I don't think I'm alone in feeling like the pandemic shutdowns destabilized, for me at least, some implicitly understood notion about the order of the world.
For example, it was understood that we had to work and hustle as part of the normal order of business and life. Suddenly we were told to stop and had a chance to observe the whole system from the outside. It turned out that things that were baseline requirements for society to operate were simply just values that had been passed along from generation to generation. There was also the lip service paid to "essential workers" who were exempt from the shut down but got little else for their troubles.
If you were fortunate you got to spend some time instead focusing on family. I think people all over the economic distribution got a chance to suddenly reflect on what it is that life is supposed to be about and, how we think society should work. The order that existed before seemed less like a natural thing and more like a strange cosplay that had been going on for too long already.
Suddenly people with money in real-estate want workers to go back to offices. The affluent in lovely homes in nice climates seem to get wealthier regardless of what problems happen in the rest of the world. In many cases the more chaos there is in wider society, the more quickly they seem to get richer.
I think there's a real naked emperor moment that happened back there and, while it would be convenient, we just can't unsee what we saw about the way that the world economy works anymore. We go back to work anyway but, the implicit understanding that we are living ordinary lives hustling and working is gone. Instead it seems like an empty cosplay at something that we don't believe in anymore.
So we do it without belief. It's empty and meaningless. Sure, you can reach for something like religion to add back meaning that has gone missing. A better approach would probably be to take the moment and try to fix society instead. Consider Abundance (i really prefer the term 'post-scarcity') as a worthwhile goal for this society and work towards it.
Another suggestion is that America is being collectively gaslit or emotionally abused by our leadership and media.
People who suffer that treatment often get sad, but aren't really sure why!
Again, this eplains the native language effect of the Murdoch-media and US GOP style of lying and lying some more. People lied to continuously get sad.
Derek — I will share with my students and hope this helps give context for their sense of well being assuming they can stop doomscrolling and read it.
Separately — would love for you to take us inside your process of how a piece like this comes to life. How do you find the studies? Over what period of time? How do the acts of podcasting, reporting, researching and writing help you make ended of the world. A recent example of this but unrelated would be your evolution on ai bubble or supply/demand issues?
Also the pandemic hasn’t ended in that people are physically really sick as well. Between the flu, Covid, RSV, Noravirus etc all circling at the same time, just physically having the body being assaulted is a negative emotional compounder to the macro events mentioned above. I think there has to be somewhat of a feedback loop between the two and emotional heath.
Related to your pod on how metrics are making us miserable, I think Covid precipitated a big swing in how companies operate, making work much more transactional and short-term performance oriented. It stripped away all the things that made work fulfilling - human connection, camaraderie, the sense that a company should at least pretend to care about its mission and its people - and those things haven’t really come back. The focus shifted to what you can see digitally, quantify, and justify with data, without the counter-balancing intangible forces that stem from relationships, intuition, and conviction. Once those were anchored as measurable benchmarks, they became the focus of optimization, while less tangible investments and bets are seen as risky or frivolous, even if they’d likely have halo benefits and big upside potential. I think of it as “cogification”, and it’s really bad for the human spirit.
AI of course will only exasperate this, as evidenced by how the people building and promoting AI (including me) talk about it. I could write a whole essay on this, but the whole lexicon of efficiency, “work units”, productivity measurement, process streamlining with the goal of 1-shot input/outputs, etc is all downstream of thinking of work as a predefined engineering problem to be solved, where humans are bottlenecks and friction is the greatest enemy. It leaves little room for exploration, happy accidents, unexpected discoveries of new paths and opportunities. I work in AI, am largely an AI optimist, and am all for automating grunt work, but I think the way it’s being approached reflects this broader corporate and cultural shift towards optimization and away from divergent thinking and big swings. This might have happened anyway without Covid, but I can’t help but wonder how the AI rollout might have been different in the 2010s growth boom environment vs today.
Tying together a lot of the things you've been writing about, it sounds like in the early 2020s we got a sudden dose of several poisons that had been slowly dripping into the economy. A great reorganization of labor combined with a sharp drop in immigration kicked Baumol cost effects into overdrive. A sudden upturn in interest rates shot up housing prices and exacerbated the lock in/lockout effect that was already plaguing young people. The George Floyd protests and subsequent police pullback drove heightened attention to crime and disorder at the same time as the social fabric fell to tatters. And public social institutions underwent a mass extinction event while people were practically required to stay inside and doomscroll.
Nobody preregistered these hypotheses, so it's important to recognize that many of these are just-so stories. But with partial hindsight, perhaps the chronic and acute diagnoses of American life aren't as different as they seem.
This also the decade where the Baby Boomers now are realizing that their bodies are breaking down and their friends and siblings are dying, The Boomers have distended economic and other effects in US society and the world since the early 1950's. In some part, the trends you identify could be an extension of the recognition by the Boomers of their own demise. Someone should research this idea.
This article leaves out important considerations around interpreting self-reported mental health status.
First, the original research doesn't adequately consider if "happiness shock" simply represents a greater accuracy in self-reported recognition of mental health. Does it make sense that American's self reported happiness was higher in the 1970s with inflation, the oil embargo, Vietnam, and Watergate?
The ACA's passage in 2010 made access to mental health services much easier. You can search "mental health" on google trends where it's easy to visualize the increasing interest since 2010. Covid created an expansion of tele-health which then supercharged access to mental health services.
Is it really a bad thing that culturally in the US we've reduced the stigma around reporting mental health issues? This stigma remains in many non-English speaking countries (ie Spain, Portugal, and Italy) and may even explain the disparity in self-reported happiness data in those countries.
Second, the original research, on which this post relies on heavily, states the "happiness shock has been borne mainly by middle- and upper-income households."
Is it really bad that more affluent people take their mental health seriously and acknowledge that they might be less happy than before and that money can't buy happiness? To be fair, the number of people self-reporting that they are "ok" in the happiness data increased by a few points over the period in question, so overall most of us are relatively "ok" - we should be cautious in positioning "happiness shock" as a crisis.
When we use data that serve as indicators of mental health - a field relatively new to public scrutiny - we should acknowledge that the data may indicate a correction in our interpretation of the past before moving forward on using that data to assess our future.
I was a kid in the 70s - in the post-riots Detroit area, where the auto industry my father worked for was getting hammered - and I don’t recall there being a pall over everything the way there is now. My parents went to parties and took vacations, my mother started a small business, we kids had nice things (for me , horseback riding lessons). Neighborhoods were cohesive, we played with other kids around us all the time, and my parents hung out with other parents. We climbed trees, made obstacle courses in our front yards, and didn’t wear bike helmets. When people called each other on the phone, you usually talked to the person’s mom or brother for a minute. Meanwhile, stagflation, crime, pollution, and Watergate, among other things, were also happening. I don’t recall people incessantly obsessing about them even though my parents despised Nixon.
This was in the non-posh downriver burbs, not fancy Oakland County. As I write this, it seems kind of utopian.
This is an amazing piece. The part about no one, across the board, being happy, ties in with something I'm working on. We are in a cycle where even the people at the top are not happy yet the entire system, including those very people, is powered by the arrival fallacy. More more more will make me happy. Someday, one day X will make me happy. The arrival part of this is trying to get to this magical, static place called "happy" which is impossible. It's like trying to find and stay forever in Enlightenment. And yet we all feed into it societally by wanting to be like the people at the top who are the captains of this ship bound for a land that doesn't exist.
And I think another issue for Anglophones is, internet has connected the info space globally and that literally turbocharged the ailment of negativity of social media. Like genz boss and mini is at Australian company, which gets to make many Americans mad for example.
The size of the market is simply bigger than any other language space so both exposure to negative contents and financial incentives of negativity is larger…
Man, great writeup and really made me challenge some of my own assumptions based on my bubble (vaguely leftist but also in a tech worker remote only bubble).
But also makes me realise how much writing around the 2020's vibes seems to always end with a "Chin up, there's reasons to hope" which this didn't, and I actually found that less of a bummer somehow? Like of course there always is, but I think we have to be objective about many things are in a bad state right now and it's a mix of various interlocking issues.
My guess is that the anglophone countries have in common that they can hear Trump speak in their native language. You can't unhear it.
An excellent summary of this vexing issue, bringing together many threads.
I don't think I'm alone in feeling like the pandemic shutdowns destabilized, for me at least, some implicitly understood notion about the order of the world.
For example, it was understood that we had to work and hustle as part of the normal order of business and life. Suddenly we were told to stop and had a chance to observe the whole system from the outside. It turned out that things that were baseline requirements for society to operate were simply just values that had been passed along from generation to generation. There was also the lip service paid to "essential workers" who were exempt from the shut down but got little else for their troubles.
If you were fortunate you got to spend some time instead focusing on family. I think people all over the economic distribution got a chance to suddenly reflect on what it is that life is supposed to be about and, how we think society should work. The order that existed before seemed less like a natural thing and more like a strange cosplay that had been going on for too long already.
Suddenly people with money in real-estate want workers to go back to offices. The affluent in lovely homes in nice climates seem to get wealthier regardless of what problems happen in the rest of the world. In many cases the more chaos there is in wider society, the more quickly they seem to get richer.
I think there's a real naked emperor moment that happened back there and, while it would be convenient, we just can't unsee what we saw about the way that the world economy works anymore. We go back to work anyway but, the implicit understanding that we are living ordinary lives hustling and working is gone. Instead it seems like an empty cosplay at something that we don't believe in anymore.
So we do it without belief. It's empty and meaningless. Sure, you can reach for something like religion to add back meaning that has gone missing. A better approach would probably be to take the moment and try to fix society instead. Consider Abundance (i really prefer the term 'post-scarcity') as a worthwhile goal for this society and work towards it.
Another suggestion is that America is being collectively gaslit or emotionally abused by our leadership and media.
People who suffer that treatment often get sad, but aren't really sure why!
Again, this eplains the native language effect of the Murdoch-media and US GOP style of lying and lying some more. People lied to continuously get sad.
Derek — I will share with my students and hope this helps give context for their sense of well being assuming they can stop doomscrolling and read it.
Separately — would love for you to take us inside your process of how a piece like this comes to life. How do you find the studies? Over what period of time? How do the acts of podcasting, reporting, researching and writing help you make ended of the world. A recent example of this but unrelated would be your evolution on ai bubble or supply/demand issues?
Also the pandemic hasn’t ended in that people are physically really sick as well. Between the flu, Covid, RSV, Noravirus etc all circling at the same time, just physically having the body being assaulted is a negative emotional compounder to the macro events mentioned above. I think there has to be somewhat of a feedback loop between the two and emotional heath.
Related to your pod on how metrics are making us miserable, I think Covid precipitated a big swing in how companies operate, making work much more transactional and short-term performance oriented. It stripped away all the things that made work fulfilling - human connection, camaraderie, the sense that a company should at least pretend to care about its mission and its people - and those things haven’t really come back. The focus shifted to what you can see digitally, quantify, and justify with data, without the counter-balancing intangible forces that stem from relationships, intuition, and conviction. Once those were anchored as measurable benchmarks, they became the focus of optimization, while less tangible investments and bets are seen as risky or frivolous, even if they’d likely have halo benefits and big upside potential. I think of it as “cogification”, and it’s really bad for the human spirit.
AI of course will only exasperate this, as evidenced by how the people building and promoting AI (including me) talk about it. I could write a whole essay on this, but the whole lexicon of efficiency, “work units”, productivity measurement, process streamlining with the goal of 1-shot input/outputs, etc is all downstream of thinking of work as a predefined engineering problem to be solved, where humans are bottlenecks and friction is the greatest enemy. It leaves little room for exploration, happy accidents, unexpected discoveries of new paths and opportunities. I work in AI, am largely an AI optimist, and am all for automating grunt work, but I think the way it’s being approached reflects this broader corporate and cultural shift towards optimization and away from divergent thinking and big swings. This might have happened anyway without Covid, but I can’t help but wonder how the AI rollout might have been different in the 2010s growth boom environment vs today.
Tying together a lot of the things you've been writing about, it sounds like in the early 2020s we got a sudden dose of several poisons that had been slowly dripping into the economy. A great reorganization of labor combined with a sharp drop in immigration kicked Baumol cost effects into overdrive. A sudden upturn in interest rates shot up housing prices and exacerbated the lock in/lockout effect that was already plaguing young people. The George Floyd protests and subsequent police pullback drove heightened attention to crime and disorder at the same time as the social fabric fell to tatters. And public social institutions underwent a mass extinction event while people were practically required to stay inside and doomscroll.
Nobody preregistered these hypotheses, so it's important to recognize that many of these are just-so stories. But with partial hindsight, perhaps the chronic and acute diagnoses of American life aren't as different as they seem.
This also the decade where the Baby Boomers now are realizing that their bodies are breaking down and their friends and siblings are dying, The Boomers have distended economic and other effects in US society and the world since the early 1950's. In some part, the trends you identify could be an extension of the recognition by the Boomers of their own demise. Someone should research this idea.
Isn't the summation paragraph just a long way of saying "the natural result of unchecked capitalism"...?
This article leaves out important considerations around interpreting self-reported mental health status.
First, the original research doesn't adequately consider if "happiness shock" simply represents a greater accuracy in self-reported recognition of mental health. Does it make sense that American's self reported happiness was higher in the 1970s with inflation, the oil embargo, Vietnam, and Watergate?
The ACA's passage in 2010 made access to mental health services much easier. You can search "mental health" on google trends where it's easy to visualize the increasing interest since 2010. Covid created an expansion of tele-health which then supercharged access to mental health services.
Is it really a bad thing that culturally in the US we've reduced the stigma around reporting mental health issues? This stigma remains in many non-English speaking countries (ie Spain, Portugal, and Italy) and may even explain the disparity in self-reported happiness data in those countries.
Second, the original research, on which this post relies on heavily, states the "happiness shock has been borne mainly by middle- and upper-income households."
Is it really bad that more affluent people take their mental health seriously and acknowledge that they might be less happy than before and that money can't buy happiness? To be fair, the number of people self-reporting that they are "ok" in the happiness data increased by a few points over the period in question, so overall most of us are relatively "ok" - we should be cautious in positioning "happiness shock" as a crisis.
When we use data that serve as indicators of mental health - a field relatively new to public scrutiny - we should acknowledge that the data may indicate a correction in our interpretation of the past before moving forward on using that data to assess our future.
Excellent, thoughtful article, thanks.
I was a kid in the 70s - in the post-riots Detroit area, where the auto industry my father worked for was getting hammered - and I don’t recall there being a pall over everything the way there is now. My parents went to parties and took vacations, my mother started a small business, we kids had nice things (for me , horseback riding lessons). Neighborhoods were cohesive, we played with other kids around us all the time, and my parents hung out with other parents. We climbed trees, made obstacle courses in our front yards, and didn’t wear bike helmets. When people called each other on the phone, you usually talked to the person’s mom or brother for a minute. Meanwhile, stagflation, crime, pollution, and Watergate, among other things, were also happening. I don’t recall people incessantly obsessing about them even though my parents despised Nixon.
This was in the non-posh downriver burbs, not fancy Oakland County. As I write this, it seems kind of utopian.
This is an incredible article, Derek! Thank you for taking the time to research and write this.
This is an amazing piece. The part about no one, across the board, being happy, ties in with something I'm working on. We are in a cycle where even the people at the top are not happy yet the entire system, including those very people, is powered by the arrival fallacy. More more more will make me happy. Someday, one day X will make me happy. The arrival part of this is trying to get to this magical, static place called "happy" which is impossible. It's like trying to find and stay forever in Enlightenment. And yet we all feed into it societally by wanting to be like the people at the top who are the captains of this ship bound for a land that doesn't exist.
Excellent summary!!
And I think another issue for Anglophones is, internet has connected the info space globally and that literally turbocharged the ailment of negativity of social media. Like genz boss and mini is at Australian company, which gets to make many Americans mad for example.
The size of the market is simply bigger than any other language space so both exposure to negative contents and financial incentives of negativity is larger…
Man, great writeup and really made me challenge some of my own assumptions based on my bubble (vaguely leftist but also in a tech worker remote only bubble).
But also makes me realise how much writing around the 2020's vibes seems to always end with a "Chin up, there's reasons to hope" which this didn't, and I actually found that less of a bummer somehow? Like of course there always is, but I think we have to be objective about many things are in a bad state right now and it's a mix of various interlocking issues.