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 ).