As a former psychologist and as a former counselor what we see is that the constant unhappiness about Trump is something that makes a lot of people on the left actually happy. It's what they seem to live for, seek, and get enjoyment from posting negative things about him.
Why all of the intense focus on Trump this and Trump that if they had lives filled with other things that make them happy?
This is a ridiculous take. I am terrified by Trump's destruction of American institutions, and have been having a borderline on and off panic attack about it for the past year, because I want a good life and a future in this country, and it increasingly looks like this is being put in jeopardy. If a hurricane was forecast for the town where you live, would you say that people stressed to board their windows and evacuate, and worried about whether their homes woukd survived, were getting joy out of it, and lacked other things to make them happy?
So I suppose all of the political leaders throughout history whose terrible decision making was destructive to their population's happiness and well-being are, what, a fantasy that could never possibly be repeated? If you reflect, is there any point at which you would consider someone's concern valid? Or have you simply decided ahead of time that no evidence matters to you, and it's an article of faith that Trump could never be truly bad for America long term?
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.
Great points here. I wonder if that disruption to work life helps explain why the unhappiness is more concentrated among higher earners, since white collar jobs changed drastically with remote work. Their whole concept of what work looks like changed quickly and has had a lot oscillation and variation with some companies staying remote, some doing RTO, or a hybrid mix. WFH also increases isolation, though it's also more convenient in many ways. For as poorly as essential workers were treated during the pandemic, they have had more consistency to their routines and career paths while experiencing more wage growth in a relative sense.
That's so insightful, Florian. I was fortunate to have a preview of aspects of the pandemic in summer 2018 when my wife and I traveled to a small town in Mexico where there is nothing to do except relax and exist (it has no tourist destinations or resorts). We were in the midst of exhausting ourselves balancing demanding careers in large organizations with busy artistic careers and this was a look at life when all of that was stripped away. It was revelatory. I wrote long journal entries exploring what matters and what we really need.
The pandemic, of course, was a turbocharged version of that trip. And you're right -- once you see how empty and pointless many of our organizational and social routines are, you can't unsee that. The short version of my story is that I vowed to get out as soon as I could, and I retired early in my 50s last year. I feel for our younger friends who feel trapped in pointless routines but haven't figured a way out or forward yet.
The answer is Trump. He came on the scene in 2016, and at first it was thought of as a joke, or a one-off, or maybe he could actually fix thing. But he became omnipresent, and his whole schtick is to tell us how awful things are now, and how they used to be better. So even when he's in power, his supporters think things are awful (because of those pesky libs), and when he's out of power, the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of woke.
Where Reagan had an uplifting optimistic message that gave people hope despite policy measure that were actually making a lot of their live worse, Trump has the opposite effect. Despite many numbers moving in a positive direction, his constant doom and gloom, lashing out at real and perceived enemimes, constant chaotic, incomprehsensible policies, have put the entire country at unease. This is why America uniquely suffers from this malaise. Not cell phones, not the pandemic, but the big dummy in the White House.
I think this is a huge part of it. He single handedly shifted American culture to be angry, mistrustful and cynical about everything, and that omnipresent fighting is near impossible to ignore
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.
Really great point. The 2010's felt very employee friendly as companies followed tech trends to attract young and ambitious talent with mission-driven cultures, focus on social causes, modern workplaces, urban vs suburban offices, and lavish perks. Companies stopped pretending to care in the 2020's and remote work just generally made jobs feel less personal. Add AI anxiety and there's a recipe for low white collar worker enthusiasm.
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.
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.
Good article! What about persistent declines in in-person socialization following the pandemic? You allude to this briefly (people spending unprecedented time by themselves) but it seems like it's probably at least a supply problem — the pandemic damaged, and in some cases destroyed, institutions and activities that promoted face-to-face interaction.
Most obviously, many companies shifted toward remote work during the pandemic, and many never fully shifted back. And while many workers say they like this (companies haven't shifted back largely because workers refused to return to the office) there's a collective action problem: when some people don't come into the office, it becomes less appealing for others to do so, and so you get in a bad equilibrium where nobody goes. I feel this dynamic pretty intensely since I work in a co-working space where half the floors are empty. The lunch options near the office are much worse than they would have been in 2019.
I imagine similar stuff has happened in other areas of life. Anecdotally, it seems like restaurant meals got more expensive (and service worse) while a lot of people got used to using DoorDash. Maybe church attendance dropped off and never recovered. I bet there were a number of clubs, sports leagues, community theaters, etc. that didn't survive 2020 and haven't been re-built since then.
This article leaves out important considerations around interpreting self-reported mental health status.
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.
Consider first that the original research doesn't adequately assess 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?
Overall, the majority of people self-reported that they are "ok" and the “ok” happiness data increased by a few points over the period in question. Hence, we should be cautious in positioning "happiness shock" as a crisis.
If the “happiness shock” is in fact real, I wonder how much of it is due to impact of elder care on both the elderly and the caregivers. Covid likely triggered a multi-generational sense of awareness of how much elder care consumes our daily energy.
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.
Good point. I agree that the second-largest generation coming to terms with their mortality would be a drag on happiness ratings. On top of that, the largest generation is just starting their role as caregivers to their parents. They are realizing that they'll be in that role for decades due to increased lifespans (once someone makes it to 60), and that they will not be receiving much help. Caregiving is good and part of being human, but I'm not sure anyone would include it in their happiness bucket.
A VERY substantive article. Thanks, once again, for using data.
Here are a couple of factors that we would like to see explored sometime.
1. Rising expectations. We are in our late 70s, and we had significantly fewer "things" growing up. Life was cheaper. Now people are spoiled, not having the wisdom to understand that maybe we can't just get happier by having more things.
2. In the fine Western (the original, not the dreadful remake) the Magnificent Seven, one of the seven (Charles Bronson) gets close to some of the boys in the village. They all express a lack of pride in their fathers for not fighting.
Bronson says to them: "Your fathers have the greatest form of courage....the courage of responsibility"
When the gang attacks, their fathers take up wooden pitchforks to protect their families.
How much of peoples' unhappiness these days is due to a lack of that feeling: the courage of responsibility. Can blue collar men provide for their families? In peoples' jobs do they feel like they are "doing something" for other people? Is happiness even something to seek, or is something better to seek the happiness of other people?
I have some gentle pushback on your first explanation point: inflation. I have zero doubt that inflation makes people angry; it obviously does. But I think there are a few holes in this part of the theory:
1. You mention the spike in housing prices: 50% increase in home prices in 5 years when it used to take 15+ to grow that much. That sounds bad! Except ~70% of Americans own their homes! So this massive jump in housing unaffordability actually just made 70% of Americans wealthier MUCH faster than ever before. It’s possible the ~30% of non-home owners are just SO updated it’s throwing the vibes off. But the data you cite in the beginning of this post does not support that.
2. You then intersperse discussion of inflation with “affordability” which I think is incorrect to do. Yes, inflation means prices are up and, as I mentioned, I am sure people are annoyed about that. But real incomes are also up. Household debt ebt to gdp is down. Savings rates/holdings are up. So, yes, the nominal bill for a dinner out with the family is higher. But the people paying it are wealthier. So it isn’t actually about ability to afford things. And we can see this with a bunch of measures of median discretionary spending also being way up. If everything is SO unaffordable…why are people going on more vacations, eating out more, spending more (inflation adjusted) on holiday shopping, etc. etc. “I am SOOO mad at how expensive everything is I am going to…choose over and over to spend money I don’t have to!” Doesn’t really hold together. Or, it does, but only if you grant the “economist side” of the argument you mention in the intro are correct and people, writ large, are irrational idiots.
3. There has to be another break between reality and perception. Ignore my first two point entirely. Inflation making everyone mad as hell. But it just is true that inflation was MUCH worse in the 70s and we didn’t see this collapse in consumer sentiment. So even if we accept that inflation now somehow triggers people worse than the Great Recession (a big ask to accept) it still doesn’t explain why previous bouts of worse inflation were so different.
On paper housing wealth isn't realized in the same way as other forms of wealth, though. If the value of your house goes up, the only way to actually use that money is to either sell your house (tricky if all of the housing prices have gone up) or take out money in another loan / HELOC. Most people only do the last one if they're doing renovations or other improvements -- it's not generally recommended to take money out of your home equity to up your general standard of living.
You are absolutely correct. And if the question was “Why did anomalous housing value growth not make everyone throw on spats, a monocle, and throw Gatsby parties?” It would be a perfect response.
But the dynamic we’re trying to explain is SO far the opposite way: a large share of people got MUCH wealthier very quickly but feel like the exact opposite happened.
To use an example: it is also true that 401ks, like houses, are not particularly liquid. But if I doubled your 401k and your response was “this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I will never financially recover from this harm.” I think that would merit some interrogation beyond “well, it’s because they can’t spend it literally right now.”
As an aside that is not directed at you at all: I wish more people who make the point about housing wealth appreciation being in some way “fake” would bring that same energy to talking about billionaires and such.
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.
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?
I think this is very persuasive, but what I would add is that social media is interconnected to all of these things -- the algorithms reinforce negativity so every amount of time spent on the platforms is more likely to leave you feeling worse; media entities play to the algos which affects their general coverage decisions; people in the media are also on these platforms, which slants their views of the world dovetails with the coverage decisions to make a more negative environment; persistent inflation means you cut back on things that feel inessential, like activities or hobbies... because social media is "free" it can fill the void of time you used to spend doing things / being with people; social media is addictive and so the more time you spend on it the less you want to or are capable of doing other things... and so on and so forth.
It's all one thing. It's social media. Nuke it from orbit.
Embedded within the topic of social isolation is the impact of a remote / hybrid workplace. For years, we’ve been talking about the disappearance of the “third place” but the “second place” (i.e. work) has also drastically changed, and for some, morphed into the same structure as the “first place” (i.e. home office).
The connections I forged with coworkers in office from 2017-2020 are drastically different the working relationships I have with coworkers now, with about 80% of them (including my boss) working from home or a different office, resulting in our working relationship being almost entirely virtual. Note that I go into an office almost everyday, it’s just not the one where the people I work with are also stationed. And I was reminded of just how different the in-person experience is when I recently went to a conference that brought me and my dispersed team together to the same place for the first time in a while. I felt like I actually got to connect with them as people and felt more open & trusting. Without this, the large amount of hours we spend each week working can feel empty and induce a certain sense of pessimism.
While I appreciate the flexibility of hybrid / remote, I think there is greater human connection to be found in bringing people back to the same in-person workplace.
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.
We are going to respectfully disagree with you.
As a former psychologist and as a former counselor what we see is that the constant unhappiness about Trump is something that makes a lot of people on the left actually happy. It's what they seem to live for, seek, and get enjoyment from posting negative things about him.
Why all of the intense focus on Trump this and Trump that if they had lives filled with other things that make them happy?
This is a ridiculous take. I am terrified by Trump's destruction of American institutions, and have been having a borderline on and off panic attack about it for the past year, because I want a good life and a future in this country, and it increasingly looks like this is being put in jeopardy. If a hurricane was forecast for the town where you live, would you say that people stressed to board their windows and evacuate, and worried about whether their homes woukd survived, were getting joy out of it, and lacked other things to make them happy?
Trump Trump Trump
Your forecasts of doom are not adult. Your hatred of him gives you a feeling of meaning in your life.
So I suppose all of the political leaders throughout history whose terrible decision making was destructive to their population's happiness and well-being are, what, a fantasy that could never possibly be repeated? If you reflect, is there any point at which you would consider someone's concern valid? Or have you simply decided ahead of time that no evidence matters to you, and it's an article of faith that Trump could never be truly bad for America long term?
I just love it when people make up what I believe, and then get snippy about what they, themselves, have made up.
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.
Great points here. I wonder if that disruption to work life helps explain why the unhappiness is more concentrated among higher earners, since white collar jobs changed drastically with remote work. Their whole concept of what work looks like changed quickly and has had a lot oscillation and variation with some companies staying remote, some doing RTO, or a hybrid mix. WFH also increases isolation, though it's also more convenient in many ways. For as poorly as essential workers were treated during the pandemic, they have had more consistency to their routines and career paths while experiencing more wage growth in a relative sense.
That's so insightful, Florian. I was fortunate to have a preview of aspects of the pandemic in summer 2018 when my wife and I traveled to a small town in Mexico where there is nothing to do except relax and exist (it has no tourist destinations or resorts). We were in the midst of exhausting ourselves balancing demanding careers in large organizations with busy artistic careers and this was a look at life when all of that was stripped away. It was revelatory. I wrote long journal entries exploring what matters and what we really need.
The pandemic, of course, was a turbocharged version of that trip. And you're right -- once you see how empty and pointless many of our organizational and social routines are, you can't unsee that. The short version of my story is that I vowed to get out as soon as I could, and I retired early in my 50s last year. I feel for our younger friends who feel trapped in pointless routines but haven't figured a way out or forward yet.
The answer is Trump. He came on the scene in 2016, and at first it was thought of as a joke, or a one-off, or maybe he could actually fix thing. But he became omnipresent, and his whole schtick is to tell us how awful things are now, and how they used to be better. So even when he's in power, his supporters think things are awful (because of those pesky libs), and when he's out of power, the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of woke.
Where Reagan had an uplifting optimistic message that gave people hope despite policy measure that were actually making a lot of their live worse, Trump has the opposite effect. Despite many numbers moving in a positive direction, his constant doom and gloom, lashing out at real and perceived enemimes, constant chaotic, incomprehsensible policies, have put the entire country at unease. This is why America uniquely suffers from this malaise. Not cell phones, not the pandemic, but the big dummy in the White House.
I think this is a huge part of it. He single handedly shifted American culture to be angry, mistrustful and cynical about everything, and that omnipresent fighting is near impossible to ignore
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.
Really great point. The 2010's felt very employee friendly as companies followed tech trends to attract young and ambitious talent with mission-driven cultures, focus on social causes, modern workplaces, urban vs suburban offices, and lavish perks. Companies stopped pretending to care in the 2020's and remote work just generally made jobs feel less personal. Add AI anxiety and there's a recipe for low white collar worker enthusiasm.
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.
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.
An excellent summary of this vexing issue, bringing together many threads.
Good article! What about persistent declines in in-person socialization following the pandemic? You allude to this briefly (people spending unprecedented time by themselves) but it seems like it's probably at least a supply problem — the pandemic damaged, and in some cases destroyed, institutions and activities that promoted face-to-face interaction.
Most obviously, many companies shifted toward remote work during the pandemic, and many never fully shifted back. And while many workers say they like this (companies haven't shifted back largely because workers refused to return to the office) there's a collective action problem: when some people don't come into the office, it becomes less appealing for others to do so, and so you get in a bad equilibrium where nobody goes. I feel this dynamic pretty intensely since I work in a co-working space where half the floors are empty. The lunch options near the office are much worse than they would have been in 2019.
I imagine similar stuff has happened in other areas of life. Anecdotally, it seems like restaurant meals got more expensive (and service worse) while a lot of people got used to using DoorDash. Maybe church attendance dropped off and never recovered. I bet there were a number of clubs, sports leagues, community theaters, etc. that didn't survive 2020 and haven't been re-built since then.
This article leaves out important considerations around interpreting self-reported mental health status.
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.
Consider first that the original research doesn't adequately assess 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?
Overall, the majority of people self-reported that they are "ok" and the “ok” happiness data increased by a few points over the period in question. Hence, we should be cautious in positioning "happiness shock" as a crisis.
If the “happiness shock” is in fact real, I wonder how much of it is due to impact of elder care on both the elderly and the caregivers. Covid likely triggered a multi-generational sense of awareness of how much elder care consumes our daily energy.
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.
Good point. I agree that the second-largest generation coming to terms with their mortality would be a drag on happiness ratings. On top of that, the largest generation is just starting their role as caregivers to their parents. They are realizing that they'll be in that role for decades due to increased lifespans (once someone makes it to 60), and that they will not be receiving much help. Caregiving is good and part of being human, but I'm not sure anyone would include it in their happiness bucket.
A VERY substantive article. Thanks, once again, for using data.
Here are a couple of factors that we would like to see explored sometime.
1. Rising expectations. We are in our late 70s, and we had significantly fewer "things" growing up. Life was cheaper. Now people are spoiled, not having the wisdom to understand that maybe we can't just get happier by having more things.
2. In the fine Western (the original, not the dreadful remake) the Magnificent Seven, one of the seven (Charles Bronson) gets close to some of the boys in the village. They all express a lack of pride in their fathers for not fighting.
Bronson says to them: "Your fathers have the greatest form of courage....the courage of responsibility"
When the gang attacks, their fathers take up wooden pitchforks to protect their families.
How much of peoples' unhappiness these days is due to a lack of that feeling: the courage of responsibility. Can blue collar men provide for their families? In peoples' jobs do they feel like they are "doing something" for other people? Is happiness even something to seek, or is something better to seek the happiness of other people?
You have it together.
Yes, it is. One doesn't have to be a rock star to have a meaningful life. It comes from the small, everyday things.
Best to you from us!
I have some gentle pushback on your first explanation point: inflation. I have zero doubt that inflation makes people angry; it obviously does. But I think there are a few holes in this part of the theory:
1. You mention the spike in housing prices: 50% increase in home prices in 5 years when it used to take 15+ to grow that much. That sounds bad! Except ~70% of Americans own their homes! So this massive jump in housing unaffordability actually just made 70% of Americans wealthier MUCH faster than ever before. It’s possible the ~30% of non-home owners are just SO updated it’s throwing the vibes off. But the data you cite in the beginning of this post does not support that.
2. You then intersperse discussion of inflation with “affordability” which I think is incorrect to do. Yes, inflation means prices are up and, as I mentioned, I am sure people are annoyed about that. But real incomes are also up. Household debt ebt to gdp is down. Savings rates/holdings are up. So, yes, the nominal bill for a dinner out with the family is higher. But the people paying it are wealthier. So it isn’t actually about ability to afford things. And we can see this with a bunch of measures of median discretionary spending also being way up. If everything is SO unaffordable…why are people going on more vacations, eating out more, spending more (inflation adjusted) on holiday shopping, etc. etc. “I am SOOO mad at how expensive everything is I am going to…choose over and over to spend money I don’t have to!” Doesn’t really hold together. Or, it does, but only if you grant the “economist side” of the argument you mention in the intro are correct and people, writ large, are irrational idiots.
3. There has to be another break between reality and perception. Ignore my first two point entirely. Inflation making everyone mad as hell. But it just is true that inflation was MUCH worse in the 70s and we didn’t see this collapse in consumer sentiment. So even if we accept that inflation now somehow triggers people worse than the Great Recession (a big ask to accept) it still doesn’t explain why previous bouts of worse inflation were so different.
On paper housing wealth isn't realized in the same way as other forms of wealth, though. If the value of your house goes up, the only way to actually use that money is to either sell your house (tricky if all of the housing prices have gone up) or take out money in another loan / HELOC. Most people only do the last one if they're doing renovations or other improvements -- it's not generally recommended to take money out of your home equity to up your general standard of living.
You are absolutely correct. And if the question was “Why did anomalous housing value growth not make everyone throw on spats, a monocle, and throw Gatsby parties?” It would be a perfect response.
But the dynamic we’re trying to explain is SO far the opposite way: a large share of people got MUCH wealthier very quickly but feel like the exact opposite happened.
To use an example: it is also true that 401ks, like houses, are not particularly liquid. But if I doubled your 401k and your response was “this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I will never financially recover from this harm.” I think that would merit some interrogation beyond “well, it’s because they can’t spend it literally right now.”
As an aside that is not directed at you at all: I wish more people who make the point about housing wealth appreciation being in some way “fake” would bring that same energy to talking about billionaires and such.
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.
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?
I think this is very persuasive, but what I would add is that social media is interconnected to all of these things -- the algorithms reinforce negativity so every amount of time spent on the platforms is more likely to leave you feeling worse; media entities play to the algos which affects their general coverage decisions; people in the media are also on these platforms, which slants their views of the world dovetails with the coverage decisions to make a more negative environment; persistent inflation means you cut back on things that feel inessential, like activities or hobbies... because social media is "free" it can fill the void of time you used to spend doing things / being with people; social media is addictive and so the more time you spend on it the less you want to or are capable of doing other things... and so on and so forth.
It's all one thing. It's social media. Nuke it from orbit.
Embedded within the topic of social isolation is the impact of a remote / hybrid workplace. For years, we’ve been talking about the disappearance of the “third place” but the “second place” (i.e. work) has also drastically changed, and for some, morphed into the same structure as the “first place” (i.e. home office).
The connections I forged with coworkers in office from 2017-2020 are drastically different the working relationships I have with coworkers now, with about 80% of them (including my boss) working from home or a different office, resulting in our working relationship being almost entirely virtual. Note that I go into an office almost everyday, it’s just not the one where the people I work with are also stationed. And I was reminded of just how different the in-person experience is when I recently went to a conference that brought me and my dispersed team together to the same place for the first time in a while. I felt like I actually got to connect with them as people and felt more open & trusting. Without this, the large amount of hours we spend each week working can feel empty and induce a certain sense of pessimism.
While I appreciate the flexibility of hybrid / remote, I think there is greater human connection to be found in bringing people back to the same in-person workplace.