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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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.

Seems like there might be a good lesson in there.

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...

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

"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-...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tipping point?

The same demographics that are the most likely to have gone from working in the office to working from home...

https://wtfhappened2012.com

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

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.)

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ..

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.

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

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.

Also sadness is a natural and ok state of being. Being a gronked out happy zombie is unnatural and should be suspect.

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

its social contract is poisoned by this proposition.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

And when you only pursue material wealth, well... that is "the root of all evil"

I'm probably the happiest now than I've been in my entire life. It's all about perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, I think this explanation is too simplistic in that it tries to compress everything into a single recent event.

From the perspective of an outsider, I believe there is a more fundamental cause. To me, the core issue lies in the structural illusion created by capitalism and meritocracy.

Capitalism, at its core, operates very differently from the moral frameworks that shaped pre-modern societies. In earlier narratives, labor and virtue were tied to value. In capitalism, value is increasingly tied to capital itself — capital generates more capital. In that sense, the subject is no longer the human, but the holder of capital.

The problem is that this creates a legitimacy gap. To justify this system, meritocracy is introduced as a kind of narrative “MSG”:

“Anyone can rise if they have the ability.”

But reality increasingly diverges from that story. Within this framework, people are encouraged to interpret failure not as a structural issue, but as a lack of ability.

Of course, ability matters. But what counts as “ability”? Even on Hacker News, people disagree. Some argue that only low-level programmers are “real” programmers. But I work at a higher level, assembling systems and libraries to provide convenience for others. Does that make me less of a programmer? I don’t think so.

This is where the real problem begins: how ability is defined, and whether that definition actually justifies who gets access to capital and power. In my view, it does not.

From what I can see, those positions are only open to a very small minority who were not born into them. That “opportunity” functions more as a symbolic opening — a narrow door that exists to legitimize the system, rather than to truly enable mobility.

From my perspective as someone from Korea, the U.S. appears deeply unequal. It often feels as though your path is largely determined by which family you are born into, which in turn shapes which university you attend. Beyond that, the only visible escape routes seem to be extreme outliers, like becoming a YouTube star.

If I reflect on my own experience — working outside formal academia and taking contract work from Western and Chinese clients — I see similar patterns. In academia, lineage matters: which professor you studied under. In industry, being part of certain organizations confers authority, which is then passed down and reinforced. What we are seeing now, especially among those born in the 1990s and 2000s, is the first generation fully experiencing the consequences of systems that were solidified during the baby boomer era.

Capital has a gravitational property. Once accumulated, it attracts more of itself. Initial conditions matter more and more over time.

Within this structure, individual effort and ability are not meaningless — but they are no longer decisive.

Yet society continues to maintain the belief that success is determined by merit. This creates a gap between expectation and reality.

People begin to feel:

“It’s not that I failed — it’s that I was placed in a game I could never win.”

At that point, what emerges is not just dissatisfaction, but resentment and cynicism.

And this feeling does not come only from those at the bottom. In fact, it can be even stronger among those who are educated and who believed in the system — those who tried to play by the rules.

This helps explain why unhappiness in the U.S. is not confined to a single class, but appears broadly across society.

The hostility we see on platforms like YouTube or social media — and even the strange satisfaction some people feel at the decline of other groups — can be understood in this context. It is less about simple malice, and more about a reaction to a broken promise.

From this perspective, the pandemic and inflation are not root causes, but triggers. They exposed tensions that were already present.

And this is where meritocracy becomes particularly problematic.

Meritocracy appears fair on the surface, but in practice it reduces failure to individual responsibility. It reframes structural problems as personal shortcomings, leaving people without a language to explain their situation.

What remains are two responses:

self-blame or anger toward the system

And that anger rarely expresses itself in a clean or rational way. It can manifest as political extremism, hostility toward other groups, or deep cynicism.

So the real issue is not simply that “the economy is bad.”

It is that the belief that “this system is fair” has collapsed.

And once that belief collapses, no amount of positive economic data is enough to restore people’s sense of stability.

From this perspective, I also begin to understand why communities like MAGA can become so extreme. As people are pushed to the margins, they lose not only economic stability but also social connections. Without work, it becomes harder to meet others; as people age, their social world narrows. What remains, at the edge, is often religion — one of the last forms of community that still provides meaning and identity.

I do not believe in God. But I can understand why they do — and why they fight to defend that sense of legitimacy.

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.