What's happening for at least a decade is that the sources of hedonistic happiness are becoming more accessible(tasty food, booze, entertainment, substances), while things that used to bring eudaimonic happiness are either becoming unaffordable (property ownership, raising kids, financial independence), unpopular (long-term relationships, religion) or economically uncompetitive (small businesses).
The media is doing its best to distract people and convince them that they don't want all those long-term things, but you can't really fool the human nature. The tensions are rising, although it may all look great on paper.
A more interesting and objective metric would be the suicide rates, but I couldn't easily find anything more recent than 2019.
>For its Life Evaluation Index, Gallup classifies Americans as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering" according to how they rate their current and future lives
People might actually feel happier when moving from a miserable state to a better state compared to being in a good state all along.
So we are seeing the effects of people being grateful that recovery is happening, not that the world has already recovered.
Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.
It's easy to confuse our own personal bubbles with the general population. There's nothing inconsistent about you living in an area with low life satisfaction and a poll that says 60% of people across the entire country have high life satisfaction.
The way you describe your home town sounds depressing and it's easy to believe that they wouldn't be part of the 60% of Americans rating themselves as thriving in this poll. However, what you're describing is very far from the norm for towns in America. Occurs too often, yes, but it's not what life in the average American city looks like.
> Starting a family with a single income in Bay Area, meeting ends meet is hard even with a tech job.
The entire Bay Area represents around 2% of the US population. It's not expected that a national poll would reflect the realities of a single geographic region.
That said, I have several friends and extended families starting families in the Bay Area who are very happy with their circumstances.
> Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.
The poll said 60% of Americans see themselves as "thriving". That doesn't meant that no one is struggling. It's important to look at these polls as ways to get a glimpse of life outside of our own bubbles. It's also important to view them as a distribution rather than a binary outcome.
A post of the form "This must be biased, because my anecdote is X". Your specific experience is the most biased thing there can be.
I think they're trying to get at "deliberately altered for political ends", but with no basis for that statement. It feels like projection: "I know what I want the result to be therefore you must be deliberately saying the opposite".
To see it expressed so baldly like that really takes the wind out of my sails, regardless of the cogent and coherent reply.
Rust Belt decay is obviously less conducive to happiness, but I think “boom towns” (where a marquee industry makes a small percentage of the population very rich) also aren’t conductive to happiness. Might explain why the politics out of place as like San Francisco is so apocalyptic. People want to have a normal life but the economy of the city has bifurcated the population into “rich but stressed out” and “struggling to get by.”
To be fair I get the sentiment. DC was the same way. In DC it was childless wealthy professionals on one side (mostly white and Asian) and service workers on the other (mostly Black and Latino). It was depressing as hell and we had to get out.
Lots of rural areas and small cities have broadly shared prosperity too. I was very surprised when I went to East Texas and saw the brand new strip malls and shiny pickup trucks everywhere. (Along with a very racially diverse and integrated population driving those trucks and eating at the new big box restaurants. I was completely unsurprised to see Trump doing better than expected among Latinos in Texas.)
NYC, DC, and SF are probably the only cities I’d put in that category. Maybe Seattle. That’s only 12% of the population.
The median household income in San Francisco is $120,000, but the median home price is $1.5-2 million, depending on source. That's 12-16x.
A $500/month truck payment isn't putting people on the edge of financial ruin when you're talking about an $800/month mortgage versus a $6,500/month mortgage.
When people see an upward trendline in their lives and can imagine it continuing they're more apt to lean in push harder. I'd imagine that even in the bay area, wages are probably rising fast for your typical worker and rents have tapered off due to the pandemic.
While in many cases we built a society where having a family is financially impractical to impossible - it's not hard to imagine that changing with a 20-30 dollar/hr 10th percentile wage ( which we get to in under ~5-10 years if the bottom quintile sees a 10% annual bump ).
And the vast majority of them have statues of philosophers as their avatars, which I still don't quite get.
As a useful mental trick, I substitute "commenters" with "bored people on the internet" sometimes to remind myself of the source.
Yes. It's right there (it takes three seconds to pull a phone out of a pocket), and it's instantly a way to talk to people. Sometimes there's no one else there.
Also, in American culture you're not supposed to be negative in social situations. Always positive, always chirpy. Maybe that is why it's so toxic online. Because similar to the Victorian age and sexual repression, the always-positive leads to a toxic sublimation into Internet anonymity? I'm just tossing this out there as a thought. A counter would be, the entire world is toxic online.
It seems that these people have no release for their views in the real world and for some reason these social sites are suitable places (from their perspective)
Are you suggesting philosophers aren’t a consistently unhappy lot ?
Agreed, 100%. It's amazing how HN, Reddit and other places select so strongly for the pessimism of the intellect, but quickly shoot down the optimism of the will. Without the latter (informed by the former, sure), civilization would never have advanced this far.
Sure, we need realism. And knowledge of what will go wrong. But find the positive -- otherwise, it's more like a withdrawal of people's energy.
Thankfully, like you mentioned, the real world, away from these artificial rectangles, is often way more empowering. :)
One is that it's one question. Just one question to summarize your life.
The second is that the ends of the scale has always seemed sort of odd to me: "he top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you."
Someone who is depressed is probably going to shift a bit in their evaluations of the top and bottom. That is, someone who is visibly and diagnosably depressed will probably imagine a worse best possible life, and also maybe even worse worst possible life. So you could be pretty darn depressed and still rate yourself as moderate. If your options go from "depressing" to "unmentionable hellscape" you could still rate yourself as a 7. Are most people doing this? Maybe not, but it's an odd way to frame the question and leads itself to that.
The final concern I have is how many of these are on the phone. If someone randomly called me on the phone to ask, would I go there even if I was really depressed? Probably not.
I guess I see these results as pretty interesting but really difficult to interpret. It's like trying to gauge global ocean temperature changes from one temperature reading in your local bay.
Your options are to try very hard, and maybe secure a barely conventional middle class life, or not try. And for people who aren't a fit for the knowledge economy, the second is the optimal choice.
Most of these things are beneficial to the common man. People have demanded revolution for years and looks like they might get it.
However, I find Reddit straight-up mean. I rarely participate, and if I do, it's more around specific hobbies, real estate and stock type forums. From the mods all the way down, there's a certain take-ya-down-with-one-liners personality type that seems to just predominate. Similar to Twitter. I'm sure there are good subs, but I'm really curious what it is about Reddit that leads to toxicity on seemingly neutral topics. I always thought it was the young age, but honestly a lot of these people are adults and not teens (teens don't frequent real estate investment subs).
I'm also part of several online communities and even forums where most people are doing well.
There's nothing about the internet that requires people to bias toward being negative and cynical. The cynicism does tend to collect in certain internet bubbles and especially certain cites that cater to outrage-as-entertainment (e.g. front page of Reddit)
I post some positive life news on Facebook. I would never go around HN posting similar news.
If the US ever gets around to properly improving its healthcare mess, these ratings would soar.
Does it sound boastful or insensitive? Is it uninteresting to hear?
Maybe that’s patronizing and not giving other individuals enough credit. Thinking on my own past depression, I don’t recall that I felt worse because of comparison to others —- I think the bigger problem was more to do with my own lack of direction, displeasure with myself, and feeling trapped.
Seeing others take alternative paths and reach happiness might’ve actually been helpful for overcoming some of my self-constructed obstacles.
It’s become more about not wanting to feed the ad monster and give my circle more reasons to be in those apps these days. Apple photo stream is where we share instead.
Reddit skews very young, and I think things are harder for youth. The older generation has seen their housing values explode over the last decade, same with their retirement accounts. Many are “paper rich”.
Younger people aren’t established, they see high housing prices and feel the “American dream” was stolen from them. They see the current market values, and think they “missed out” on the rise. After all, will we see another decade of this kind of prosperity? Could be a kind of FOMO.
I do agree that stepping away from social media is important. Reddit has a lot of folks with a victim mentality (victims of “the system” - represented by capitalism), and that idea is easy to cultivate in oneself. It has a kernel of truth, but I think people ruminate and it doesn’t do any good.
Is there somewhere in modern society this schedule is available?
Spending your time fighting for limited resources is actually not something we stopped doing. If you live in the US on average around 4% of your working time is spent on war, and that's working more than twice the hours, all things considered, of people in the neolithic. And that's in relative peace time, expect that to revert to the mean in the next decade or two.
Anyways, this is besides the point, the natural state of man is indeed to do less labour and even less work than nowadays.
Apparently, humans would tend to migrate rather than fight for available resources.
You could go live a hunter gatherer lifestyle in most forests in North America. Nobody will try to stop you if you are far enough from a road.
What about modern life has anything to do with this mythical "natural" state? Why should people be left to die as if we were the same as gazelles?
My in laws out in smaller Oregon cities, who mostly didn’t go to college or went to the local state school, seem pretty happy. One took on a lot of debt for college and is an unhappy progressive activist.
And statistically, going by social issues they don't do well either.
This is just a small slice of what's wrong with city life from today's errands I had to run. Traffic, population density, constant fear of crime and someone breaking into your car, everything just takes longer and the noise itself takes the joy out of life.
My parents live in rural California and it is the most beautiful, impossibly gorgeous place with a sense of tranquility in the air. Life moves slowly and at a nice pace. Everyone is nice to one another. And this isn't some rich neighborhood.
Perhaps that could explain the outlook seen on HN, etc.
Gallup survey was conducted entirely online but "real world" survey [2] (including ppl without internet connection) says otherwise here
"Americans' optimism about country's direction over next year drops nearly 20 points since May: POLL
In May, a little more than a third were pessimistic. Now, it is a majority." [1]
1. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-optimism-countrys-...
2. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/outside-covid-19-bide...
And crackdowns did closed lefty abusive subs too.
Especially when one of them is based on ignoring an unprecendented economic bubble and hoping for the best. No reasonable person in rudimentary touch with reality can have elevated "anticipated life satisfaction" in this context.
This is a perfect example of the internet cynicism I was referring to. There's a general vibe on sites like Reddit and HN that the average people are wrong and they shouldn't be happy because everything is actually terrible and they just haven't figured it out yet.
Can we stop acting like these people are wrong or stupid and just accept that maybe people really are doing well?
This is really hard to do given my conversations with most people in real life.
There is a shocking obliviousness to climate change, plastic pollution, economic problems, healthcare (personal and the system), philosophical/existential inquiries, etc. Not to say people don’t know climate change is happening - they just aren’t aware of any details beyond surface level memes.
Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes.
But also a reminder that frustration and outrage drive content algorithms, so its no surprise that kind of content dominates the text based social media.
Normie: “Oh cool, electric cars are improving that means less pollution and i spend less on gas!”
Too-online environmental person: “But ACKSHUALLY, electric cars are terrible because theoretically lithium might have some environmental impact and we need to ban all cars if we REALLY care about the environment, so electric cars are bad because they’re stopping us from banning all cars.”
Normie: “Solar power is good; I heard a little bit about climate change, so I’m glad some people are working to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”
Left Caucus of Nevada: “ Arevia Power withdrew their application for the Battle Born Solar project. Congrats to @saveourmesa and the other activists who put in the work to keep the community healthy, safe, and whole”
https://twitter.com/LeftCaucus/status/1418403704047243264?s=...
Electric cars are between 2 and 20 times better than the status quo. The end result of opposing electric cars won’t be that cars get banned but that we’ll just use internal combustion engine cars.
Beyond that, we live in a world of limited resources and path dependency. Every dollar being spent on subsidizing electric cars is a dollar not spent on public transport. So as soon as we're no longer talking about getting ICE cars off the road, we're spending money on tech that is not good enough instead of tech that is good enough.
It's not the good being the enemy of the better, it's the less bad being the enemy of good enough. A world where we're spending 5000$+ from taxpayer money on EVs while dealing with ineffective public transport, which incentivizes people to move to suburbia and double their CO2 emissions, isn't going to cut it.
So by all means we can work on EVs as a backup plan for those that will never use public transportation or human powered transport, but the second it's harming actually working transportation tech, and in the US that's starting to happen, it's doing more harm than good.
Every year, our society spends VAST amounts on fossil fuels and fossil fuel vehicles. THAT is the real problem. Anything spent on electric vehicles is minuscule in comparison because every single new internal combustion car sold, about 60 tons of CO2 is released from the gasoline burned, in addition to manufacturing. It is conventional cars that compete with electric cars, NOT public transport. In fact, people who live in places where public transport or bikes (whose CO2 emissions per mile depend on not having a high beef diet) is not an option, such as many suburbs, are where electric vehicles are most suitable (can charge at home).
You’re making claims that people will, in the 10 years we have left to fully decarbonize, majority move out of the suburbs and into denser areas that are bike friendly and can have good public transport is absurd. Firstly, there’s nowhere for them to move into as prices in denser areas are often higher, so we’d have to kick off a massive apartment building campaign starting NOW (with all the cement emissions that implies… and cement is decarbonization resistant). Second, are we asking people (as most people in the US own homes) to abandon a massive $250k investment just to pay rent in an apartment? If everyone moves out of the suburbs on timescale you think, there’ll be no one to buy that house… it’ll just rot or will have to be torn down. Houses can last over 100 years (mine was built in 1919), much longer than cars, so you’re wasting the embodied emissions of the house. Thirdly, people often LIKE living in the suburbs with large yards (I live in a small duplex in a dense neighborhood with a small yard, but it’s clear that having more space has advantages), and this totally unrealistic idea that we can force everyone into a dense cityscape in just a decade or so is bananas. The political pushback would be enormous.
So the only option is to encourage densification on the margins (by getting rid of parking mandates, getting rid of local zoning that bans duplexes and multiplexes, etc), funding public transport infrastructure and bike infrastructure (which is cheap) to stop sprawl while decarbonizing people in-place. That “factor of 2” emissions for living in the suburbs is only because of building energy costs and commuting, which can both be decarbonized much cheaper (via heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicles) than the cost of abandoning a $250k house for more expensive and more cramped urban housing. PLUS you won’t have the massive political cost of taking the middle class’s most valuable asset and making it worthless while also forcing everyone to change their lifestyle.
The whole “electric cars are bad, ACKSHUALLY” argument relies on a chain of thought that is absolutely absurd when you look at the political capital it would take to achieve on the timescales we’re talking about.
Regardless, there would STILL BE CARS. Japan, the Netherlands, and every other large developed nation that is put up as a model of public transport STILL has a heck of a lot of cars per capita, much higher than we can afford to be fossil fuel run in a decarbonized future. Best case is we get rid of half of all cars with the rest electric. We are currently at like 1% electric, and the consumers who buy from biggest manufacturers in the US (GM and Tesla) don’t even get federal tax credits for their vehicles as those companies already used theirs up, so you argument that electric cars are bad because of competition for tax dollars already is shown to be false. We need to get to 50% electric in the BEST CASE SCENARIO of bike and public transport centric decarbonization, and ban the rest. We are not going NEARLY fast enough and many states have now added EV taxes that are HIGHER than the equivalent state gas tax. Plus, actual business (meaning practical things like contractors who do plumbing, bring food to market, etc) need electric vehicles as well which must be decarbonized, as well as all buses and trains and mining vehicles and semi trucks and whathaveyou needing if you be electric, so the whole sector needs a massive push.
Normies understand this better than too-online degrowthers who think you’ll be able to convince the politically diverse America to abandon the suburbs in a freaking decade and all take trains (which require expensive infrastructure that America takes literally decades to build), buses, and bikes. There is no plausible world where that happens outside of hellscape authoritarianism. We must decarbonize in-place with solutions that don’t require everyone to get on the same exact page lifestyle-wise within a decade.
(And a side note on zero sum thinking about climate change solutions: we need to decarbonize so fast and spend a LOT of money to do it, so even if we DID want to spend it all in one sector, we’d run out of qualified people to do the work and machines capable of building the thing, ie you’re supply-constrained and so you’d get massive cost inflation. Spreading the money over several solutions at once, however, prevents that from happening as those who build cars & heat pumps are different from those who build railroads and trains and multiplexes. So we SHOULDN’T put all our money on just electric cars or public transport or whathaveyou, but actually spend it on a wide spread of solutions to be most optimal & enable the fastest decarbonization. This is in addition to all the other arguments above. It is NOT zero sum.)
This is a false dichotomy. Other options are possible, e.g. increasing public transportation. Japan and Korea provide good examples of modern high-density cities with good public transportation. And many alternatives are possible.
Secondly, your reply still fails to prove your claim that people are "too plugged in to environmental social media" to support effective solutions.
In the 60s-80s, there was impending nuclear war, overpopulation, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, radioactive and chemical waste, deforestation of the Amazon at an alarming rate, and various species placed on endangered lists. That and all the religious rapture expectations, in the US at least.
Somehow civilization managed not to collapse or annihilate itself decades ago. So the updated crisis of climate change, plastic in the ocean, etc. starts to sound like more of the same doomsday talk. Not that all of these things aren't problems to deal with, but are they existential in nature? Do they mean we should expect life to get worse? Because the overpopulation bomb and mass starvation didn't pan out. We produce more food now than we ever have. Acid rain and the ozone layer were manageable. Species often make recoveries after being protected. Rivers recover after being cleaned up. A majority of the original Amazon still remains, even though deforestation and fires remain concerns. There are more trees in the world today than 100 years ago. And standards of living having been going up around the globe over that same time, while absolute poverty has been diminishing.
Maybe we can manage our problems and avoid the worst case scenarios. In the movie Tomorrowland, Hugh Laurie as the villain does give a really compelling speech in which he talks about how all the doomsday expectations are an excuse to not fix problems, which contrasts with the main character, who is very optimistic that humans can find solutions, unlike all her classmates and teachers.
> Ignorance is bliss.
I didn’t grasp this when my HS English teacher imparted this on us, but having consumed much of the trending Reddit content, it makes a lot more sense these days.
If you're not doing actively something about it, what's the point of keeping this in mind if it only makes you sad? It seems like some people like having a moral high ground by being sad at important issues, but I don't really see the point. Either do something, or don't do anything.
I bristle when others captured by internet outrage loops suggest that I too must share their outrage or I'm unreasonable, out of touch, etc. Did you recognize that you have become a recruiter for social media algorithms?
I think it’s difficult for people with these types of issues to cope with problems that are out of range for any one person to fix, for coming to terms with change, and to fixate on these things. Just bring in a constant panic state while everything seems so out of control.
It’s sad because it’s just a very bad way to spend a life when there’s so much good and beautiful everywhere.
The internet was great before everyone got in the pool and 30% of them started pissing in it.
Like even if there is an economic bubble what does that really mean for you? Is your long term personal life satisfaction really tied to the economy? Maybe you'll have a bad year like 2008 did to some but you'll probably bounce back
That's what the pollster and reporter want you to do.
This has become an extremely common method of polling manipulation, and I can't believe more people don't see right through it.
But I am surprised most others think so too.
However, maybe the study here presented has also some hidden selection.
50-60% of 300 million+ people “thriving” means what for their other 40-50% of 300 million?
Comments like yours lead me to the same conclusion. I’d suggest people interact outside their usual filter bubble specifically, online or real.
tl;dr: it's getting better. We're living longer, homicides are down, fewer wars and autocracies, etc..
But about this poll-- it seems like it happened before Delta version of Covid got traction. I think if they hold the same survey today, they'll get different results.
Real world interaction is where I get to learn that wild fires are supposedly being caused by migrant workers, where I get yelled at for wearing a mask during a pandemic, have my kids teased for the same, discover that people I used to think were reasonable adults are actually anti-vaxxers, and interact with depressingly insane inflated residential & commercial real estate markets.
My online interactions are probably principally responsible for maintaining the threads of idealism that are hanging on.
That said, I also spend zero time on Facebook, Instagram, etc., and near zero time on Twitter. So, neither my real world nor online world interactions are necessarily representative of much.
A very simple explanation is rising salaries for manual labour, and unprecedented stimulus cheques.
> Notably, even as current life satisfaction has increased in recent months, anticipated life satisfaction remains elevated compared with pre-COVID levels.
These results are striking in contrast to the increasingly cynical outlooks we see on sites like Reddit and even HN. It seems like every comment section is full of negative comments about how terrible everything is or how terrible it's going to be soon. Results like this are a good reminder to log off and go interact with the real world for a more grounded perpsective.