If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad? | Hacker News Reader

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

derekthompson.org

564 pointsmomentmaker1,087 comments

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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.

> "whatever we built isn't working anymore,"

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

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.

> What are we even building?

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

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

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

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.

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.

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?

The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop around 2020 specifically, which long-term trends don't explain.

Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives.

And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality of our social relationships. Anything that cuts us off from our friends, or prevents us from forming new friendships, is going to be visible in the happiness data.

Judging by the stats, we haven't dug ourselves out of the post-COVID hole yet.

I agree the article is smarter than the title makes it seem. And honestly, much better than comments on HN. The articles keeps diving deeper and asking questions. The comments here take hold of a single theory, without even thinking about the counters that article mentions. This is probably the best example of read the article, and not the comments.

I 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".

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.

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?

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?

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

As an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted.

On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive. Even food where normally you could walk in a shop and get something for not much, a basic sandwich started from $8 and when I came out some lady followed me and said could she have some she was hungry so I gave her half and really was hungry. I've never really had that in the other fifty countries I've visited including in Africa. In London you get Roma sitting around with 'hungry' signs but they are all fat and well fed and want cash. It's odd.

The 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.

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.

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.

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+.

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.

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

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..

>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.

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.

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…

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.

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

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

I have never seen someone in america starving.

I do feel this trend in my life. I have a job which I'm grateful for but nothing feels satisfying anymore, and I feel like it is much harder to connect to people or form deep relationships, especially in this field, unless you already have a clique in your workplace.

On top of that, AI is generally a demotivating entity to the majority of people. Despite all the hype of Altman and whonots, I feel like people just don't have a positive view of the future of their careers due to AI. And once you lose hope it's just downhill from there.

Also I feel like society still hasn't recovered fully from COVID, so many third places gone, restraunts closed, etc. It's getting there but people are isolating more and more. I'm in my late 20s and I just haven't felt like my social life is even half of what it used to be before COVID.

I sense your lack of hope and see it in a lot of younger people these days.

I grew up in the 80's. College in the late 90's. Start of career in the mid aughts. Went through two dot com busts, and have seen a lot of shit. The one thing that my generation (Gen X) seemed to have was always some optimism for the future. Some hope that as bad as it is now? It will eventually get better. The economy will recover, tech jobs will come back, new companies will start up, things will get back to normal.

There seemed to be so much open road with our generation. We knew we were at the forefront of something really special. The road to being successful was pretty standard. Go to college, get a degree, start a career making 40-50K. Get married, buy a house, have kids, live happily ever after.

That seems to have dissipated with Millennials and has gotten worse with Gen Z. Even college for Gen Z is like, "I don't know, is it really worth it any more?" How do you pick a career in something that may or may not exist in a few years because of AI? It just seems like we were the last generation that really had so much hope (regardless of which party was in the White House or controlled congress) and it seems that kind on relentless optimism for the future has dimmed immensely over the past few years.

I'm grateful for the time I grew up in. I'm not sure I would be able to handle the amount of pressure and stress that young people have to deal with these days.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

I agree. I think we should just stop.

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.

I feel like this is an easily answerable question, but I can see this because I grew up an atheist (and travel in those typically atheist/educated/professional circles) and have become much more aware/educated in/embracing of religion later in life myself.

If you compare apples to apples - say my average atheist friend who is a director in a FAANG and also my religious friend who is also a director in the same FAANG.

The former lives by themselves, spends their money on fun things like cars and "toys", etc. Don't get me wrong, wonderful guy (hence friend) but doesn't have those traditional things that historically have been correlated with a fulfilled life.

Meanwhile my religious-FAANG friend has 4 kids, lives in a community where everyone knows each other, lives much closer to family (intentional choice) and just overall sees his life, both the ups and the downs, as part of something purposeful and meaningful.

I would say my religious friend has much more intensity and drama/richness in his life, and maybe no time for "sadness" which I actually think is the right way to go.

I like talking about these 2 guys because outwardly they are apples to apples (same career, similar degree, etc.) but I think this generalizes well to my other friends too. At whatever level of "secular" success and safety, my religious friends just somehow seem more grounded, more belonging in their lives compared to my atheist friends, deal with setbacks better, take a more long-term view and in that traditional sense have more "to live for" than themselves which is very healthy.

America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization. When I came to the US in mid-90s (as an atheist) over half the population attended religious services regularly. Obviously that number is nothing like that today. So what registers to us as an overall change in society (fewer kids, less happy) is actually the proliferation of non religiosity in society and the corresponding magnification of the kind of challenges non-religious folks face.

As a sort of comical but sad example, most my atheist friends "would want kids" but have 30 reasons why it's impossible, between economics, politics, etc. Meanwhile my religious friends just have kids.

Yeah, I agree. I think we're deep into a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning. A lot of people are blind to the trend because those aren't easy things to measure.

But if you're single, isolated, on dating apps -- or maybe caught in an unfulfilling marriage commuting from the suburbs to a job you resent -- there often doesn't seem much point to your own existence. Everything has been stripped of its meaning.

The spiritual crisis also explains why people aren't having kids. If there's no point to anything, why go through all the work and hardship? Parents often want to bring more happiness into the world. But if you're deeply unhappy, the logic changes.

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.

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.

Secularism in the US began rising steadily in 1990 and has actually been declining since 2020. That trend doesn't line up well with any of the data we're talking about.

I 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.

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.

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

Not a lot of "average" going on here.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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)

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.

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.

What has atheism anything to do with this?

> 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.

> 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.

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!

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"?

Sounds like you have two happy well-adjusted friends?

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.

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.

"America has undergone a VERY rapid secularization"

And yet we elected Jesus.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Relentless striving without any kind of real meaning isn't healthy. Even people who aren't deeply Christian in the religious sense are still inherited of much of the values. I.E. people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic.

I would argue that individualism is the root, more than the work ethic. I’m someone with a 50th percentile work ethic but a 99th percentile focus on community. I only have so much energy, but I make sure I reserve a good portion of it (say, at least 30%) on acts that have no “direct” benefit to me at all. Hosting a party and not worrying if the invitee’s contributions are equitable. Paying a nephews rent for a month so he can travel. Mowing the yard for a neighbor in need. Buying presents for people I see 2x a year. Calling up a distant friend just to remind them how much I like them.

Friendship and community are harder work than your job, because no one makes you do it. It pays off in peculiar ways many years later, if ever at all. It’s senseless effort, but only figuratively. The returns I get are incalculable, but only literally.

Christian orthodoxy begins with the assertion you cannot ever work hard enough to be made right with God but that your value is imputed by Christ’s death and never once earned.

See also: the imago dei.

What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.

> people must prove their value via an extraordinary work ethic

Ironically, this is the literal opposite of Christianity. Christianity in a nutshell is "Jesus saves people because we are incapable of saving ourselves."

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

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.

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.

More Protestant than Christian.

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

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.

When I see a sudden drop in 2020, my first reaction is "COVID." For a lot of people that was a pivotal moment with persistent consequences.

My second guess would be politics. I have met few people in the last few years that do not seem unhappy as a direct result of our political battles. Families actually breaking up over it, etc.

Now I will go read the article ;-)

I'm actually sure COVID is a big part of it. It causes neurological changes that affect behavior. Look at road safety data since 2020, it strongly supports that something is wrong.

There's been a massive increase in high risk behaviors, an increase in road rage, and a spike in traffic fatalities since COVID.

If COVID brain damage affects motor vehicle operation, it wouldn't be so far fetched to say it negatively effects happiness and overall wellbeing. Covid causes a loss of grey matter affecting impulse control and emotional regulation.

If millions of people have brain damage affecting impulse control and we are all collectively quick to anger now, which will manifest as collective frustration and unhappiness.

Not unlike the theory of Lead poisoning causing crime in the 70s and 80s. Our generation may be suffering a similar fate as a result of COVID.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

“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

The top 10% of American families own close to 70% of america's wealth. So if "America" is rich. Those are the folks who are rich. 90% of Americans are not rich.

America's wealth is not a pie that gets divvied up. For example, Musk created the wealth he has. It wasn't distributed to him from others.

> 90% of Americans are not rich.

Compared to 250 years ago, about 99% of Americans are rich.

I like how the graphs suggest that prior to 2020 a certain "holy trinity" for happiness existed of being married, graduating college, and voting Republican. This passes the sniff test even though I am only 2 for 3, I was not having a great time at 1 and was downright glum at 0.

I suspect much of it was simply... believing in the American dream. And it's not just about the house in the suburbs, it's believing you're building something worthwhile, beautiful, and enduring.

In the interests of being purely descriptive: married, college-educated Republican usually meant "someone who in the mainstream who had made it." You were happy with this country and where it was going.

Now, everyone is despairing about where this country is headed, albeit in different ways. No one seems particularly optimistic.

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

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.

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.

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.

There's a mentality I see in Americans as well as in the big European cities where everything has to be goal-oriented or you have to have accomplished something, even when taking vacations.

There's a stigma against just doing something for nothing, or even doing nothing and being lazy.

That's a cultural thing. Perhaps it's part of the Protestant work ethic. My favorite are Americans who call themselves "foodies", which means taking instructions from Tiktok influencers, visiting tourist traps, waiting in line to eat and overpaying on "Michelin" restaurants.

Italian and French grandmothers make far better food without calling themselves "foodies" and a 15 year old from those countries has better knowledge and breadth of food.

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

That's just objectively untrue.

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

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

It's getting to the point where I search "K-shaped" and "Cohort" in these kinds of articles before I even read them. I'm not even saying these are why, exactly, but failure to wrestle with the intellectual effort of rejecting that as a hypothesis is a frustrating omission.

The article shows that the decrease in happiness is across the board, so even the wealthy cohort (the upper arm of the K-shaped chart) is unhappy.

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.

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-...

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.

> 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.

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"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I feel like wealthy americans live like poor Europeans - they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs, no amenities walking distance so they have to drive everywhere, having to commute an hour to their job, eating bad manufactured food... I'm American but moved to Europe years ago. It may be even better being poor here because at least you might live in a village and you'll have healthcare and your government won't be trying to kill you with polluted air and dangerous food standards.

As an American, I don’t think of the suburbs when I think of rich people. I think of what’s left of our middle class just trying to do their best. Many of them probably have negative net worth when debt is considered. But they need public schools, they need big (relatively) affordable housing, they need strip centers with the same 5 restaurants every exit of the highway. When I think of wealth, I think of mostly inner city old money areas or neighborhoods that have had gentrification (not underway). They live near their work/business, near poverty even, but they don’t commute far because they value their time and they will pay for private schools and create their own sports leagues and stuff for their kids and private security to keep out the riff raff. These areas were probably a far out suburb 50-100 years ago but a city grew around them but their wealth was enough to isolate themselves. That’s where the wealthy people live.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Plenty of wealthy Americans live in big cities

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.

> they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs

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

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

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.

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).

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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"

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.

would you please recap the 5-6 reasons?

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

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.

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.

I see one real thing here - since 2017, the sense of stability in everyone's lives has been throughly upended - and perhaps, stability really matters for people to the point that rich, but unstable and precarious life feels worse than poorer, but predictable one. Too many things change too fast and no one knows what comes next. A lot of those things were actually positive changes, but people are afraid and bitterly unhappy anyway.

Maybe policymakers who come from wealth and are thoroughly insulated from life upheavals, just don't get that and should take that into account - public information/propaganda system should project some sense of stability.

But really that contrasts with the previous ~15 years during which literally nothing changed. Smartphone was basically the only invention that went mainstream between 2002 and 2017 that had any sizeable social or economic consequences. That was comfy, but not good for the future.

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.

It all shifted in 2012:

https://wtfhappened2012.com

I am an optimist, so I do think things will improve eventually, and we're going through a tough transition.

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

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.

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.)

Important thing to know about Derek Thompson is that he has a very specific job in the culture.

His job is to present compelling, interesting narratives about why the world is the way it is and what we should do about it that have one specific attribute.

The attribute is that we must never actually do anything to address the real problem, which is that the lion's share of the wealth and resources are being claimed by a tiny group of people who use monopolies, coercive tactics, buying up politics and technology to hoard and protect their wealth and power.

Needless to say his job is a great job to have because those people will be happy to pay him and promote him. It's how he makes a living.

The reason people are so sad is because they realize there's one set of rules for them and one set of rules for the people in charge with money and power. It's become absolutely obvious that if you ever get any kind of edge or get ahead on a smaller scale level, one of those people from the Epstein class or Wall Street will soon come along and take it away from you.

They'll make you pay a subscription to use your own car. They'll use algorithms to increase your rent. They'll get you hooked on streaming services, buy up all the competitors, and then raise the price. They'll take away your rights to complain about it through an arbitration clause, use non-competes to stop you from hiring people if you're a small business trying to compete. If you do manage to compete with them directly they'll use access to incredibly low-cost subsidized capital to undercut you. If you somehow navigate all of that and manage to succeed they'll buy you and turn around and consolidate your company with what they're doing to go back to their extractive profit model.

The delusion of this article is the idea that people don't really understand what's happening to them, or what the causes are, or that it's this big mystery. People actually are pretty intuitively connected to what's happening, and they'll lurch towards anyone who seems to be, at least sort of, trying to do something about it.

The problem is they don't have any choices who will actually fight for them.

> The attribute is that we must never actually do anything to address the real problem, which is that the lion's share of the wealth and resources are being claimed by a tiny group of people who use monopolies, coercive tactics, buying up politics and technology to hoard and protect their wealth and power.

Yes, thank you for saying this. Truly the "Steven Pinker" of these times. "There is actually something wrong with you if you're not loving this".

Although saying this on this platform, unfortunately, won't get much traction.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

At the US hotel I stayed at they had a waffle machine so that you could eat waffles for breakfast. To make waffles you took a plastic cup to the "faucet" of the waffle machine, filled it with paste and then poured it into the waffle frying pan. Then you threw the cup away. Apparently, there was no need for a more efficient way. Americans seem to be very, very good at working very, very hard but not so good at efficiency.

It would probably be less efficient to have a more complicated waffle machine with a dispenser attached that costs more. Having a re-usable glass or metal cup, would require cleaning, and waffle batter is kind of annoying clean. Instead you buy a big ole sleeve of paper cups that are used one time and cost $.01 each. It is more efficient than paying someone making $20/hr to spend 5 minutes a day scrubbing it.

>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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

And now is getting eaten by AI

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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

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"

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Richard Easterlin found a correlation in 1974, and subsequent studies have reinforced that. See the Introduction in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9802463/.

Stereotypes of extrema in wealth are attached to images of extrema in happiness. The poor sad person vs the rich happy one. Cliché are often great tools to make quick judgment, but of course quick judgements often fail miserably when it comes to scale the idea.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 ..

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".

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

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.

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.

Hello. Inflation. Wage Contraction.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Interesting, have they not tried youtube?

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.

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.)

Dear god, get offline for a while...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I listened to a podcast recently which mentioned a rich person living in Florida for tax reasons but really wanting to live in New York. They had an app that counted down how long they needed to be in Florida day-by-day. They hated Florida.

I like to think being rich is FU money to do what you want, “fuck being taxed, I have enough wealth to live in NY anyways.” I feel that the culture pressuring you to hoard wealth even at loss of happiness obviously makes for unhappy people.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

"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."

Wealth inequality.

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.

Worship of the 1% and social disorder.

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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

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

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.

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.

Concentration

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.

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

Healthcare.

The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Is this not addressing quality of life getting worse?

"Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel."

Yeah, the "economist" view of a country's state always seems awfully reductionists: "Those few KPIs look good, so there can't possibly be a way in which things are bad. So the rest must be 'feelings'."

I'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.

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

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

crony capitalism is the root cause

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com