be ok in that case. By the time vaccines were out, it had already mutated enough that it didn't make much of a difference whether or not people vaccinated, and most people ended up getting some variant of it. The bickering stopped, and US ended lockdowns around the same time as other countries.

If we were less lucky and it turned out to be super deadly and only solvable with more cooperation, that would fall apart here.

anon2915• 3 months ago

I mean this is just silly. If anything, America was more communal than most countries during covid, as churches, clubs, gyms, continued to meet, even if in secret. Except for the extremists, no one really cared to be honest.

If anything, it made me realize how uninterested in being governed Americans are, and how pervasive this attitude is. Lest you think it's all 'MAGA' types, consider my brother who lives on the Central Coast of California in a heavily hispanic enclave. We visited a few times.

Despite California being one of the strictest states, I don't think there was a single sign or signal that anything was going on. My sister-in-law's large hispanic family continued to hold every family event indoors or at parks, without masking, or anything. We had a great time with the cousins.

Our church continued to meet in secret, flaunting the spirit of the law, if not the letter, and people were fine. COVID ran through once at the beginning, and then we were just there laughing at the government. Great bonding time honestly.

Geee3• 3 months ago

Actually the less collectivist approaches e.g. Sweden caused much less trouble.

deeg• 3 months ago

If it was COVID, though, wouldn't we expect to see the same thing in other countries?

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown.

Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest. I reckon it's probably one of the Pacific islands.

spockz• 3 months ago

We do see it in other countries. But even if we didn’t see it, it could still be that the situation in the states was at such a precarious position that COVID tipped it there (more) than in other places, making it more visible. Also other places such as Europe in general have bigger safety nets so the fallout of the damage is less.

jmyeet• 3 months ago

Covid wasn't some magical line in the sand when things got bad. It's really the tipping point for a trend that began in the 1970s of increasing inequality. Two big things happened in the pandemic that have nothing to do with other issues of social isolation:

1. The fear companies had of raising prices went away thanks to inflation. It's when dynamic pricing in various forms (eg RealPage for rents) really took off. Supermarkets started engaging in essentially unspoken collusion. This tends to get labelled as "price leadership" rather than "price fixing" where the only difference is the first is legal and the second isn't but they're otherwise identical; and

2. Governments around the world engaged in massive wealth transfer to the wealthy, which creates asset price inflation, particularly with housing. Some countries tried to claw some of this back with so-called windfall profits tax. Personally, I think there should've been a corporate tax of 80%+ for 2020-2023 (at least).

The usual tool that governments use to tackle inflation is monetary policy. The theory goes that you raise interest rates, it makes borrowing more expensive and it dampens the heat in the economy. That's true but it's also a very blunt instrument. It hurts everyone from the biggest borrowers to people buying homes.

What never gets serious discussion let alone policy discussion (at least in the US) is fiscal policy, secpfically taxation. Temporarily high corporate taxes would've had a similar effect on tempering M&A, share buybacks, etc but it would've only targeted companies who were profiting from, say, a huge spike in oil prices.

But there are other factors too that existed before Covid such as private equity, which is simply buying up all the competition, making everything more expensive, paying back an LBO and then loading up a company with exploding debt so some sucker down the line can buy it before it blows up.

ActorNightly3• 3 months ago

Can we stop pretending that it was Covid, and not the felon pedophile and his cronies in charge of the country? You can see on the plot that the shit started in 2016.

sph2• 3 months ago

Sure, because the world was just great before 2016. The orange idiot is just the culmination of decades of decline, not a random blip in American history.

gjm11• 3 months ago

What plot? All the plots in the article either (1) show the change for the worse happening in 2020 or later or (2) are explicitly comparing "before 2020" with "after 2020".

(I do agree that Mr Trump is a shockingly bad president in oh so many ways. But the malaise being described here doesn't seem to have started in 2016. Not every bad thing is his fault.)

bjourne4• 3 months ago

100% right. What we (rather 80+ year old corrupt politicians) did to young people during covid was downright criminal. Almost two of their most important years destroyed.

phtrivier4• 3 months ago

Well, to be fair, it allowed some of the old people to survive more than two years, so...

Young people should react by voting in people who will defend them. Instead, they joined the elderly un voting for Trump. Go figure.

watwut2• 3 months ago

Young people were more pro lockdowns then old people.

And also, America did nit had two years of lockdowns.

lamasery4• 3 months ago

I can say that post-Covid inflation took us from feeling like we were on the edge of escaping the middle class, to feeling like we aren't even close and realistically won't ever be again. Even as our incomes went up quite a bit at the same time.

And we're a lot better off than median. I can't imagine how crushing it's been lower "down the ladder".

jimbokun12• 3 months ago

Everyone expecting to escape the “middle class“ reminds me of Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average.

WarmWash4• 3 months ago

Dollars are dumb and you should price your place in society based on the demand/impact of the job you do.

To put that in an example, during covid lots of people who never made more than $12/hr were suddenly able to hop into jobs (lateral movement) paying $20/hr.

In there head they almost doubled their income, and placed themselves in a much high social class. But that is not how it works. $20 simply became the new $12, and they were pissed as all hell when realized they went nowhere.

If you work as a cashier in city Z, you will live the life of a cashier in city Z, regardless of your pay.

jmcgough• 3 months ago

COVID almost certainly had something to do with it, but the US isn't the only country that faced lockdowns, nor is it the only country that experienced inflation. Why is it that most other countries' happiness scores have returned to near-baseline since then, while the US is still so much lower?

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

The USA really didn't have lockdowns, where people were actually forbidden to leave their homes. Apart from a handful of metro areas, what was actualy implemented were feeble 'stay at home suggestions' with tons of exceptions. It was entirely voluntary, and people broadly ignored them (again, outside a few areas). Around me, everyone was still out and about, eating at restaurants, buying their khakis, and basically ignoring that there was a deadly airborne disease being spread around. The only thing that seemed to be adequately enforced were school closures.

carabiner• 3 months ago

Lockdown was such a massive mistake. Masks are good, vaccines are good, shutting down everyone's lives in hopes of protecting already extremely unhealthy people, to which effectiveness was never established, was devastating to the world. Cities were hollowed out - ask ANYONE who lives in NYC, LA, even smaller cities like Seattle, and they'll tell you how nightlife was decimated by pandemic.

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

Outside of those cities, though, there really wasn't a "lockdown." Nobody was forced to stay in their homes. People treated it as optional and were out and about despite the utterly unenforced "stay at home". Around me, it had a minor impact on traffic, but no noticeable impact on stores, restaurants, and socialization.

tensor• 3 months ago

Actually it's extremely well documented in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point. Basically if you don't have a home and food due to not enough funds, then yes money absolutely equals happiness.

Inequality has grown to the point where the majority of younger people now have no hope of ever owning a home, and even large parts of the country are struggling with something as basic as food.

The HN crowd lives in a top 5% bubble and often forgets how bad it is for most people. All this talk of "money doesn't make happiness" is terrible. Money for basic necessities is the problem here.

justsomehnguy2• 3 months ago

in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point

Perceived happines. It's hard to talk about happines with a person with an empty stomach. But I was much more happy when I was young and poor than I became a not poor but no longer a young one.

thephyber2• 3 months ago

It goes a little further than “money for basic necessities”.

It’s about being able to provide the necessities AND having income security. I remember reading about a study that said poor people who have to scramble to deal with all of the extra steps that accompany being poor (no credit cards, maybe no bank account, dealing with getting utilities turned back on, etc) is the equivalent of losing about 15 IQ points from your optimal.

It’s the difference between being able to work “in the zone” / flow state frequently and being always stuck in “fight or flight” mode. One makes you successful while the other actively sabotages you.

eudamoniac2• 3 months ago

Inequality has grown to the point where the majority of younger people now have no hope of ever owning a home

Please stop repeating this myth. Look further up the thread for gen Z homeowner statistics.

tmvphil• 3 months ago

No, happiness increases linearly with log(money), well beyond basic necessities https://happiness-science.org/price-of-happiness/

thephyber2• 3 months ago

2020 / Covid did A LOT of things, not just scramble our social lives.

There was a pretty large check from the government to workers (which supercharged some people risk-taking in stocks, crypto, events betting, sports betting). It became the year of WallStreetBets and meme stocks.

White collar people were working from home, which eliminated tedious commutes but also blended together work and home life. I’m pretty sure one of my sisters snapped dealing with several kids doing Zoom schooling and teaching her own classes over Zoom.

Many Americans reconsidered what is important in life. Another one of my sisters was “an essential worker” but wasn’t (and still isn’t) paid well and the health benefits didn’t increase even when the likelihood of getting a debilitating disease did.

It was also contentious politically, with a major election. I cut off half of my family after they went down the QAnon / Election Theft rabbit hole and they began to inhabit a completely different reality than I did. We all reacted to extreme stress in different ways and one of those ways was to distrust American institutions.

There are some post-2020 things that happened. Interest rates rose in 2022 for the first time since 2009ish. Lots of tech companies hired like drunken sailors during 2020 and began to layoff once the interest rates rose environment started to curb spending and investment. Twitter was bought and most of the staff was cut, giving other executives in Silicon Valley cover for attempting the same.

To stay with your theme of social lives changing, I think my personality has changed a bit where I am less likely to socialize with strangers (like in a 3rd space), to go out in the evenings, to hang out with coworkers.

WarmWash4• 3 months ago

Those checks had the smallest impact out of all the things the government did.

0% interest rates was insane when most cash cow workers simply shifted to working from home (sorry, I know it's harsh, but hourly workers are not the backbone of the American economy). The gov also froze student loan payments, and froze rent payments. It also payed full unemployment and for longer. Oh and PPP loans....

It was an absolute money bonanza, and way way far beyond what was actually needed.

keybored• 3 months ago

The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy.

Not everything is supposed to be read literally. But this seems to be the Abundance author so maybe it really is unironic and that tediously sincere.

And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships.

Everyone who has enough money to not worry about money agrees.

Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data.

Great news for the developing countries with healthy social connections. Not so great news for a country with great wealth and income inequality and atomized connections.

regularization4• 3 months ago

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.

orangecat• 3 months ago

The average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US has fallen over the past 50 years.

No: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

regularization4• 3 months ago

What I said is correct. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages are down.

You posted a link that people are working more hours per year, so their yearly inflation-adjusted income is up.

So you're really posting the second negative here, thanks. As I said, tge average hourly median wage is below what it was 50 years ago. From the same federal reports you linked. Plus, we can see from here, that not only are people paid less per hour, they have to work more.

I don't know why you think these two negative things post a rosy picture.

alsetmusic• 3 months ago

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.

FrustratedMonky4• 3 months ago

Hello. Inflation. Wage Contraction.

Sure, money doesn't buy happiness. But you need some minimum. The Maslow's Pyramid. Food, Shelter.

asdfman12312• 3 months ago

Relatively well off people seem very unhappy now too, so that's not enough to explain what's going on.

FrustratedMonky4• 3 months ago

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.

yalogin• 3 months ago

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.

jerlam3• 3 months ago

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.

globular-toast4• 3 months ago

GDP is not and never has been a measure of wealth. It's a measure of a country's output. Higher GDP could just mean you're working longer and harder.

JALTU2• 3 months ago

Yes! And I recommend a post about "The Wealth Ladder" by Nick Maggiulli. A concept I love because I relate is the idea of how we are conscious about how much we spend on things, or we are not. Do you count the cost of a daily lunch vs. dining out at an "expensive" restaurant where you bought three glasses of wine? Does it even matter that you eat out, do you count the cost?

Great food for thought about one's attitude towards wealth: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/climbing-the-wealth-ladder/

mbgerring5• 3 months ago

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.

xg15• 3 months ago

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'."

WalterBright8• 3 months ago

relative quality of life

Relative to what?

mbgerring5• 3 months ago

- 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

happytoexplain2• 3 months ago

Relative to itself. I.e. the QoL for the upper, middle, and poor are each getting worse.

californical• 3 months ago

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

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

And why that anecdote happened is pretty informative. Someone was cooking the data to make themselves look good. It took 1 call to support to prove this was the case. I'm betting they didn't last long after that.

ptaffs• 3 months ago

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."

sosodev• 3 months ago

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.

ChrisLTD• 3 months ago

Having to read about the crazy things Donald Trump is doing for 10 straight years hasn’t been good for my emotional health.

bjourne4• 3 months ago

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.

warkdarrior2• 3 months ago

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?

bjourne4• 3 months ago

Yes. They are wasting their abundance on dumb shit. Even poor Americans have more resources than me. But their society is ridiculously inefficient.

ecshafer• 3 months ago

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.

bjourne4• 3 months ago

The obvious solution is to reuse the same plastic cup for all customers each morning. Voila, now you save 309 plastic cups/day.

nobody99993• 3 months ago

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.

I suppose that depends on how you define "efficiency." Using disposable cups and self-service dispensers/waffle irons eliminates the need for an employee to stand there making waffles and/or another employee washing reusable dishes.

If you compare the ongoing costs of disposable cups vs. the cost of at least one employee, one might conclude that it's more "efficient" to use disposable cups.

From a societal/global perspective, it may well be more "efficient" to use employees instead of disposable cups, but the corporation that uses the disposable cups can't increase their profits by using employees and reusable cups instead.

manoDev• 3 months ago

This is the expected result of a society optimizing for GDP and quarterly results.

threethirtytwo• 3 months ago

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).

stronglikedan• 3 months ago

crony capitalism is the root cause

themafia• 3 months ago

Wealth inequality.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

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"

cortesoft2• 3 months ago

Sure, but this whole thing is about trends over time, so the societal customs shouldn't change drastically in a specific country in such a short time.

fl4regun7• 3 months ago

how would you measure "happiness" if you were tasked to do so for a study?

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Well, for one...if Ireland and Finland come out on top, you are doing it wrong. That should have been your first clue that the "study" is clearly doing something wrong. Also, if you don't know how easy it is to game a study...well then you have never conducted a study.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

Perhaps there is more to being happy than just being rich (as in "If America is so rich ...")

netcan• 3 months ago

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.

anovikov5• 3 months ago

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.

anovikov5• 3 months ago

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.

MattGrommes• 3 months ago

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.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

If you run a propagandizing bot farm, which languages do you focus upon? Think about that for a bit and you will know why this is happening.

MattRogish• 3 months ago

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.)

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Dear god, get offline for a while...

czscout2• 3 months ago

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".

riversflow2• 3 months ago

Man, it's almost like materialism actually is a root of suffering. Who'da thunkit?

mancerayder5• 3 months ago

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.

mannanj2• 3 months ago

We don't deserve that, at least I don't feel like I do. I don't identify with "hard-working sheep" and everyone else, I identify with setting an example around transparency, honesty and dignity. There's a famous post about dignity written by someone who said something along the lines of "We have allowed being in the worker class in American become inherently undignified" and I think its more along that line: the very high up leaders and bourgeoise class have modeled unaccountable, abusive leadership and so the leaders we interact with model that as well to us, and then when many other people dont speak up and I do, I and maybe even you find ourself on the current side of the minority wishing others were as vocal about things.

Well here's my invitation: rather than resign about how everyones weak and a sheep, take on the perspective of voicing what you want and what you are doing about it and feel free to share about about how even if you've experienced bad things you would rather want to experience goods things. Maybe things could change if you focused on what you actually want over complaining about what you don't?

mancerayder5• 3 months ago

I have much of your perspective already and trust me, I propagandize it in person.

At the same time like everyone else here I need jobs to pay the bills, and in every job I'm faced with these workaholic types who believe "this is not a 9 to 5 job" is a great motto. You'll find many of these people here, too.

I try to be too useful to fire. But when I was younger places I worked at had brutal on-call situations and limited time off. One place had 15 days of PTO per year, and that included sick days.

bdangubic5• 3 months ago

I want all social media to be banned. Until that happens - nothing else matters...

What I am doing about it - I do not use social media apps of any kind (since 2017), do not allow my offspring to be on social media, trying to convince my wife she should do the same (she is on facebook still because of marketplace), and absolutely ridicule anyone that uses social media (in a fun way)...

ActorNightly3• 3 months ago

The problem is that there is no incentive, because if you take the average set of behavior of a human, nowhere in that set is the willingness to go against the grain to to what is morally right versus what is currently "socially acceptable".

For example, taking a stand against Tesla, when you go buy one right now, you really don't feel any sort of general animosity from people, even though its morally not the right thing to do.

nozzlegear3• 3 months ago

and we deserve all the motivational Corpspeak we have to suffer through on LinkedIn posts.
We get what we deserve.

Why? You don't actually justify this reasoning in your post.

joaogui1• 3 months ago

I believe their justification is on the first sentence

That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries.

(Not that I agree)

mancerayder5• 3 months ago

I did, but let me hammer home the point: when you try to restore balance in a corporate settings, your peers, not management, are the ones self-promoting how much they work.

I've worked in many environments where I came up against workaholic co-workers who pulled everyone down with them into weekend work and extra effort.

So yes, deserved.

This is not senior management versus us, it's us versus us, that's the American way.

jimbokun12• 3 months ago

My one vacation to Paris I was very concerned about the protests/near riots, things being set on fire, and garbage piled high because of strikes I saw on television.

But we ended up having a great time. Got used to the piles of garbage, and the fires and protests were scheduled in advance so easily avoided. And I gained an appreciation for the willingness of French workers to stand up for themselves.

retired3• 3 months ago

appreciation for the willingness of French workers to stand up for themselves

I wonder if you still have that view when your car is one of the hundreds that typically get set on fire during protests.

Rioting and the government caving for a minority out of fear of violence is the most undemocratic possible and does not fit in 21th century society. I’m happy to grow up north of France where minorities don’t torch the town when the democratically appointed representatives decide on something they don’t like.

quadrifoliate• 3 months ago

Our CEOs are happily, gleefully, boasting about how we're replaceable.

This exactly, and especially in the tech industry there's so much "If you're not doing this right now you're going to be unemployed in 5 years" nonsense about AI being peddled, mainly by people who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.

tim3332• 3 months ago

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.

nephihaha11• 3 months ago

The UK's the same. The lockdown was a major driver of this.

fakedang3• 3 months ago

Can say from experience volunteering, I was mighty surprised when literally children were being rendered hungry and homeless in London during Covid.

websap2• 3 months ago

The UK (at least London) is cheaper than Seattle, and far cheaper than NYC.

cvoss• 3 months ago

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Area is the paradigmatic example of this. But when COVID hit, the main attractor of the Bay Area vanished overnight: you didn't have to live there to work those jobs. There was a mass exodus to cheaper places. Texas was at the top of the list of destinations. Austin, though decidedly not the rest of Texas, has a similar culture to SF and so was a natural and comfortable landing spot. So the pressure relief valve on SF is a source of pressure on Austin. But Austin was already suffering growing pains before COVID.

But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.

oooyay• 3 months ago

I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my favorite examples. There used to be many of these but many people didn't realize they were all (or mostly) subsidized capital ventures. Many of them are closing now that the subsidy has ended. So, is that county land cheap? Yes, but when you have an incident where time matters your likelihood of being cooked goes up precipitously.

fakedang3• 3 months ago

You still don't expect people to go hungry in a first world developed country. Nor did people go hungry or homeless at this scale before in recent American, British or even broadly Western history. Yet here we are, and the UK is no exception either.

At least you can be guaranteed for certain you won't be going hungry in Istanbul, Warsaw or Amman.

t-3• 3 months ago

But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.

I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.

davesque4• 3 months ago

Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.

websap2• 3 months ago

Yup, you are correct to not generalize, because Austin is one of the cheapest "cities" in America.

jimbokun12• 3 months ago

In general it’s bad to generalize, but the article says that housing prices across the US increased 50% over the past 5 years.

crooked-v3• 3 months ago

A big part of it is that literally almost every major US city has a self-inflicted housing shortage (https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...), which then has cascading effects on every other part of cost of living.

uberstuber• 3 months ago

sadly Austin is one of the best US cities at allowing new housing development

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 3 months ago

Just speculation:

The houses got expensive because homeowners wanted housing to be an investment, so they voted for laws that make it harder to build or densify housing.

Cars are expensive because the government puts tariffs on perfectly good imports to protect the American car companies. The American car companies produce garbage, and even the electric car companies like Tesla and Rivian are producing super-high-tech luxury land yachts. The government incentives are also captured to produce huge trucks, and many states don't have regular inspections, so lifted trucks are common. The companies don't want to build and sell small cars because the perception is that a small car is going to get pancaked in a crash with a bigger, heavier car. Gas prices don't matter because the government artificially suppresses them, sometimes with war.

Corn and dairy are cheap because the government subsidizes them at the behest of the corn and dairy lobbies, which use small good ol' boy farmers who don't even exist as their marketing. A lot of the corn goes to ethanol for fuel, even though it's a crappy fuel and an acre of solar panels results in many more miles of EV driving than the same acre of corn ethanol. So you can also get a cheap soda and a cheap cheese pizza, but a lot of the food pipeline is captured by seed monopolies and middle-men. Somehow milk became a bit of a right-wing meme, and it's basically a naturally-occurring dessert, so people love milk even though it's not good for you and not a good way to get nutrients.

Even food where normally you could walk in a shop

You aren't supposed to walk in America. You're supposed to drive. Don't get me started lol

seniorThrowaway2• 3 months ago

Housing being expensive because of laws and zoning that constrain it's supply is often touted, but there is good academic research that that isn't the case. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zfsw4iotsn3nqs8vhu8kb/LMW-FAQ...

snikeris4• 3 months ago

Houses got expensive because of usury (loans made for unproductive purposes). It destroys civilizations over time. That is why it was encoded into ancient religious traditions.

Housing, education, and cars, all typically financed via loans, all exorbitantly expensive.

HoldOnAMinute• 3 months ago

Sorry, a Tesla is neither luxurious nor a yacht.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 months ago

Austin prices absolutely exploded from about 2010 to 2022. A huge part of that was housing, and then just before the pandemic Austin became sort of a weird "meme stock" ("Elon Musk is moving there!", "Joe Rogan is moving there") where its popular vision far outstripped its actual reality. I remember travelling around 2018 or so and telling people I was from Austin, and nearly every time I got a "Oh cool, I've heard that's such an awesome city" in response, which was far different a response I'd get in like 2005 or so. I mean, I like Austin, but we also had 2 months straight of 105+ degree weather a few years ago...

Like the article states, when housing goes up everywhere, it means that even the lowest wage workers need to be paid a lot more to survive, so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.

The other issue you saw, homelessness, is especially concentrated in Austin. Austin is perhaps the most liberal city in deep red Texas, so homeless people flock to Austin because it has good services and a generally sympathetic populace, and some rural conservative locales have even been giving homeless people one way bus tickets to Austin.

I guess the good news is that Austin built a shit ton of housing since 2021-2022, so housing prices (including rentals) are falling faster in Austin than anywhere else in the US.

pixl972• 3 months ago

so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.

Commercial property and property tax rates are insane in Texas. It's not the pay, because in towns were pay is less prices aren't much lower.

tzs6• 3 months ago

In constant dollars cars are actually pretty much the same as they were 40+ years ago when you compare similar types and trim levels. A new Honda Civic for example costs about the same when you take into account inflation as the Civic I bought in 1989.

The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger percentage of buyers nowadays are buying bigger and/or more luxurious cars.

It's quite remarkable when you take into account how much more technology and safety features are in new cars. My '89 Civic didn't even have cruise control.

sidewndr46• 3 months ago

You've got the cause and effect backwards here. The average purchase price of a car in constant dollars is about double now because those are the only cars to purchase and the only group that can afford those cars are those who are affluent. In general the people who purchase new vehicles ironically are not the ones who own them. They consistently purchase new vehicles at a regular cadence.

The existence of some base model Honda Civic or similar doesn't imply you or anyone can actually buy one.

HDBaseT2• 3 months ago

A 1999 Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, assuming serviced regularly (and competently) could easily be on the road today.

I genuinely do not believe a 2025 car will usable on the road in 2035 (a mere 9 years), yet known 15 or 20 years from now. They are all too hamstrung by technology and whilst some of the technology is an improvement, a vast majority if malicious.

mikepurvis2• 3 months ago

Same experience as a Canadian visiting NY and SF in recent years. Yes I know I went to the most expensive cities in the country but still it was hard to eat a basic meal that wasn't US$30, and in tourist contexts (like the hotel restaurant) it was even more still.

Even shopping for a few basic groceries felt like I was paying dollar amounts more than I would expect to see at home but in a currency that's worth 1.3x+.

maxerickson5• 3 months ago

Services are expensive because they compete for labor with other things.

I think US grocery prices are higher because there's not really a goal of keeping them lower. Subsidies could be structured to ensure that they help the consumer, but they aren't. And so on.

BobaFloutist• 3 months ago

Where in Canada are you from?

When I visited Vancouver from the Bay Area things only felt cheaper accounting for the exchange rate.

jaarse3• 3 months ago

Everything is priced the same. And it’s Detroit, Minneapolis, Austin, LA, and 100 people towns everywhere.

The US prices are the same as the Canadian prices, despite their dollar being worth 30% more.

Wild

johnsmith18403• 3 months ago

I don't think you've seen starving people if this is your opinion.

I have never seen someone in america starving.

cguess2• 3 months ago

Oh boy, you're not paying attention or you're in a bubble. Not usually distended belly-famine starving, sure, but malnutrition is rife in many rural and impoverished counties in the country.

tim3332• 3 months ago

I wasn't really saying starving. Just hungry enough to come ask for food and eat it. I think the lady in question was likely drug addicted but even so usually even the addicts are fed.

ProllyInfamous• 3 months ago

On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive.

That's Austin & life in the 21st Century, friend.

I grew up ATX-style in the 90s, and cannot afford to live there anymore. But also chose not to years before then.

There're still a few regions where living hasn't gotten life-prohibitive, yet (my answer: anywhere there is a Cookout and/or Pal's fastfood restaurant).

But nothing is cheap, anymore.

TitaRusell• 3 months ago

They're opening Action stores in the US because their CEO has noticed that it's a huge potential market.

Cheap Chinese shit is like mana from heaven for the poor and couple that with Dutch frugality and America is saved.

dlev_pika• 3 months ago

Texas has gone nuts. I visited Dallas, Houston, Galveston from Oregon last year, looking to try out the cheap food that I hear about online because they dOn’T hAvE cOmMuNiSt tAxEs aNd rEgUlAtIoNs, and oh boy did I my hopes get crushed. Everything seemed as expensive, or more, than in my area with regulations, more reasonable worker protections and minimum wage…

anon2915• 3 months ago

Partially this is because of the strength of the dollar. I lived briefly in England in 2013ish and everything was expensive. I went back last year and it seemed cheaper, but only because the dollar has increased in value. Thus, if you've been visiting from England, you're probably seeing a huge increase in price due to the pound weakening.

jaarse3• 3 months ago

I’m Canadian, but frequently travel in the US. Over the past year I am also shocked at US prices. It used to be that everything in the US was about 25% cheaper (makes sense as their dollar is worth more). Lately I’ve noticed that everything is priced the same. And I mean exactly the same.

On work trips over the past year I’ve had to buy tools at Home Depot, supplies at IKEA and Walmart, groceries, hotel, etc. I was in both large and small cities on the east and West coast … and the pricing is the same.

The drill I bought for $279 USD is $279 CAD. The IKEA cabinet I got for $199USD is $199CAD, etc..

Note sure what is going on with US prices, but Canadian making $17/hr minimum wage are struggling. I can’t imagine how Americans do it..

pb74• 3 months ago

US USD$199: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-M18-18V-Lithium-Ion-Br...

Canada CAD$298: https://www.homedepot.ca/product/milwaukee-tool-m18-18-volt-...

First drill I opened.

matthest• 3 months ago

1. We stopped allowing housing to be built, skyrocketing the cost of existing housing.

2. Our healthcare system remains a Frankenstein of a half-government sanctioned oligopoly, half-capitalist nightmare. Driving up the cost of healthcare.

3. Our governments are at best incompetent, at worst corrupt. SF spends $100k/person per year on homelessness. NY spends $80k. Where is all that money going?? Would be better to give that money directly to the homeless.

yodsanklai2• 3 months ago

I would start by question the premises. America is rich, but there are high inequalities and harsh conditions for a lot of people.

stephc_int13• 3 months ago

One element that seems to be rarely discussed is the link between obesity and mental health/happiness.

Of course, access to cheap and addictive food is likely the first trigger.

At the same time obesity seems largely involuntary while not being desirable for most people, and yet, before the help of Ozempic style medication, obesity was rampant in the US.

brightball• 3 months ago

Marketing?

There are so many studies showing that if you just get off of social media, everything about your life gets better. Anxiety, depression too.

There’s money in creating the perception of problems that don’t exist or creating the idea that small problems are much larger than they really are.

fl4regun7• 3 months ago

I'll throw my hat in the ring as to what might be causing this. I am turning 30 years old this year, and in my experience, I was probably happier prior to graduation from university. I think there is something deeply unsatisfying about the structure of modern adult life - mostly how and where we engage with work.

See, in university we were in close contact to many people, in our age range, with our interests, in both academic and recreational contexts. In work, we are strictly there in professional contexts. That's not to say you can't make friends from work, I do have several people I consider friends that I met like that, but none of them live near, so spending time with them is not going to happen on a regular basis.

The main way I see people involve themselves with others seems to be through what I'd describe as "activity groups", could be the gym you go to, could be a structured class like dancing or tennis clubs, whatever. But these things are usually at most, a few times a week, for about an hour or two at a time. Nothing compared to what being at university with your peers for multiple hours every day was. I think that physical presence near other people is a hugely important driver of establishment of friendships and social groups.

Plus pretty much all of these things require you to invest additional money towards (usually in the form of a monthly bill), just to access. I didn't have to pay anything additional to join a club at university (of which I was involved with probably close to half a dozen, even if I didn't stick with all of them for all 4 years of my time there).

I probably would feel less isolated if I lived closer to my existing friends, but everyone has spread out a lot and there's not much I can do about that. The new friends I've met are usually not that (geographically) close to me either. Everyone is a 30min drive or farther away now it seems.

Arodex2• 3 months ago

See, in university we were in close contact to many people, in our age range, with our interests, in both academic and recreational contexts. In work, we are strictly there in professional contexts. That's not to say you can't make friends from work, I do have several people I consider friends that I met like that, but none of them live near, so spending time with them is not going to happen on a regular basis.

At work, you are all set one against each other to get the good projects, to be promoted, or to be spared from the next round of culling.

The workplace is a retrograde hierarchical system that is not far from feudalism.

fl4regun7• 3 months ago

Some universities also have this type of culture (I know of 1 in particular near me which is like this), mine was quite the opposite, lots of collaboration between students. I liked that aspect of it as well.

fbd_0100• 3 months ago

just turned 32 and I feel this as well. I feel into a deep depression shortly after graduating for this exact reason; mourning the loss of that regular contact with similar-age, similar-interest people as they all moved across the country to start their careers. Similar thing happened a few years later when I was internally transferred to another group at work with no people my age. It's never been the same since.

I've always scoffed at paying for those "activity groups" (what kind of loser would pay for friends?), but recently I've started reconsidering.

booleandilemma• 3 months ago

Unchecked issuance of work visas and massive, unending immigration. Pretty much the opposite of Japan. I know people don't like to hear it but that's the answer. We really need to scale both of these things back as soon as possible. Especially if AI is going to displace a lot of people.

cortesoft2• 3 months ago

I wonder if the 'English language speakers saw the biggest increases in unhappiness' is related to something else I keep reading about, which is that countries like Russia are spending huge amounts of money on campaigns to decrease stability in the west.

If they are making a concerted effort to drive the narrative in English speaking online communities, it would make sense that English speakers would be most affected.

traderj0e5• 3 months ago

I've been suspicious of this. It's typical for mainstream social media to become negative because that's where legitimately unhappy people go to complain, but things like Reddit and Twitter seem completely bot-farmed on top of that. And more and more people have been online, especially starting 2020. Even seems like Trump or his close contacts are browsing Reddit comments.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Look farther afield. For example, remember that brief "war" between India and Pakistan last year? Right after it ended, a couple of populations of bots appeared on X. One group of bots spammed anti-Muslim propaganda. Another group of bots spammed anti-Indian propaganda. We know this because when there were Internet outages later last year (in that part of the world), whole groups of accounts went silent at once.

Basically, there are foreign propaganda bot farms who don't propagandize their own populations, but instead focus on the US population. Generally trying to get Americans to turn on their (the people running the bot farms) enemies. Sometimes those enemies are countries, other times they are immigrant populations. Funtimes huh...

PS Yea, I know Israel does it, so does HAMAS and a bunch of other countries including both Russia and China.

mrwh• 3 months ago

Speaking for myself, an awful lot of what makes me happy are things I am forced into doing. Work makes me happy, but if I didn't have to work I'm sure I wouldn't. If I had complete freedom my life might become quite lonely and sad.

cyberax• 3 months ago

My TLDR; version: urbanism and (economically) forced migration into large cities.

thomukas2• 3 months ago

Americans hate each others guts that’s why. And they are not equipped for a more cplx world.

As seen from a European (often going to US, have friends and relatives there) I am surprised the author does not mention how the US became so much more polarised (on the usual race/guns/abortion/sex/gov topics).

Covid fragilised people social networks (isolation, job market shifts) and they’re left herding around the usual divisive topics.

It’s not just politics. It’s throughout daily life. And it’s unfortunately amplified by core tenet of the USA - freedom : ie do whatever you want for what you believe in or want . That translates into intensity about key topics unlike other societies where core tenets have a constructive tension btw each other (eg France : liberté , égalité, fraternité) which means people are more tolerant of each other.

Finally Americans low educational standards (before university) esp in history-geography make it difficult to make sense of a more crisis-prone and multipolar world.

Europeans on the other hand have a much lower standard with what they can do (less work or ambition in anything) and more used to and taught about that shitshow you have no/little control of (=life) .. so more or less as happy as before ..

crooked-v3• 3 months ago

When talking about that polarization, it feels irresponsible not to mention the role of Fox News and companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group in pushing 24/7 fear-and-hate programming nationwide, partly to continuously promote right-wing politics, partly because angry and scared people are more vulnerable to ads like "use all your money to buy gold from us because it's the only safe investment".

thomukas2• 3 months ago

they are just an economic actor maximising profit by exploiting a low-regulation environment where anything can be monetised even hate (again “freedom”)

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

If you take the "its the other side doing it" slant on it, you are the problem. There are good reasons why CNN's ratings are terrible. And they are just as dishonest as Fox. If you don't realize this, you are the problem.

globular-toast4• 3 months ago

The biggest difference between the US and other first world countries is inequality. The article rules this out in a ridiculous way. First it only mentions wage inequality, then it just says that median wages have risen, which says nothing about inequality at all. But wage inequality is nothing, it's wealth inequality that matters. People are more happy when they don't see others having more than they'll could ever dream of everywhere.

seniorThrowaway2• 3 months ago

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-do-americans-feel-poor-because

The gist: the statistics used to define poverty are old and inaccurate.

tracker1• 3 months ago

One thing that I think is probably a large impact has been an increase in general strife. Online arguments and division often among political and ideological lines combined with trends away from any sort of national identity or cohesion.

ex: 50 years ago, everyone had seen at least an episode of "I Love Lucy" which was the most watched show in the US. With only a few networks and some very popular culture there was more cohesion. Even with political discourse it was often presented in a much less polarizing way.

I would also point the blame at a lot of what I can only summarize as excessive internalized guilt. Often over things you, personally have no impact on. As well as trends towards coddling anxiety. Where the only true way to get past anxiety is to do more of what gives you anxiety, whatever it takes to actually do that.

I'd also say that "rich" is largely subjective, and common, regular expenses have become extremely burdensome this past few years... If you look at the pricing trends in fast food, it seems to have really ramped up since around 2018-2019 and over the top during COVID... far more than inflation alone can justify, and I think is mostly plain greed. People feel squeezed out and it's hard to overcome.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

All of my life experience up to 2016 suggested that about 1% to 3% of us are seriously bad eggs, people who will cheerfully and thoughtlessly screw over everyone around them for even the smallest perceived advantage or political "win."

In the 2016 election it began to appear likely that this figure is closer to 30%. That impression was reinforced -- cast in concrete, really -- in 2024.

So yes, I'm sadder, because I honestly didn't think I was surrounded by so many shitheels.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Would it make you feel better to learn that that's not really true. Its just that you don't know anything about public policy and are moderately economically successful so you are isolated from the problems that your political beliefs were/are causing. And when this expressed itself in politics instead of learning why others were unhappy, you instead just call them names and declare them all "shitheels". So all you have really done is to prove the old saw..."when you point fingers, there will be 5 more pointing back at you"

defrost3• 3 months ago

When did you first meet CamperBob2 and learn all this information about them?

Or are you just strawmanning for effect?

It does come across as a comment not in line with: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bontaq• 3 months ago

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home?

Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the military. What are we even building? For what?

Is it any wonder at all?

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

Money should only have the purpose of realizing ones goals, it has no purpose in itself.

The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.

lo_zamoyski2• 3 months ago

Popularize the notion of chrematistics.

Lammy3• 3 months ago

It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money.

As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.

pipes2• 3 months ago

I see it money as a wall. Without it, me and my family are defenceless. My goal is keeping us safe.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic.

It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job.

Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.

redleggedfrog2• 3 months ago

I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you.

Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.

skirmish• 3 months ago

I would much rather talk to my family at random times over the working day than listen to the guy at the next desk who is always on the phone blabber on (and it always happens when there is a pressing deadline, and your boss is checking every 15 minutes: any progress on this?).

decimalenough3• 3 months ago

YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.

coldtea• 3 months ago

social contact is a definite plus for well-being

If you have asd or adhd (not uncommon in programmers) it can be a definitive minus for well-being. But even if you don't, between office politics and idiotic corporate mandates, it can be draining.

Especially as for the average office worker, originally you had an office of your own or at worse with one or two other people, then starting from the 80s you had a cubicle, then we got the hellish open plans. You're asked to focus on a screen and a codebase in an environment full of distractions, and full of activity around you.

And that's before we added any commute, and preparing for the commute, which can easily eat an additional 1-2 hours of your day, every day.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.

Remote work is an interesting topic in this debate because any change in any direction (more remote work or less remote work) provokes claims that it's the reason for declining happiness.

I've managed remote teams for years, and I lean more toward your interpretation: Over the years I've seen a lot of people turn over in remote roles because they thought remote work was going to be the best thing ever, then they slowly slid into unhappiness in the isolation. (Before you downvote, I'm not claiming this is true for everyone. Remember I work remote too!)

maxerickson5• 3 months ago

Staying as healthy as you can is the best strategy with perfect healthcare too.

MrDrMcCoy• 3 months ago

The fully remote teams that I have been a part of all started a tradition of leaving a persistent ${VIDEOCONFERENCE} running that we can just hang out in. It isn't perfect, but is enough to retain the sense of community and support from an office.

I'd love to see a dedicated tool that does "virtual office hangouts" well, where you can spin up rooms, share screens/files/text, easily drop in and out, and see where people are. There are a few out there that come close, but I haven't seen any that let you browse to see various groups/individuals to match walking the halls.

nurumaik• 3 months ago

is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can

I think it's a good idea regardless of healthcare availability

marcus_holmes2• 3 months ago

Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity

This is a major difference between US and Euro workplaces that I have noticed. In the USA, there is plenty of time for chat with colleagues, and everyone stays at work longer. In Euro workplaces it tends to be more focused on work and then everyone goes home at 5.

The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.

I've worked with German colleagues who were ex-large-consultancies and they all said the same thing about working in the USA; that Americans spend a lot of their day chatting and stay in the office much longer. It drove the Germans crazy, "they would be so much more efficient if they just stopped talking and did the work!".

I'm not holding Europe up as an example to emulate; I don't think Europeans are that much happier at the moment, particularly the UK, but I wanted to push back on this idea as work == social space.

jcranmer• 3 months ago

Great, have they increased by as much as inflation?

Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

shimman5• 3 months ago

Wow wages barely rising after 60 years of wage suppression, the wealth is truly trickling down now! Just ignore that the top 1% stole $50 trillion from the bottom 90%:

https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...

bobthepanda• 3 months ago

There’s also the question of, “what’s inflation?”

A lot of major necessities like healthcare and housing have outpaced CPI.

momoschili• 3 months ago

Unfortunately this is using BLS data that captures largely urban areas and fails to account for a large and quickly growing segment of the workforce that also tend to be lower earners - self-employment (eg uber drivers, doordash, gig working, contractors). This is definitely an over-estimate of real wages, a best case scenario of sorts.

With the backdrop of it coming from the organization that is supposedly supposed to be managing inflation... :P

bsder3• 3 months ago

The "inflation basket" keeps getting rejiggled to hide things.

Rent as percentage of income is up. Groceries as percentage of income is up. Medical insurance as percentage of income is up. etc.

People aren't stupid. They can see and feel this.

Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful. That doesn't help people eat.

dandanua• 3 months ago

What are we even building?

Caste of trillionaiers who could destroy nations and cultures simply because they feel so.

thisisit• 3 months ago

The focus is now largely on stock markets. It’s not by mistake that we got DOW over 50k so don’t question anything as an excuse.

thewillowcat3• 3 months ago

This is mostly true, but things were almost universally worse in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was a similar feeling of anomie, stagflation, and a sense that the country was on the wrong track. But people still reported themselves as happier than now.

daymanstep• 3 months ago

Happiness is to a large extent related to how many close friends you have and how much time you spend with your friends.

anon2915• 3 months ago

You should be building your family and friends instead of wondering when the government is going to find some project for the country to work on

dudefeliciano2• 3 months ago

whatever we built.

It's not what we, or even your mom's generation built (taking some liberties here, assuming your age). Whatever ideals the US stood for have been long gone.

Benjamin Franklin, when asked "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" responded "A republic, if you can keep it”. The answer is clear today.

HerbManic3• 3 months ago

It is Taoist/Buddhist translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) who once said something along the line of; if the Taoists and traditional Buddhists where in charge, we wouldnt have built the world like we have today. It would be angled towards happiness and satisfaction rather than growth of the machine.

Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring.

I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch.

But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater.

There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.

nvch• 3 months ago

In this case, we might not have an advanced civilization with modern medicine and technology. Herbs for healing, candles for lighting, letters for communication. (Perhaps I wouldn't be alive without modern medicine. I suppose it's not easy to be dead and happy.)

Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.

dudefeliciano2• 3 months ago

While I want to agree with you, my critical mind finds flaws in this. The idea of a taoist in charge is an oxymoron: "would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones honored, or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail through the mud".

And the idea of a buddhist doing anything to change the world is also impossible to me, isn't it all about accepting reality as it is?

pipes2• 3 months ago

And yet people risk their lives to get to the USA. They vote with their feet. It isn't perfect but declaring "it isn't working", my response "compared to what".

I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.

Marazan• 3 months ago

"incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation?

Yes.

Can I afford a home?

No.

There's an important lesson somewhere here.

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home?

Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford.

Pay's less.

Less than the narrow window of post-COVID mania pay maybe, but inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term.

Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on.

Annual working hours per worker is flat or slightly down from when your mom's generation made up most of the workforce https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

When it comes to happiness, the numbers don't actually matter though. Perceptions do. Your and your mom's worldview that everything "isn't working any more", that young people can't possibly be buying homes, that real wages are down, and that working hours are up are actually very common ideas, especially if you zoom in on demographics who read a lot of certain types of social media (Reddit especially!) where classic doomerism prevails.

tech_ken• 3 months ago

Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic.

Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper?

edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent history, but I think it's pretty inarguable that the housing market is much worse than it was 30 years ago.

whatisthiseven• 3 months ago

Can you link a source for gen z with higher homeowner rates than millennial, st the same age?

Because redfin shows that just is very clearly not true

https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...

traderj0e5• 3 months ago

Yeah, a house is always affordable to someone, and it's not like all the single-family homes are owned by huge landlords renting out. Some areas have become more sought-after, so young adults there are finding that they can't afford to buy a house where they grew up.

grafmax2• 3 months ago

inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term

Inflation is a tool for monetary policy. It doesn't track cost of living. For example, if luxury items become more affordable, but housing prices rise, inflation-adjusted pay doesn't capture this kind of negative effect on the working class.

vannevar• 3 months ago

Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age.

Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread):

"Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home in 2025, compared to 42.5% of Gen Xers when they were 28 and 44.4% of baby boomers when they were 28." (There is an accompanying chart in the linked report.)

https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...

That seems to show a pretty clear decline in home affordability over time, for people of the same age.

arkis22• 3 months ago

one thing to also consider is that maybe the younger kids who are capable of buying houses may be getting their down payment from the bank of mom and dad. not good for people thinking things are fair

globalnode• 3 months ago

nice debunk, thats just a wall of words that besides likely being wrong, has no evidence and goes against what i hear people saying all the time.

edit: besides, happiness is not about money. freedom of expression and free/impartial institutions are at all time lows across the western world. which as we speak is in an arms race to be the biggest and best surveillance system it can be.

api2• 3 months ago

I can’t grasp the math. How are young people buying homes? Is the average income now over $100k?

Or are they taking out mortgages they can never pay off, meaning they are almost renting not on a path to actually buying or owning and most of their payments are interest.

If that’s the case they are renting a leveraged financial position.

Previous generations could own homes. As in pay them off.

ryukoposting• 3 months ago

Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age.

The median Zoomer is in their mid-20s. You're comparing rounding errors.

HDBaseT2• 3 months ago

Home "ownership" is misleading. You don't own a home until you've paid it off.

Younger people are getting into more debt, for much longer in order to be able to survive.

When we start comparing the numbers (i.e, house paid off, even reflected as a percentage paid off, relative to age) the numbers reveal the real crisis.

Anecdotally, I know tons of 20-30 year olds getting into the property market (with insane levels of debt with almost impossible loan lengths) simply because if they don't do it now, there is a high chance homeless is the next option.

FpUser• 3 months ago

Cut the bullshit please. I bought house in 1998 for $200K, guess what's the price is now. And salaries did not all that much since then. Definitely not 5 times.

reddozen• 3 months ago

This reminds me that people only care about what you tell them to care about. Grocery store prices was the first thing out of any "undecided muh both sides" voters mouth in 2024.

But on Jan 20, 2025 it was magically fixed instantly despite grocery store prices increasing because voters decided to elect in blanket import taxes. No one cares about these issues. They just care about the aesthetic.

camgunz• 3 months ago

Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford.

It's more the case that Gen Z is giving up on having the homes that Millennials want in the places they want them. They're buying fixer uppers, moving into 3rd/4th tier cities, etc. They also have some benefits millennials didn't have: inheritances and way less student loan debt.

You can look at this in a number of ways, but it's clear we didn't solve the problem of "so you want to live in NYC/LA/Chicago/SF/Seattle".

https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/how-gen-z-...

bsder3• 3 months ago

People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry.

For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.

The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.

james_marks2• 3 months ago

At almost 50, I feel like there has been a cultural shift since I was a kid.

It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority.

If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy.

The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.

scottyah3• 3 months ago

I think this was what was the meaning behind the "avocado toast" phenomena. My typical example is that back in the day, you could be the coolest in town +/- 5 grades by jumping off the Big Rock into the river- and that person's 2-3 best friends all shared in the glory. Now, you have to compete with the craziest people in all the world for the same level of admiration.

cucumber37328428• 3 months ago

Every geezer says this but people these days would kill for a reliable chance at a middle class life. We're talking Homer Simpson not Home Alone.

y0eswddl3• 3 months ago

I'd argue most people do not, in fact, year for glamor and wealth. The majority of us just want to be able to live

epicureanideal2• 3 months ago

If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy.

Most people in this conversation on HN seem to just be talking about a regular house and a lifestyle that would’ve been normal for a manual laborer 60-70 years ago.

diogenescynic5• 3 months ago

I think it was boomers who demanded McMansions with 3 car garages and new cars every 4 years and drove lifestyle inflation to a point it's no longer sustainable/affordable for the next generation. Millenials are struggling to afford the bare minimum. Housing used to be 3-5x your salary. Now it's 10-15x in some areas. Meanwhile our taxes are sent to Israel to subsidize genocide and we can't even pave roads in the most expensive zip codes (La Jolla). There's something fundamentally broken with our society at the moment.

mymythisisthis2• 3 months ago

I think for me the big difference is in airline travel, it's become ubiquitous for vacationing. At the same time everything in N. America has become a cookie cutter suburb or exurb and drab. Houses have also become bigger, as well as cars. It's a big shift in culture that happened.

y0eswddl3• 3 months ago

"whatever we built isn't working anymore,"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

goreeStef• 3 months ago

Have wages made up for 800% inflation since 1980?

Multiple generations have now been born into an economy intentionally engineered to deflate their buying power.

roxolotl• 3 months ago

I agree there’s a lot in the comments here that are right. Yes people are chasing ideals that probably aren’t worth it to chase. Yea money for the sake of money is a bad idea. But the reality also is a lot of what had been built has been actively dismantled. Much of what made the lifestyle of the boomers possible has been being actively taken apart piece by piece since the 80s. We’re now seeing what happens when a society stops trying to improve and instead just rent seeks off of itself for 40 years.

danielschonfeld• 3 months ago

I agree with your mom’s sentiment. It’s exactly that. I also feel that generally hope is gone - nobody actually sits there imagining the US becoming what it felt like in the 90s and that’s probably the root of the problem. We all kinda internalize this is the decline.

jjav4• 3 months ago

The US is not particularly rich. The GPD is way out there, but that doesn't mean anything. It is highly concentrated in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.

And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations.

Who could be happy?

Erem3• 3 months ago

I agree with the authors point at large, but he misses one key pillar to defend his thesis: happiness requires health, and many of us never fully recovered physically from our first bouts with COVID.

Our energy levels are lower. This makes us more sedentary, which makes muscles atrophy, which attracts injuries at even moderate exertion, when we try to climb out of the pit.

Havoc• 3 months ago

I get the sense (from afar) that income rather than wealth is where the problem is. Or put differently reckon the US is very inefficient at converting high salary numbers into a good life.

If you earn a mountain but rent is expensive and healthcare is expensive and tipping is expensive and you need to save for private retirement etc etc and end up living paycheque to paycheque then I can see that not being fun despite incredible top line salary.

_DeadFred_• 3 months ago

We normalized the rustbelt/loss of famliy farms/loss of real decent jobs in small town America/the cities' working class forgetting those were the pipeline that generated the children that went on be the young vibrant energy that knew how to do things/grew our economy/contributed to our culture and strength.

We normalized children working in sweatshops making our things overseas. We made their suffering a cheap punchline and labeled comedians gritty for normalizing it. Extended the apathy to seniors working Walmart to not starve. To the treatment of factory farmed animals. Extended it to Amazon workers literally forced to piss in soda bottles/dying on the warehouse floor as managers tell co-workers they can't perform CPR to try to keep them alive until an ambulance comes, it's more important they just work around the body. We lost all moral compass and are horrific people. That horribleness/acceptance of horribleness is leaking from consumerism and into more and more just being what our society is now. And cheap social commentary humor absorbed the energy that would have been put to changing things and instead just normalized bad behavior. You don't get Donald Trump without Jon Stewart/Joe Rogan both normalizing behavior and building apathy. We went from serious talk about societal problems in our papers/magazine/church groups/social clubs to nodding our heads as we consumed negative/lowest value humor from comedians, the most depressed/live horrible disgusting lives people in our country.

We made eagle scouts the but of jokes (again crappy humor with crappy results) and convince kids they are too cool for programs that foster everyone coming together and doing shared programs/experiences. We removed so much experiential growth/community that was baked into being a youth in the past. Instead of community sports it's fancy paid programs for the cool kids that get accepted or have high talent. You can't do anything with friends that is cheap let alone a revenue driver (buy fix junk cars, do yardword, do sidework for a friends parent who have their own business). So much we value later in life came from doing things that weren't cool or maybe we didn't want to do when we were kids or we needed to be guided into. Now we let children choose but also don't guide them to making growth choices or protect them so they can do uncool things (other than distracting games maybe or 'cool in a geeky way' things).

We slavishly worshiped the tech economy that pushed bits around in machines but don't really do anything other than replaced workers jobs or figure out how to suck money out of systems as a middle man, and made that our ideal 'dream and future'. Efficiency goes up for what was there, but we arent' really creating new just optimizing while tech bros suck the moving dollars out of the system causing entropy.

Current culture inflicts a horrific level of sexual abuse against young women. Maybe it was always that way and I was naive, but the amount of manipulation/lieing/emotional betrayal by men is unacceptable and beyond anything I experienced in the past. Add in so many more women doing sex work either online but also lots more irl. That really burns someone out/detaches. Between the two our previous social construct is gone and in the new one I personally expect women to just give up on men.

I think that there is something very medically wrong that got waived away as an 'obesity epidemic'. I hope Ozempic will lead to figuring it out and not let it be waived away as 'fat people' one the people impacted has lost the weight but still have problems. I've watched my mom and so many others go from happy, healthy, energtic to putting on weight and every day life just being very very hard that it doesn't make sense.

There's a lot going on. Past America would have addressed things as they came up. But we stopped doing that. We've looked away for so long/from so many things we no longer have a direction to look away to.

sssilver• 3 months ago

As someone who's immigrated into the United States around 2010s, I have experienced a life in Central Texas that was much better than it was expensive before COVID, and much more expensive than it's good after COVID.

khriss• 3 months ago

It's been discussed multiple times here before. The blunt reality is that

* Almost all of the productivity gains over the past three decades have been captured by the 1%(0.1% really). Rank and file workers (yes that includes tech workers) have seen a very minuscule portion of that. Tech got by for a while because the gains were so large and that for a while, the overall pie expanded faster than the growth in developers.

* The elites used the excess surplus to capture the govt(e.g Citizens United)and ensure favourable policy like being able to socialize losses and privatize profits which resulted in even more of the gains going to them.

* In search of ever increasing profits, the elites also funneled those gains into buying up more and more of the economy starting at the top (P.E driven consolidation) and increasingly moving lower and lower on Maslow's hierarchy (housing, food/farmland, medicine).

The lowest sections of our society started getting squeezed way before(notice where the most support for a promise to return to a 'glorious' past is), but it has now reached a point where even the upper middle class is getting squeezed and can't easily afford basic needs like housing and healthcare.

History shows that these situations are inherently unstable and don't last very long. Unfortunately for the elites, in the extreme cases they don't tend to do well in the aftermath once the proles decide they have had enough.

The best hope is that they voluntarily realize that the situation is untenable.

slibhb• 3 months ago

Regardless of exactly how it started, the constant negativity you see everywhere (including HN...) has become a self-perpetuating social contagion. Notice that it mainly affects the English-speaking world, which hints that it spreads and survives through language.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Its caused by active influence campaigns and institutional ideology. Its not native, it doesn't come from the population and it doesn't reflect society. That's why politicians who embrace it usually lose. Only the reactionaries (who go against it) do well in elections. Those "people" you see online pushing it, those are bots and they are rarely operated by Americans or even native English speakers.

PS A foreign example, the entire Scottish Independence movement online (post say 2020) was caused by foreign bot farm.

mirrorlogic• 3 months ago

Worship of the 1% and social disorder.

bryanlarsen4• 3 months ago

Note that one of the assumptions isn't necessarily true.

The culprit has to fit the crime. Most importantly, it has to fit the timing of the crime. What we’re looking for is something that happened around 2020 (uh, seems obvious) and then didn’t recover (ah, that’s the hard part). This timing rules out several otherwise plausible suspects.

You can pile straws on a camel as part of a continuous process and then observe the breaking of the camel's back as a discontinuous result.

Any explanation that doesn't fit the timing (like the "decline of religion" example he uses) may still be relevant. It can't be automatically ruled out, but the timing is a strong piece of evidence against it. The theory needs to include a solid explanation for why the timing doesn't seem to match. I don't think decline of religion has such a solid explanation, but other theories might.

lo_zamoyski2• 3 months ago

Poverty sucks, but if you think material wealth is sufficient for or even the key to happiness, then you've already lost the plot.

The key is virtue. Ethics is the science of the good. You cannot be happy as an immoral person. That's where you should look for sources of misery or unhappiness.

(We could also distinguish between happiness and joy, where, according to this distinction, happiness fluctuates because it is dependent on circumstance, while joy is grounded in permanence.)

HEmanZ• 3 months ago

The everything crisis is somewhat apt, but if I look at my cohort (older gen z/very young millennial) it’s really mostly a cost of housing crisis.

And if I look at the squeeze I feel as a very high income young person, it’s still just cost of housing. The amount of house a salary of x buys was utterly decimated in the last 4 years, especially in the metros that have good job growth.

Solve the housing crisis and you’ll have happy young people and future generations. Maybe not so much boomers.

zaptheimpaler2• 3 months ago

I think everyone I see writing anywhere whether these comments or substacks or just talking to in real life, we all pretty much agree on why we're sad. Its the same 5-6 reasons. We all know. There are much deeper analyses showing trends that started in the 1980s that took away our power too.

It's just that the government does not properly measure any of these things and doesn't work for us anymore. We've all been trained to constantly ask WHY things are broken and argue about it but never take any real action to change them. Trained to pretend a protest on a weekend and a post on FB is the height of activism, to forget what really collectively demanding and creating change looks like. The number of atrocities committed by this government weekly is insane, all anyone talks about is keeping up or not keeping up with the news, no concept at all of collective power to make them accountable. Let's just wait 3 years and hope the next government does that - while history clearly shows they will not, and cannot in many cases given the law.

maerF0x03• 3 months ago

would you please recap the 5-6 reasons?

zaptheimpaler2• 3 months ago

1. Breakdown of community & support structures. Isolated, atomized society. Few friends and family, weak relationships between them, dating market accustomed to infinite choice.

2. Power increasingly shifting to capital over labor, leading to tougher and exploitative work conditions, lower wages, tougher job markets etc. for labor. Also affects us as consumers dealing with oligopolies or monopolies. Somehow we saw a world where a ton of us worked remote, it worked at least 80% as well in exchange for huge worker benefits, but its going away because we don't have any power and no one is looking out for us. Now we have massive inflation and I don't think anyone believes that a big chunk of it isn't just greedy opportunistic price gouging. Every single thing I see about any job in any field, its about how they are losing power, getting more work for less pay, jumping through more bullshit hoops, field is turning from being run by practitioners to being run by psychopaths in PE firms. This is even in medicine, like people who directly help people everyday feel their job lacks purpose because of the amount of paperwork, huge overwork and under-staffing in general coming down to centralization in the health care system, increasing oligopolization and insurance power - same power shifting from labor to capital.

3. Absolute breakdown of government institutions, regulators and justice for powerful people. Epstein files - actual child abusing pedophile billionaires, lawyers, senators all face no consequence besides maybe losing a very cushy job. President pardons all kinds of corrupt buddies. What kind of clown believes in a justice system when this happens weekly? ICE officers kill or abuse victims without consequences. Can't build a single train line in the time China built millions and millions of miles. Congress gridlocked for a decade now. Perception that government is completely ineffective, and not at all accountable to us or working for us. Its linked to point above as well, with capital being more powerful than government, or in bed with them in many cases.

4. Higher exposure to negative news, media algorithms, social media etc. It's all been covered before. Fear and anger sells. Billion dollar companies with 1000s of very smart employees trying their hardest to addict you to their app, which makes your life worse. Seemingly constant state of emergency or crisis, one crisis to the next.

I read the article after writing this, I think the author had very similar points. I think most complaints roughly come down into these buckets and root causes.

The only missing piece is the understanding that this will not fix itself anymore, the will to collectively agree on the bad actors, organize, take back power, enforce consequences.

BobbyJo• 3 months ago

Technological advancement is speeding up. When you don't have to worry about selling your labor, it is an increasingly powerful source of comfort. When you do have to sell your labor, it is an increasingly powerful source of insecurity.

I think a lot of the demographics that the article points to overlap strongly with technological diffusion, with social media exposure being a strong proxy.

Garlef• 3 months ago

Going to the US always feels weird:

It's very nice on the surface but it underneath it all, there's always someone trying to extract value from you. At almost every little step.

Simply enjoying life is guarded beyond a glass wall and you need to pay an entrance fee.

maerF0x03• 3 months ago

I mean, it seems pretty obvious, no?

Wealth is concentrated and can skew the averages, but happiness, even if rated on a scale, is not particularly able to skew the number up... so as wealthy americans got spectacularly rich, pulling up the "rich" side, maybe making them equisitely happy... a more widespread shift in sentiments are pulling down the average.

And a lot of this makes sense... Wealth doesn't add much happiness over a certain threshold. A naive happiness maximizing algo would probably do something like cap someone around that number and redistribute the wealth to those below it.

Plus there's the monkey grape/cucumber experiment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo ... Humans are social status sensitive, meaning we're likely to have bad feelings (and make irrational choices) when we feel our place in the herd is falling or below someone else's. Eg: People living near lottery winners are more likely to go bankrupt than similar people who don’t have a winning neighbor, presumed to be a "keeping up with the joneses" kind of issue.

pnw• 3 months ago

IMHO the top ten countries on World Happiness Report are primarily those that are good at expectation management. The Nordic countries always rank well because culturally they manage their citizens expectations in life so as not to expect too much (cf The Jante Law). Australia and New Zealand have similar cultural drives where being too successful is seen as a negative. The US does not - if anything, US culture is the polar opposite of expectation management.

When walking through the CPH airport with one of my Danish colleagues, they would always roll their eyes at the "Welcome to the happiest country on Earth signs" and point out that Denmark was ranked #1 in SSRI use in Europe.

Glyptodon• 3 months ago

I do not buy that income / housing / cost of living related issues are not part of the story so much as I buy that they're very intertwined with inflation and labor costs. The other thing that this waves over that I think is very real is how the nature of employment has changed. Most people who have a job, and especially after things like Doge and endless layoff cycles, where everything is about psycho dark patterns, surveillance, and penny pinching, do not feel like their job assures anything. And this is on top of people who have complicated situations to begin with and often work multiple part time jobs or gig work.

Literally most everyone working I know basically thinks everything is always getting more expensive, that most wage gains were/have been less than how much costs have gone up, that housing is so expensive it might be worth moving to West Virginia, and that all it would take to ruin 20 years of work is an unexpected layoff or major life event like a medical issue, lawsuit, car or home issue. And that's non tech people mostly. Who also have increasing resentment for how scumbags and flim flam dealers seem to always be the ones getting ahead.

christkv• 3 months ago

My theory is that everyone is overstimulated by constant information, dooming and context switches.

Beijinger• 3 months ago

"If we’re being clear-eyed about it, America has, historically, been brutal to many of its citizens. For some, that treatment is far more recent and unfamiliar, inspiring the desire to find happiness, safety, and security elsewhere. And while it’s tempting to believe this sense of urgency can be wholly blamed on Donald Trump, he was, in reality, an accelerant to a necrotic system.

When the middle class began to crack in the years following the 2007 economic collapse, the old American instinct to migrate in search of opportunity shifted. If leaving was something Americans did domestically, the horizon shifted further afield."

abhijitr• 3 months ago

For me personally working in big tech, there was a sharp increase of work-related malaise in 2020 that never went down. IMO it was largely driven by 1) covid-era hiring blitz followed by layoffs, 2) so-called zoom fatigue. Teams became more geographically distributed, lots of newbies showed up, coordination overhead went up, competitiveness and backstabbing increased, work seemed to progress much slower.

danesparza• 3 months ago

And now is getting eaten by AI

cutler• 3 months ago

It must be hard to remain sane, let alone happy, after 2 terms of Donald Trump.

qgin2• 3 months ago

I don’t think this discussion is complete without mentioning Trump, if not as an outright cause, at least a symbol and a symptom.

The level of toxicity and cynicism and nihilism that has been brought to the foreground every day is really something to see.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

It takes 2 to tango and everyone that takes a "its only the other side doing it", is the problem.

thewillowcat3• 3 months ago

I think the pandemic broke the feeling most Americans had that we were all in the same boat and we could work together to solve our problems. Liberals stopped seeing Trump's election as a fluke but an indication that conservatives were living by a fundamentally different set of values. Conservatives started to see liberal policies as a threat to the basic fabric of American life.

When I was younger, it was unusual for people to think they couldn't have friends with different politics, but now it's almost taken for granted in some circles. The current political environment is absolutely corrosive.

shell0x• 3 months ago

Not just America, the whole West is in decline IMHO.Hong Kong is also done after the China security law.

I’m planning to move back to Asia, where I lived for like a decade. The work culture is harder but it feels much safer, better food, more fun, harsh on crime.

I wouldn’t mind to trade in German and Australian citizenships for Singapore.

Henchman21• 3 months ago

The answer to the question posed by the headline is simple:

The elites have built a propaganda machine / mind control device called "Social Media". Facebook, famously, sought to determine if they could influence people's emotions. They succeeded in manufacturing negative sentiment. This was then harness by the "elites" to wage class war against the rest of us.

They're gonna REALLY SURPRISED when the rope runs out and they find themselves hanging at the end of it. You can't endlessly create negative sentiment and expect positive results. That's lunacy.

ForgotMyUUID• 3 months ago

This is a hard subject. I have lost a lot because of covid 2019 money-wise, familly-wise and health-wise right in the middle of my twenties. It literally destroyed me making me impared. Life was never worse as in 2021 for me. These days I feel that my life will turn out to be shorter than i thought before.

But i would like to share something that keeps me alive: if i see an opportunity to make someone happy, I do that. If i see someone feeling lost, i try to give them a bit of confidence : will everything around break but they can rely at least on me. A human being needs a human being. Although it is hard, i forgive more. There is so much suffering in the world these days, so many people lost their relatives, got injured, lost homes because of wars, that feeling any comfort these days, feeling "happy" just hurts. It just does not feel right.

rstuart4133• 3 months ago

Impressive article. He gathered a lot of data interesting in its own right, tested a lot of theories, focused on facts over assertions; and it did it in a way that was a pleasure to read.

The conclusion was somewhat underwhelming: it's a least two things hitting at once: inflation and COVID, possibly with social media thrown in.

I dunno if he's right, but I'd probably add two more factors: the latest round of the ongoing (for 4 years now) Ukraine war coincided with the start of the decline, and now the rise of AI providing a sting in the tail. In fact it was the total lack of AI writing in this piece that made it such a pleasure to read. It's a rare find nowadays.

alex435784• 3 months ago

I really don’t think Americans broadly are concerned with the Ukraine war on a day to day basis.

GS5235238• 3 months ago

The author argues that the reason America is sad is because of global trade and the interest rate policy. Perhaps having a culture that equates happiness with the economy is the real reason America is sad.

ahaferburg• 3 months ago

Can be explained with one word: Inequality. America being rich is a smokescreen. Some Americans are very rich. Most are not. The very rich Americans are not sad, actually.

molsongolden• 3 months ago

A lot of these articles and social media discussions miss by not contemplating the fact that by increasing productivity and incomes we have also increased the cost of leisure.

In the vein of The Harried Leisure Class, the more opportunities that are available to you, the more likely you are to feel like you are wasting time, need to optimize everything, etc. People are also pushed to be even more individualistic because the cost of slowing down and interacting with the community has increased.

There are many other factors at work but this one seems pretty clear but doesn't seem to see enough discussion.

pico303• 3 months ago

I have no information to back this up or suggest this isn't anything but anecdotal, but from my perspective, we have a Federal government that stopped promoting the well-being of its people. We've twisted the message and convinced people that promoting business and wealth at the cost of everything else is good for everyone. So we drop every social safety net in favor of unregulated growth, which leaves the poor and middle class struggling to get by with a promise of good fortune sometime in the future, while the wealthy ride high on the hog.

We've been running this race, reaching for a carrot that's always poised just out of reach for 30 years, and I think we're all just getting really tired of it.

bonyt• 3 months ago

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

odyssey7• 3 months ago

All work and no play... gives you a birth rate crisis, apparently.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

Its urbanization that causes that. COVID had nothing do with it.

lotsofpulp9• 3 months ago

It’s women’s rights that causes that. Turns out, making and raising a baby more than one or two times is not a preferred option. And zero is preferred a lot of times too.

assimpleaspossi• 3 months ago

It's the rise of dependence on the internet and the social interactions there along with the decline of respectable news gathering organizations that have crossed the line into fronts for advertising. A decline in truth.

I find that the more I avoid television, radio and the internet, the better I feel because the people in the real world around me aren't discussing wars, politicians, murders and suicides. We're talking sports and good food and, today, vacations I'm going on.

These things don't make me sad. The internet, television and radio make me sad. So I avoid them altogether.

Kuyawa• 3 months ago

America is not rich, the government and their cronies are. The people is just realizing that there are no more crumbs falling off the tables, vultures have eaten them all. It will take a hard reset to start it all over again.

shadowtree• 3 months ago

Crime and Grime - which is what SF is currently trying to turn around, but LA is still in full denial mode about.

Seeing a Fentanyl victim on your way to work ruins your mood.

Using Waymo as a woman because Ubers are legit rape traps anchors fear in your mind (https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/disturbing-details...).

Seeing trash everywhere, alongside every freeway in the Bay Area? Subliminal assurance everything is a mess.

BART?

etc etc etc.

davesque4• 3 months ago

Something discussed in the article, but absent in the diagnosis of the final paragraph: the unique phenomenon of Donald Trump in American life. To half the country (including me), he's the worst leader in the country's history. Even if a person has faith in humanity, they may still feel like they are swimming against the man's personal tide of anger and bad judgement. Things might be great if it weren't for the disastrous tariff policy and Iran war, which have needlessly crippled the economy. As long as a person like him is in charge, it feels like we're always taking two steps forward and twenty steps back, and for no good reason. To the other half, Trump rode in atop a wave of grievance, so even to those who like him, he's sold them the notion that their society is on the brink of collapse (because Democrats, leftists, etc.). Overall, the sum effect of his presence has been to shift the entire national culture (and even the world's culture) towards knee-jerk rage and resentment, in accord with his behavior and personality.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

If Trump changed his name to Andrew, he wouldn't even be in the top 2 worst Presidents named Andrew. If you don't know history, you think everything is happening for the first time ever. You have probably never seen something truly unique happen in your lifetime but you don't know that because you don't know history.

PS There was once a major political party in the US literally called the "Know Nothings" and that name wasn't ironic.

defrost3• 3 months ago

There was once a major political party in the US literally called the "Know Nothings"

In the exact same sense as there is currently a major political party in the US literally called the "MAGA party".

ie. not literally and not actually, just colloquially.

senectus1• 3 months ago

I've repeatedly observed (from outside of the US) that the core of the culture of the US appears to be that everything is a consumable.. including and especially its people.

its social contract is poisoned by this proposition.

keeda• 3 months ago

My personal theory, represented in the points in TFA but not quite pinpointed, is that it is due to smartphones and the overall media environment (not just social media). Specifically:

Smartphones enable unprecedented levels of reach as well as content personalized to you... as decided by The Algorithm. Media organizations and social media influencers discovered that ragebait gets clicks, which generates revenue. This also explains why news articles overall are very negative, as TFA points out. This is what influences The Algorithm.

This is all that is needed. Consider:

1. The psychological harms of social media are very well understood, as often shown in Meta's own leaked reports. But the discussion has focused on youths because "think of the children" (which is actually justified here) but overshadows the harm to the general population.

2. Elon and Twitter. 'Nuff said.

3. Beyond public channels, there is even more negativity in private message groups like WhatsApp and Telegram which is invisible from the outside. I've seen a lot of large influence campaigns and disinformation flow through those channels that have not made the news. Which also means that fact-checking is not a thing there.

4. The countries where happiness is rising has two main (mostly mutually exclusive) traits:

a) They have low inflation (from TFA: Portugal, Italy, Spain). Maybe this is sufficient to overcome the effects of negative media environment.

b) They are largely authoritarian states (from TFA: China, India, Vietnam) where the media environment is heavily controlled. So the constant media narrative is "Things have never been better!" (Though the cracks are showing in India, because people will tolerate this only as long as things are good, and genuine dissatisfaction is breaking the narrative barrier, since "fake it til you make it" does not work for national economies. I suspect cracks will show in China too if the gravy train comes to an end there.)

5. The lockdown from the pandemic was probably just the impetus that drove more people to their smartphones and got them hooked into this cycle of negativity.

So basically people have been inundated, via public and private channels, with constant waves of negativity and disinformation. Even the "positivity" is stuff like social media influencers portraying unrealistic, luxurious lifestyles ("a day in the life of a PM at a tech company".) This further breeds resentment in people even if their own lives are actually getting better.

In my tinfoil hat mode, I even suspect the global media environment is heavily manipulated to sow dissatisfaction and cause instability (hence the "vibecession") as a form of economic warfare. ("We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within." - Kruschev, maybe)

But Occam's Razor says good old capitalism is a sufficient explanation.

diogenescynic5• 3 months ago

America is rich, Americans not so much. We've strip mined the middle class since the 1970s. Good jobs were outsourced. Then we used immigration to make sure that the good paying jobs were unavailable for most native born citizens. Now they import H-1Bs and L-1Bs to use as indentured servants and scab workers to undermine whoever is left with a job. Then on top of that a shitty healthcare system that only extracts wealth and cares little about the outcomes of its customers. You can't even own a home anywhere nice anymore because now you as an individual have to compete with AirBNBs and home flippers. The stock market has never been higher, but the economy itself feels paper thin. Quality of almost everything is in rapid decline--restaurant food/service, new homes are low quality (using lower quality materials, almost no brick or wood), college education is no longer a signal for actually being intelligent, you buy a vegetable at the grocery store (Whole Foods) and it's still several months old junk from sitting in a packing house and now it goes back in a week when you bring it up. Meat prices at Costco are up 25% in a single year.

It honestly feels like we optimized all the wrong stuff--social media, sports betting, crypto, etc. and then anything that matters--housing, healthcare, food... it's all just pathetic now.

hunterpayne33• 3 months ago

There are only 3 industries that cause most of that. All 3 advertise heavily on news programs and all 3 are heavily regulated. They are also the only 3 industries whose prices have gone up (inflation adjusted) over the last 25 or so years. Those 3 industries are education, housing and health care. You take out those expenses and everything is different.

stego-tech• 3 months ago

It got sad because enough folks across enough strata aren't doing well in enough ways that matter, and yet are constantly told that the numbers/statistics/data tell the opposite so clearly they're in the wrong.

Just look through the comments here for more evidence of that sentiment: for every commenter saying they did everything right but can't afford a home, there's someone else storming in with cherry-picked data showing that ahkshually homeownership for younger cohorts is getting better so obviously it's a problem unique to you and not the larger demographic. For every commenter complaining about wages not keeping pace with inflation, there's another commenter barging in with ahkshually the basket of goods indicator suggests you're wrong and everything has never been more affordable, so it must be a you problem.

America is so sad because we keep saying "we're having problems and need help," and the response is consistently along the lines of "Ahkshually everything on this graph is great and we're not going to look any deeper than that so it must be something you've done to deserve this." Nobody is listening to the meat of the grievance, just immediately punching down on the aggrieved. That makes us sad.

As for the "u rich why so sad" argument? Because you're conflating the wealth of the whole for the wealth (or lack thereof) of the components. Taken as a whole, America is fabulously wealthy; hell, taken individually, Americans earn and are worth more than any other society on the planet, period. Yet when you start boiling down to individual pictures, it becomes clear that the wealth of the country is intensely concentrated in fewer hands, and that those hands have no intention of ceding that wealth to the government nor using it to govern effectively. The problem isn't wealth so much as wealth inequality, and just mentioning that phrase is going to get this downvoted into oblivion because the last thing a country of pretend-billionaires wants to admit is that they won't actually be wealthy themselves someday.

EDIT: One little nugget I've been chewing on lately with regards to this whole thing is that perhaps the financialization of everything is a contributing factor. Before computers spat out "optimized" pricing for every good, service, and transaction out there in the name of maximizing profit via "objective" measures of value, human elements could choose to eschew that in favor of prioritizing other outcomes - like cutting tenants a break on rent when they got laid off so your building had a stable set of known inhabitants that were more predictable and invested in the community, for instance, or paying workers more and investing in their training so they wouldn't be tempted to leave. By optimizing for profit, we removed humanity from a very human system; by worshiping entities like "the invisible hand of the free market" and "efficient distribution of resources via Capital allocation" as if they were gods, we hand-waved away any obligation of those with outsized success to provide support for those who failed to achieve it themselves.

That would explain the vast chasm between the "mood" and the "stats", in a way: the system might be optimized for maximum profit, but it has come at the expense of prioritizing a healthy human society, and the humans are feeling that more and more.

As for all the talk about how humans are ultimately the ones making these decisions - are they, though? Are they really? Because it doesn't look like the C-Suite and Boardrooms and investor classes out there seem willing to sacrifice some profits for improved human conditions; the consistent pattern continues to be along the lines of "the computer said X", and that's the extent of the discussion lest a human risk being accountable for that decision.

_carbyau_3• 3 months ago

I think it is related to who can make a higher % of wealth gain.

It seems like rich people can get %-wise richer faster than the rest of us.

IE they can double their wealth way faster than I can double mine.

digitaltrees• 3 months ago

Concentration

latentframe• 3 months ago

That shows wealth can go up without people feeling better, if most gains come from assets then it mainly helps those who already have those assets while others mostly see higher costs

leonidasrup• 3 months ago

Many America's are not rich, so it's understandable that they are sad.

"The costs of inequality: When a fair shake isn’t"

"One measure of American inequality is the percentage of the nation’s overall wealth owned by different parts of the population. The graphic above shows that the richest 20 percent of the country owns 88.9 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 40 percent owes more than it owns."

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-...

theturtlemoves• 3 months ago

"Cultural conservatives might try to explain the Tragic Twenties by citing the rise of secular individualism among American liberals and pointing to the fact that religion seems to be a tonic for unhappiness. But the rise of religious non-affiliation in America has been a steady 30-year trend, whereas this falloff in well-being started in 2020, when secularism reached its recent peak. So, that explanation won’t do."

Tipping point?

anal_reactor• 3 months ago

I have zero chances of getting married. I see my friends about once per two weeks and that's a huge upgrade from not having friends at all.

Suzuran• 3 months ago

America is not rich. A handful of Americans are rich. The rest of us are not, and can never be allowed to become rich because that would not be in the interests of the aforementioned handful.

trepaura• 3 months ago

We're rich for reasons that do not remotely correlate with happiness for most Americans. Happiness on a larger scale did exist for about 2 decades during which we had strong labor laws and high taxes for corporations and the wealthy. I also have to specify the ultra wealthy mostly didn't exist in that time frame except for a small handful of people with generational wealth.

Once the corporate tax rates started to drop, deregulation started and employee and consumer protections began being stripped as well. As a result, all that money has been allowed to pulled away by a tiny fraction of ultra wealthy, non-working Americans.

After 4 decades of these circumstances, this has left the majority in a state where they can't afford Healthcare or virtually any kind of emergency without going into life long crippling debt with no hope of escape.

Incidentally, the top correlating factor with divorce is being unable to pay for 1 moderate emergency with savings. If you can, then it's possible to resave that money before the next one most of the time, but if you can't, the interest will eat you alive.

naishoya• 3 months ago

Here is pretty much the full rebuttal to the "It really is better, but everyone is whining" points of view:

https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie title: "Part 1: My Life Is a Lie" byline: "How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America"

TLDR; it does actually take well over 100k for a family of four in the US to not be at significant risk of becoming de-housed and the 'poverty line' that everyone points to has not been adjusted to account for the actual erosion of public standard services since the late 1960's and does not take into account the actual costs of many significantly inflated market conditions; including housing, food security, basic transportation, and communication.

Bottom line, the answer to the original questions is: America is not rich, has not been for quite some time, and everyone is sad because the reality is in serious contrast to the image which the wealthy and powerful are very effective at projecting both inside the US and abroad. That image is every bit as disconnected from reality as every other fictional product of the US entertainment industry.

abustamam5• 3 months ago

Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures. More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class, and workers at the bottom of the income distribution have seen their wages grow faster than those at the top in the last few years.

I think it's important to define rich. Is it high net worth or high income? High income means nothing when you're paycheck to paycheck paying mortgage and bills.

Also, I'd argue that America itself isn't rich. The 1% certainly are rich. Corporations are sure rich. But the rest of us? We're dealing with the world the rich people put us in.

insane_dreamer• 3 months ago

It's hard when there's so little good news. I mean what good news has there been in the past 10 years? What progress has been made that has really improved our lives? Maybe I'm overly cynical but I can't think of anything.

The big step of "progress" has been the breakthrough in AI, which is amazing in itself, but that in practice is improving the lives of a tiny sliver of the population, and making everyone else's lives worse. It's not improving society in any meaningful way (but it is improving corporate profits and stock market returns -- I guess there's a bright spot for those lucky enough to have significant investments in the market).

Materially, in the past 10 years, things have gotten much much better for a very very small number of people, about the same for a segment of the population, and worse for most everyone else.

Even medically, the one area where we should be continuously getting better because of new discoveries, etc., we have gotten worse (worse health care outcomes, lower more people not getting healthcare due to affordability, poor nutrition because healthy food is more expensive, etc.). Even life expectancy, if you average over the past 10 years, is lower than the 10 years prior to that (due to COVID mostly).

skrlet13• 3 months ago

America isn't rich, just a few people there are.

plumbees• 3 months ago

The friction in everyday interactions feels higher than it used to be. I'm noticing a common thread: a lack of emphasis on training. I see the gap shows up everywhere. The result is increased friction for everything in life and it's happening regardless of the industry.

I've seen baggers in grocery stores, place cans and bottles of water on top of bread. When I visit the doctor I have to constantly advocate that I want to see the document they are making me sign in writing as they typically won't share the document with me at all unless I sign. And just over all lack of empathy and understanding of what services are being provided, all due to the lack of training.

This forces everyday interactions to have an additional layer of distrust and having to pay attention to things that would have normally been taken care of in the past.

lucy_hnatchuk• 3 months ago

The "trust as shock absorber" point hits hardest. We didn't just lose money or stability — we lost the basic faith in each other that makes hard times survivable.

If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

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