15 ms·

Americans' life ratings reach record high

131 points by gorwell 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Not only is life satisfaction high, optimism about the future is also very high: > 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.
- refurb 5y ago
  Social media reflects a small slice of the population (like <1%) and it seems to overwhelmingly attract negativity. I would even argue it’s a bit of an outlet for people who aren’t that negative in their everyday life.
- eps 5y ago
  It's very much debatable which perspective is "more grounded." 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.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > 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?
    - humbleMouse 5y ago
      Are we going to have any arctic ice left? That’s the type of question that keeps me from being too jovial.
    - meowkit 5y ago
      > Can we stop acting like these people are wrong or stupid 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.
      - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
        Long ago, my dad checked out of news media entirely, and the effect on his mental health was incredible. Personally, I don't think I can turn a blind eye to the rest of the world, but IME those that do are generally much happier.
        heckingoodtimes 5y ago
        What do they say again? > 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.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        When we all first hear this expression we assume that ignorance is a bad thing, thus we should not be like all the blissfully ignorant. But maybe it was really advice -- don't expand your circle of awareness too far beyond your circle of influence.
      - 5y ago
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    You can both acknowledge economic bubbles and have life satisfaction. It's as simple as not tying your own happiness onto gargantuan systems well outside your individual control. 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?
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      I estimate around 20%-30% of the country has a mental health issue ranging from depression to narcissism to outright sociopathy and misanthropy. And they occupy a disproportionate amount of social media, etc congregating and spreading their sad world views everywhere. 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.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    I think your mixing up two different questions. This article is asking is your personal life good. Im generally happy with my own life and think it'll get better, that doesn't mean I think the world is on a good path. I think I can live a decent life independent of whatever is going on in the world at large. 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
    - beerandt 5y ago
      >I think your mixing up two different questions. 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.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    Why is it a bubble?
    - username90 5y ago
      This study is from June, USA still paid a lot of stimulus money in June. Being happy from stimulus money is a bubble, it wont last.
      - l33t2328 5y ago
        When will it not last till? There will always be another crash...
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Nobody is going to go on an Internet forum to proclaim how great their life is.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    Most of my Facebook and Instagram is full of other people sharing good things about their lives. I know the cynical internet commenters will insist it's all fake and that they're only putting on a show, but the reality is that most people in my circles are doing quite well and are generally happy. 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)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - adventured 5y ago
      Job openings are at ~9.2 million in the US and there has been a persistently healthy wage increase over the past five or six years for the bottom half of the laborforce due to the labor demand vs labor supply imbalance. It all goes a long ways toward bolstering optimism for the mass public. If the US ever gets around to properly improving its healthcare mess, these ratings would soar.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Facebook and Instagram are primarily about showing. They are less discussion forums. I post some positive life news on Facebook. I would never go around HN posting similar news.
      - detaro 5y ago
        People do show (on-topic) things they are proud of on HN, people regularly share their own stories, and not just bad ones, in reaction to submissions. Not really life news, no, but still positive content.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  That will undoubtedly have the opposite of the intended effect for me. 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    Ahh yes sounds like a pile of good reasons to hide in not real life, enjoy!
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    In the real world I’ve never heard anything resublime those claims, or been yelled at for wearing a mask.
    - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
      That's fortunate. Dalliances with the rural expanses of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho have not been so encouraging for me lately.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Is it possible reddit is mostly bots at this point?
  - utdoctor 5y ago
    Is that even up to disagreement? The main subs certainly are
  - hereforphone 5y ago
    To be fair many of the bots (those with a conservative world outlook) were banned years ago.
    - spicybright 5y ago
      Bots that they know of.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Reddit has plenty of conservatives. And crackdowns did closed lefty abusive subs too.
- noobermin 5y ago
  They should show the results broken down by age. I think you'll see the vast majority of happy respondents being baby boomers.
- mercy_dude 5y ago
  I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population. I am from Greenboro, WI and I can tell you it’s the opposite among the population in the areas I grew up. Most young people like me who had more than a high school degree have moved away and ones that are left there are either in some kind of struggling business or are plain into dark places dealing with addictions (alcohol and opioid). Even people like me who did move to the cities, I don’t see how the optimism can be so high. I mean I work in tech and have pretty much accepted that I am forever priced out of the housing market I am in. The school district system of where I live also doesn’t look very promising so my kids will have a better education (and future). Starting a family with a single income in Bay Area, meeting ends meet is hard even with a tech job. Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Nothing stopping the elites from pumping out fake polls to keep us distracted from how bad things are getting.
    - tag2103 5y ago
      A new flavor of bread and circuses with added "appeal to authority" goodness.
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Do you have evidence the poll is faked, or does it just go against your confirmation bias?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population. 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.
- blippage 5y ago
  "Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven Pinker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ tl;dr: it's getting better. We're living longer, homicides are down, fewer wars and autocracies, etc..
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    This entire thread is a proof of how many people on HN constantly downvote anything that is not rage-worthy.
- lrdswrk00 5y ago
  Looking at raw numbers if always much more telling than cherry picked stats intended to sell an emotional narrative. 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.
- eulers_secret 5y ago
  I skimmed the article, but I think this disconnect may be due to demographics. 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.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Reddit and Twitter skew young, urban, and educated. It seems like these people are the least happy, because they feel like they deserve more. 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.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I don't buy this. I know plenty of unhappy rural people and unhappy uneducated people. And statistically, going by social issues they don't do well either.
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        I disagree. City life is full of stress. Want to go to a nursery to pick up some plants in Oakland, CA? It will take ya 2.5 hours, not to mention finding parking on the street and then dealing with 'asshole' customer service - there is no incentive to improve because hey they have a lot of people buying plants and if you don't like it, go somewhere else. 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.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > 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. A very simple explanation is rising salaries for manual labour, and unprecedented stimulus cheques.
- ekster 5y ago
  I have noticed on social media that the cynical, assholes, grumpy, and those that want to take others down a peg are quite loud but in the minority. Typically when you run into one they have a comment history where they are just being a jerk all day every day to all comers. Normal people have good or bad days and it might come out in different ways on different days, but there is a surprising number of people out there just being hateful on the internet all day like it’s their job. And the vast majority of them have statues of philosophers as their avatars, which I still don't quite get.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Here's the thing I try to remember: when life isn't going well for a person, it's easy to turn to the Internet to vent frustration. And the less one has going on in the rest of their life, the more time one has to spend arguing online. The volume of posting doesn't indicate how right someone is or how reflective their experiences are of reality, just how much time they have to dedicate to the task of commenting. As a useful mental trick, I substitute "commenters" with "bored people on the internet" sometimes to remind myself of the source.
    - mancerayder 5y ago
      > Here's the thing I try to remember: when life isn't going well for a person, it's easy to turn to the Internet to vent frustration 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.
  - ssss11 5y ago
    Specifically on reddit and twitter, the few times I’ve used them, they seem to be filled with assholes. 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)
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  What is the standard error on these measurements? And what is the variance, that is does the mean satisfaction represent the majority or are there, say, two populations, one very optimistic and the other less so. Perhaps that could explain the outlook seen on HN, etc.
- paulddraper 5y ago
  This is relief. I believe humanity's condition is getting better and better. But I am surprised most others think so too.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I guess happy optimistic people have better things to do than spend their day commenting on Reddit. Bit of selection bias maybe.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  It seems to be human nature that people are more happy to talk about misfortune than about lucky events. 60% are thriving. But the 40% that are not probably have a much stronger opinion about things. So you'll hear the loud "minority".
- hdivider 5y ago
  "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." 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. :)
- mancerayder 5y ago
  I don't know if HN folks, on average, are grumpy and negative and mean. They might get feisty in a particular debate and there are a lot of sky-is-falling type articles. 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).
- derbOac 5y ago
  There's three concerns I have about this, the Cantri measure as it's applied. 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.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    Reddit skews young, and I’ve definitely noticed the younger generation likes to commiserate. There’s also this pervasive sense of doom that the environment and the economy is going to collapse.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
      There's a pervasive sense of stagnant wages, unaffordable homes, etc in first world and developing countries. In China, it's tangping. In America, it's my step sibling having 0 desire to move out of our parents home (e.g., "Millennials kill X" headlines). 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.
      - muzani 5y ago
        That might explain the ratings. COVID has begun a kind of shift. Those in the upper class are getting it hard. Real estate traders are screwed. Those who pay minimum wage are having difficulty hiring, especially with the number pf deaths from those exposed to it. Things like bus driving come with hefty hazard pay now.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  I think, this is trickier. Happiness generally consists of 2 components: hedonistic (short-term, "had a great meal" type) and eudaimonic (long-term, "I am doing the right thing and am confident about my future" type). 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.
  - yann2 5y ago
    There is a Gross National Stupidity index thats been on the rise for a while now. So the poll really makes sense.
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    The study appears to factor in short-term vs long-term happiness. Specifically, they ask respondents to project forward 5 years into the future: >For its Life Evaluation Index, Gallup classifies Americans as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering" according to how they rate their current and future lives
  - uyt 5y ago
    Another problem is because of hedonic adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_adaptation 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.
- RickJWagner 5y ago
  I'm usually optimistic, and I think there are bright days ahead. 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.
- muzani 5y ago
  My observation is business owners are unhappiest. They're subject to restrictions. Workers don't want to work in the office anymore. People who took minimum wage jobs are dead and more expensive, with bus drivers and janitors getting double pay for danger. Real estate is going to take a dip, especially offices. Most of these things are beneficial to the common man. People have demanded revolution for years and looks like they might get it.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Yeah it could be a magnet for people to complain in a safe place where everyone will echo it. However, maybe the study here presented has also some hidden selection.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > Results like this are a good reminder to log off and go interact with the real world for a more grounded perpsective. 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-direction-year-drops-20-points/story?id=79036435 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-optimism-countrys-... 2. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/outside-covid-19-biden-receives-mixed-approval-ratings https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/outside-covid-19-bide...
ChrisLTD 5y ago
Compared to 2020, this year has been amazing for Americans. But I wonder if the happiness will be short lived. Aside from Trump and Covid, the same issues we had in 2019 are lurking below the surface. And it’s entirely possible a Trumpy figure, or even Trump himself, will return to power in 2024.
- tbihl 5y ago
  I would say not 'possible', but more probable than in 2016.
  - RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
    Its been demonstrated as both a viable political strategy and that there is a clear bloc of voters to use to support that strategy. We'll be seeing its hints in 2022 and it will be full bore in 2024. If the holders of the old-guard strategies (McCain 2008/ Biden 2020 style campaigns) want to not get trounced in 2024, they need to make a substantial difference in peoples lives to win that election. Otherwise, 'Trumpian' style campaigns will become the norm, as they'll be show to be more effective at winning elections. Might actually be more riding on 2022/ 2024 than 2016. 2016 proved it possible; these next elections will decide if its reproducible.
    - yerwhat01010 5y ago
      Ron DeSantis will be elected president in 2024. You heard it here first.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > And it’s entirely possible a Trumpy figure, or even Trump himself, will return to power in 2024. Wouldnt that be good for this particular measure given the scores reached 'new recorded high's in his presidency.
  - ChrisLTD 5y ago
    The job market really started to heat up for the first time since the 1990s under Trump, which I think explains that phenomenon. On the flip side, even my friends and family that support Trump were growing tired of the baseline level of anxiety he was causing with his erratic proclamations.
burlesona 5y ago
I mean, it’s not hard to understand. Give everyone a bunch of money and most of them will fix a bunch of problems in their life, feel less stressed, and be more optimistic. On top of the federal stimulus, this housing bubble has a lot of people thinking “okay I can retire off the sale of my home now,” though I doubt they’re thinking through where they’ll live after that sale, nor how inflation may devalue what seems today like a vast accumulation of wealth on paper. The current situation makes me (a) more convinced that policies like a negative income tax are a superior safety net to the bureaucratic means tested programs we use today, and (b) more concerned that zero interest rate policy and the incredible distortions in the financial markets are going to end very badly.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  The article doesn't talk about money though, but factors like "significant enjoyment the day before", which obviously took a huge hit during the various phases of COVID lockdown. And this in turn is tied largely to social interaction and the general reopening the US has been experiencing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Why does it have to end badly? Why can't money just always get funnier? If Central Banks guarantee to always pay more for bonds than what the Federal Government sold them for - what difference does it make if the interest rate is 0% or -5%? It's still some fixed, semi-guaranteed return. Inequality doesn't seem to be a major talking point in any major economy despite the fact that we surpassed The Belle Epoch peak a couple years ago. The masses don't seem concerned that inequality is sky rocketing. Almost everywhere >50% of people own homes -> A lot of them on a lot of leverage. Why should they care if Jeff Bezos is making >$70Bn a year on paper - when they're also making more on paper than they do working their jobs? Until the homeownership rate starts to plummet - I don't see why >50% will ever care. And if the homeowership rate does plummet - why can't the government just Federally back negative-percent-down, interest-only loans to increase homeownership and inflate housing prices more (both of these exist already in other countries)? Things can always get funnier. You know what's not going to happen... The government just sit back and watch 80% of the world's wealth disappear.
randcraw 5y ago
In monkey studies, when a subordinate monkey is removed from the presence of the alpha male, its stress level goes down and it shows clear emotional signs of 'thriving'. I wonder if that might help explain this improved outlook on life among humans since covid arose, now that so many subordinates are working from home and no longer under the mindful eye of a less-than-beloved boss.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  The article includes a graph that shows well-being was depressed during COVID. Well-being didn't reach pre-COVID levels until into 2021 as lockdowns were ending. There isn't much mystery here: Average people do better when they're more social. > I wonder if that might help explain this improved outlook on life among humans since covid arose, now that so many subordinates are working from home and no longer under the mindful eye of a less-than-beloved boss. The raw numbers would suggest the opposite: That people reported worse life satisfaction during the times most associated with WFH.
- watwut 5y ago
  Basically, when you remove aggressive assholes, other sentient beings become happier? This can be reproduced in human prisons or boarding schools. If you are not locked with bully you are happier.
axpy906 5y ago
> The most recent results, captured June 14-20, 2021, are based on 4,820 U.S. adults surveyed by web as a part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based, non-opt-in panel of about 120,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. People surveyed online have higher life ratings. Edit: to show that it’s always important to understand how data is collected.
- _rpd 5y ago
  You shouldn’t be downvoted. Web only vs. conventional phone surveys is a significant change. Cheaper, but definitely excludes poorer demographic sections. You can’t ignore this for a survey about ‘life ratings’.
CalChris 5y ago
A lot of this optimism is just not having Trump drive the news cycle everyday.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Don't know why you're getting downvoted, I think you're right. Whether deserved or not, the news cycle 2016-2020 was one conflagration after another, sometimes with not even a day between them to absorb things.
  - steve76 5y ago
    If liberals win, then you are allowed to be happy. If liberals loose, prepare for your city to burn and disease from their marxist friends.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Make News Boring Again
mrfusion 5y ago
Why can’t we measure our progress by ratings like these instead of gdp and unemployment rate?
- gardnr 5y ago
  You would need to ask S&P Global Ratings that question.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Because such rating is really misleading.
irthomasthomas 5y ago
Really? While places like Chicago and Baltimore have murder rates now up there with warzones. And where they filmed Rocky in Phili looks like the zombie apocalypse: https://youtu.be/-FD7xxo5ApY?t=518 https://youtu.be/-FD7xxo5ApY?t=518 Same place but parental warning, this one is rough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i45JMm9hM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i45JMm9hM4
- adventured 5y ago
  The areas you're talking about are isolation zones. That's how the US functions, it's huge, sprawled out and heavily bifurcated as a society. The war zone areas of St Louis (60 per 100k murder rate, astronomical, from ~2015-2019) don't directly touch the majority of people that live in or near St Louis and go out of their way to avoid those areas. The same is true of Chicago. They don't buy houses near those areas, they don't drive through those areas, they don't shop in those areas. That's how you get Baltimore in a country with a GDP per capita of $68,000 - fourth highest in the world, after Switzerland, Ireland and Norway. Consider the context of matching up on per capita economic output to hyper rich tiny nations with 5m-8m people. The US low outcome is very low compared to those nations, it's median is high compared to the EU median, and it's top 1/4 is exceptionally high. The top 10%-15% in the US are far richer than the top 10%-15% in Europe. Economically the top 10%-15% outcome in Europe is Germany, Britain and France. The top 10%-15% outcome in the US is Switzerland. People that think of the US as one nation economically, are thinking about it entirely wrong. The US is more like Europe as a whole in both its diversity of outcomes and crime, with a far higher median income and wealth level. The worst parts of Baltimore are as dilapidated as the various ghettos of the eastern EU like Stolipinovo Bulgaria. When you picture the US top 10% you should picture Switzerland; when you picture the US ~10%-35% bracket you should picture Germany or France. When you picture the bottom 10% in the US, you should picture poverty in poor EU nations, you should not picture the bottom 10% in Switzerland. That will help you get your head around how the US is arranged.
  - neither_color 5y ago
    I wish people were more mindful of this when they critique our "averages" so incessantly. Certain parts of the country bring down the average hard, and while we SHOULD be doing everything possible to improve these areas, I roll my eyes when a European tries to use an average weighed down by places like Baltimore to tell me my likelihood of getting shot, having access to healthcare, or overall risk of catching a certain pandemic disease. My state had lower case rates than most of Europe, buddy.
jdhn 5y ago
One thing that may be influencing optimism about the future is the fact that the job market is tilted in favor of job seekers right now. I know this is an anecdote, but I have coworkers who are quitting and seeing vast increases in their salary because the job market in tech is tight and is seemingly not getting any looser anytime soon. Now, they weren't earning table scraps before, but when you have people earning 20k to 60k more, that has a really big impact upon how you view the future.
armchairhacker 5y ago
"% thriving" pre-covid was about 56%, the worst of covid was about 46%, current is about 59%. "% suffering" is about 3.4%. Anecdotally, I started getting depressed during the start of the pandemic and again during September-December of 2020. The pandemic loneliness and cynicism was getting to me. Albeit, it never got really bad. In May of 2021, I started feeling a lot better. Because everything is open again, and everyone else is optimistic.
narrator 5y ago
Working from home and spending more time with family is probably a big part of it. Commuting was such an enormous daily waste of time for millions of people.
- mertd 5y ago
  Note that it was around all time low just six months ago. The chart seems very volatile. I don't know if it is a bad survey or if people are fickle.
dominotw 5y ago
> based on 4,820 U.S. adults surveyed by web This is a bit much to call it " American's life ratings" based on 0.0013% of American population who we aren't even sure are americans.
- ZoomerCretin 5y ago
  4,820 is a large enough sample size to be representative of the population within a few percentage points.
  - dominotw 5y ago
    > is a large enough sample size What logic are you using to say that( for my future reference). I am having hard time wrapping my head around how .001% of something can be representative.
    - jfengel 5y ago
      If you assume that your sampling is random, it's actually not too hard. If you were able to pick randomly from all over the planet and ask who was male and who was female, you'd probably get a number of around 50-50 with a sample size of just 10. Maybe it's 60-40 or 40-60, but it's unlikely to be all of one or all of the other. That would happen about 1 time in a thousand. If you asked a thousand people there's basically zero chance you'd get all of one or the other. Your low number might be 490 or even 480, but it would take a bizarre coincidence if it were even as low as 450. The big "if" is assuming that you can sample randomly. That's the hard part. There are a ton of ways they go about trying to ensure that they're doing a random sample, but yeah, you do have to take it with a grain of salt. But setting that aside, the fact that they sample only a tiny percentage isn't really a problem. The exponential nature of coincidences makes significant departures from reality unlikely. One coincidence is rare; hundreds is basically impossible. Most of the math behind statistics assumes that there are infinite populations of people. It requires special corrections if you're dealing with only small groups like hundreds. Once you get into the millions, it might as well be infinite. And as long as your sampling is random, it still works out to give reasonably close answers.
anonAndOn 5y ago
It's not mentioned in the article because it just started, but I suspect we will achieve new highs with the Child Tax Credit.[0] It will likely have a massive impact. [0]https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/
- codingdave 5y ago
  The Child Tax Credit has been around since 1997. The timing changed this year, but the credit itself is not at all new.
  - ZoomerCretin 5y ago
    In its current form of being deposited monthly into people's accounts? No, it's very new.
  - anonAndOn 5y ago
    Except it's been massively increased and now comes with monthly cash disbursements sent via direct deposit whether you filed your taxes or not (eg, those who are too poor to need to file taxes and never got any tax "credit").
gardnr 5y ago
"The percentage of Americans who evaluate their lives well enough to be considered "thriving" on Gallup's Live Evaluation Index reached 59.2% in June..." And "homeownership rate of 65.6 percent"[1]. Everybody else is fucked. 1. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
moltenguardian 5y ago
Wow, the graph of happiness almost matches the S&P500 returns.
dmosley 5y ago
In other news, chocolate rations have been raised to 20 grams.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
Interest rates are lower and the unemployment rate is lower than when the “morning in America” ad aired.
aflag 5y ago
I think people are hopeful that after the vaccine rollouts, things will be back to normal - and people are starting to do what they used to do before the pandemic. When you down it's easy to overshoot a little when you go back up.
lkrubner 5y ago
Actions speak louder than words, and so drug overdoses must speak louder than a poll. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the USA was stagnant or falling because of the upsurge in "deaths of despair". This is pre covid: https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-experts-say-rise-1481975 https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-exper... A poll has limited value and people are famously bad at self-reported happiness. There have simply been too many cases of people saying they are happy with their lives and two years later they commit suicide, or kill their spouse. Some researchers have argued that self reported happiness is worthless. Instead, look at actions. After the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union men over the age of 40 engaged in one of history's greatest alcoholic binges, such that life expectancy in Russia dropped for men during the 1990s. Actions speak loudly. Killing oneself with alcohol communicates how one really feels about the future. We've seen something similar in the USA since the crash of 2008. Until such time as we see real evidence of people acting in the way that we might expect happy people to behave, including planning for the future and taking care of one's health, don't believe a poll that says Americans are happy. But still, in 1945, on VE day or VJ day, if you asked Americans "Are you happy?" obviously everyone would have said "Yes". This is well known. But what they were feeling was relief. The same is true now. People feel relief, thinking the pandemic might be coming under control. Such relief is fickle. It could be different next month. It does not signal long term happiness.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  Why was this downvoted? Does anyone disagree with the basic idea here? People's actions are more meaningful than what they say to a pollster. This should be obvious.
  - staticman2 5y ago
    There are entire fields of medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, that believe surveying people on how depressed, anxious, etc. they feel is the scientific basis of research, diagnosis, and treatment. Your idea to just ignore what people say is just totally out there...
machinehermiter 5y ago
My personal life is wonderful. The country? This chart from the Fed is just astounding. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD
- ZoomerCretin 5y ago
  Contrary to what right-wing media claims (curiously, only during Democratic presidencies), deficit spending isn't actually bad.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Just imagine if we could have spent all that free money on human needs instead of stupid unnecessary wars...
- throwntoday 5y ago
  I hate to be a conspiracy theorist but if covid was made in a lab this seems like the biggest grift of all time. I can't imagine how much of that money just disappeared.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  That looks like unadjusted dollars? It's a crazy graph, as the biggest pre-pandemic event in USA fiscal history (World War II) is simply invisible on this graph. As a point of comparison USA debt hit 101% of GDP in 1946, a level we only rose above recently, because of the pandemic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    Why was this downvoted? World War II was the largest fiscal event in USA history (before the pandemic) and it is invisible on this graph, therefore the graph has little explanatory power. Why would I be downvoted for pointing that out?
    - 5y ago
snambi 5y ago
Sounds like propaganda material.
deertick1 5y ago
I do not even remotely believe this study. Myself and everyone else I know are not very optimistic about our economic prospects for the future and are scared of the direction the country is heading morally and socially.
- GaryTang 5y ago
  I agree with you. This is another propaganda piece.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    If people believed it, it wouldn’t be newsworthy.
- losvedir 5y ago
  Sounds like you're in a sad bubble that's all part of the 40% then. But it's great out here in the 60%. I recommend you get out of your comfort zone and meet some new people, who statistically will be optimistic and happy.
- 0x5f3759df-i 5y ago
  This is about the same logic as "How did Trump get elected I don't know a single person that voted for him" I am very optimistic about our future economically and socially. So you can add that data point.
grecy 5y ago
Life expectancy in the US just dropped by 1.5 years in 2020, the biggest drop since WWII. [1] Life expectancy for Black people fell by 2.9 years and life expectancy for Hispanic males dropped 3.7 years to 75.3 [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-22/us-life-expectancy-in-2020-saw-biggest-drop-since-wwii/100313330 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-22/us-life-expectancy-in...
lkrubner 5y ago
Self reported happiness is notoriously unreliable. Check out “Are you really happy?” https://www.psypost.org/2016/01/self-reported-well-being-doesnt-match-up-with-external-observation-40289 https://www.psypost.org/2016/01/self-reported-well-being-doe... Here is a basic primer on the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study Given that self-reports are unreliable, we should instead focus on what people actually do. And since 2008, the USA has seen a rising number of “deaths of despair”: https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-experts-say-rise-1481975 https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-exper... If you look at peoples actions, and ignore their words, it would seem the USA is suffering an epidemic of despair.
- orzig 5y ago
  Importantly, they measure different things. If there's a dynamic "happiness disparity" (like income disparity, and plausibly correlated) changes on the lower end won't differentiate between a change in mean or variance.
readonthegoapp 5y ago
I'm assuming they only talked to upper class white people Even then I don't believe these results No way
deleted 5y ago
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jl2718 5y ago
“Gallup selects potential panel members using random-digit-dialing (RDD) of landline telephones and cellphones or address-based sampling (ABS) to contact U.S. households at random.” Also a bunch of weird stuff about weighting responses. Overall, I think this is the result of asset price inflation. Everybody thinks they got rich last year while everybody else was struggling.
falconroar 5y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, self-reported happiness is notoriously inaccurate, and is not correlated with objective statistics like suicide rate. The suicide rate in 2021 is at an all-time high [1][2]. I think it's more likely that after months of forced self-isolation, people are less willing to show vulnerability and express unhappiness. Sources: 2021: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/suicide-rates-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/suicide-rat... since 1999: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
- deleted 5y ago
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131 points by gorwell 5y ago

Not only is life satisfaction high, optimism about the future is also very high: > 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.

refurb 5y ago
Social media reflects a small slice of the population (like <1%) and it seems to overwhelmingly attract negativity. I would even argue it’s a bit of an outlet for people who aren’t that negative in their everyday life.
eps 5y ago
It's very much debatable which perspective is "more grounded." 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.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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?
  - humbleMouse 5y ago
    Are we going to have any arctic ice left? That’s the type of question that keeps me from being too jovial.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    > Can we stop acting like these people are wrong or stupid 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.
    - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
      Long ago, my dad checked out of news media entirely, and the effect on his mental health was incredible. Personally, I don't think I can turn a blind eye to the rest of the world, but IME those that do are generally much happier.
      - heckingoodtimes 5y ago
        What do they say again? > 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.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        When we all first hear this expression we assume that ignorance is a bad thing, thus we should not be like all the blissfully ignorant. But maybe it was really advice -- don't expand your circle of awareness too far beyond your circle of influence.
    - 5y ago
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  You can both acknowledge economic bubbles and have life satisfaction. It's as simple as not tying your own happiness onto gargantuan systems well outside your individual control. 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?
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    I estimate around 20%-30% of the country has a mental health issue ranging from depression to narcissism to outright sociopathy and misanthropy. And they occupy a disproportionate amount of social media, etc congregating and spreading their sad world views everywhere. 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.
- tayo42 5y ago
  I think your mixing up two different questions. This article is asking is your personal life good. Im generally happy with my own life and think it'll get better, that doesn't mean I think the world is on a good path. I think I can live a decent life independent of whatever is going on in the world at large. 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
  - beerandt 5y ago
    >I think your mixing up two different questions. 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.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Why is it a bubble?
  - username90 5y ago
    This study is from June, USA still paid a lot of stimulus money in June. Being happy from stimulus money is a bubble, it wont last.
    - l33t2328 5y ago
      When will it not last till? There will always be another crash...
MattGaiser 5y ago
Nobody is going to go on an Internet forum to proclaim how great their life is.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Most of my Facebook and Instagram is full of other people sharing good things about their lives. I know the cynical internet commenters will insist it's all fake and that they're only putting on a show, but the reality is that most people in my circles are doing quite well and are generally happy. 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)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 5y ago
    Job openings are at ~9.2 million in the US and there has been a persistently healthy wage increase over the past five or six years for the bottom half of the laborforce due to the labor demand vs labor supply imbalance. It all goes a long ways toward bolstering optimism for the mass public. If the US ever gets around to properly improving its healthcare mess, these ratings would soar.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Facebook and Instagram are primarily about showing. They are less discussion forums. I post some positive life news on Facebook. I would never go around HN posting similar news.
    - detaro 5y ago
      People do show (on-topic) things they are proud of on HN, people regularly share their own stories, and not just bad ones, in reaction to submissions. Not really life news, no, but still positive content.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
That will undoubtedly have the opposite of the intended effect for me. 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anonfornoreason 5y ago
  Ahh yes sounds like a pile of good reasons to hide in not real life, enjoy!
- l33t2328 5y ago
  In the real world I’ve never heard anything resublime those claims, or been yelled at for wearing a mask.
  - im_down_w_otp 5y ago
    That's fortunate. Dalliances with the rural expanses of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho have not been so encouraging for me lately.
mrfusion 5y ago
Is it possible reddit is mostly bots at this point?
- utdoctor 5y ago
  Is that even up to disagreement? The main subs certainly are
- hereforphone 5y ago
  To be fair many of the bots (those with a conservative world outlook) were banned years ago.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Bots that they know of.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Reddit has plenty of conservatives. And crackdowns did closed lefty abusive subs too.
noobermin 5y ago
They should show the results broken down by age. I think you'll see the vast majority of happy respondents being baby boomers.
mercy_dude 5y ago
I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population. I am from Greenboro, WI and I can tell you it’s the opposite among the population in the areas I grew up. Most young people like me who had more than a high school degree have moved away and ones that are left there are either in some kind of struggling business or are plain into dark places dealing with addictions (alcohol and opioid). Even people like me who did move to the cities, I don’t see how the optimism can be so high. I mean I work in tech and have pretty much accepted that I am forever priced out of the housing market I am in. The school district system of where I live also doesn’t look very promising so my kids will have a better education (and future). Starting a family with a single income in Bay Area, meeting ends meet is hard even with a tech job. Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Nothing stopping the elites from pumping out fake polls to keep us distracted from how bad things are getting.
  - tag2103 5y ago
    A new flavor of bread and circuses with added "appeal to authority" goodness.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Do you have evidence the poll is faked, or does it just go against your confirmation bias?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population. 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.
blippage 5y ago
"Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven Pinker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ tl;dr: it's getting better. We're living longer, homicides are down, fewer wars and autocracies, etc..
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  This entire thread is a proof of how many people on HN constantly downvote anything that is not rage-worthy.
lrdswrk00 5y ago
Looking at raw numbers if always much more telling than cherry picked stats intended to sell an emotional narrative. 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.
eulers_secret 5y ago
I skimmed the article, but I think this disconnect may be due to demographics. 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.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Reddit and Twitter skew young, urban, and educated. It seems like these people are the least happy, because they feel like they deserve more. 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.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I don't buy this. I know plenty of unhappy rural people and unhappy uneducated people. And statistically, going by social issues they don't do well either.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I disagree. City life is full of stress. Want to go to a nursery to pick up some plants in Oakland, CA? It will take ya 2.5 hours, not to mention finding parking on the street and then dealing with 'asshole' customer service - there is no incentive to improve because hey they have a lot of people buying plants and if you don't like it, go somewhere else. 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.
baybal2 5y ago
> 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. A very simple explanation is rising salaries for manual labour, and unprecedented stimulus cheques.
ekster 5y ago
I have noticed on social media that the cynical, assholes, grumpy, and those that want to take others down a peg are quite loud but in the minority. Typically when you run into one they have a comment history where they are just being a jerk all day every day to all comers. Normal people have good or bad days and it might come out in different ways on different days, but there is a surprising number of people out there just being hateful on the internet all day like it’s their job. And the vast majority of them have statues of philosophers as their avatars, which I still don't quite get.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Here's the thing I try to remember: when life isn't going well for a person, it's easy to turn to the Internet to vent frustration. And the less one has going on in the rest of their life, the more time one has to spend arguing online. The volume of posting doesn't indicate how right someone is or how reflective their experiences are of reality, just how much time they have to dedicate to the task of commenting. As a useful mental trick, I substitute "commenters" with "bored people on the internet" sometimes to remind myself of the source.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    > Here's the thing I try to remember: when life isn't going well for a person, it's easy to turn to the Internet to vent frustration 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.
- ssss11 5y ago
  Specifically on reddit and twitter, the few times I’ve used them, they seem to be filled with assholes. 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)
kwhitefoot 5y ago
What is the standard error on these measurements? And what is the variance, that is does the mean satisfaction represent the majority or are there, say, two populations, one very optimistic and the other less so. Perhaps that could explain the outlook seen on HN, etc.
paulddraper 5y ago
This is relief. I believe humanity's condition is getting better and better. But I am surprised most others think so too.
missedthecue 5y ago
I guess happy optimistic people have better things to do than spend their day commenting on Reddit. Bit of selection bias maybe.
fxtentacle 5y ago
It seems to be human nature that people are more happy to talk about misfortune than about lucky events. 60% are thriving. But the 40% that are not probably have a much stronger opinion about things. So you'll hear the loud "minority".
hdivider 5y ago
"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." 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. :)
mancerayder 5y ago
I don't know if HN folks, on average, are grumpy and negative and mean. They might get feisty in a particular debate and there are a lot of sky-is-falling type articles. 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).
derbOac 5y ago
There's three concerns I have about this, the Cantri measure as it's applied. 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.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  Reddit skews young, and I’ve definitely noticed the younger generation likes to commiserate. There’s also this pervasive sense of doom that the environment and the economy is going to collapse.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
    There's a pervasive sense of stagnant wages, unaffordable homes, etc in first world and developing countries. In China, it's tangping. In America, it's my step sibling having 0 desire to move out of our parents home (e.g., "Millennials kill X" headlines). 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.
    - muzani 5y ago
      That might explain the ratings. COVID has begun a kind of shift. Those in the upper class are getting it hard. Real estate traders are screwed. Those who pay minimum wage are having difficulty hiring, especially with the number pf deaths from those exposed to it. Things like bus driving come with hefty hazard pay now.
john_moscow 5y ago
I think, this is trickier. Happiness generally consists of 2 components: hedonistic (short-term, "had a great meal" type) and eudaimonic (long-term, "I am doing the right thing and am confident about my future" type). 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.
- yann2 5y ago
  There is a Gross National Stupidity index thats been on the rise for a while now. So the poll really makes sense.
- maroonblazer 5y ago
  The study appears to factor in short-term vs long-term happiness. Specifically, they ask respondents to project forward 5 years into the future: >For its Life Evaluation Index, Gallup classifies Americans as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering" according to how they rate their current and future lives
- uyt 5y ago
  Another problem is because of hedonic adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_adaptation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_adaptation 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.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I'm usually optimistic, and I think there are bright days ahead. 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.
muzani 5y ago
My observation is business owners are unhappiest. They're subject to restrictions. Workers don't want to work in the office anymore. People who took minimum wage jobs are dead and more expensive, with bus drivers and janitors getting double pay for danger. Real estate is going to take a dip, especially offices. Most of these things are beneficial to the common man. People have demanded revolution for years and looks like they might get it.
xwolfi 5y ago
Yeah it could be a magnet for people to complain in a safe place where everyone will echo it. However, maybe the study here presented has also some hidden selection.
dominotw 5y ago
> Results like this are a good reminder to log off and go interact with the real world for a more grounded perpsective. 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-direction-year-drops-20-points/story?id=79036435 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-optimism-countrys-... 2. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/outside-covid-19-biden-receives-mixed-approval-ratings https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/outside-covid-19-bide...

ChrisLTD 5y ago

Compared to 2020, this year has been amazing for Americans. But I wonder if the happiness will be short lived. Aside from Trump and Covid, the same issues we had in 2019 are lurking below the surface. And it’s entirely possible a Trumpy figure, or even Trump himself, will return to power in 2024.

tbihl 5y ago
I would say not 'possible', but more probable than in 2016.
- RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
  Its been demonstrated as both a viable political strategy and that there is a clear bloc of voters to use to support that strategy. We'll be seeing its hints in 2022 and it will be full bore in 2024. If the holders of the old-guard strategies (McCain 2008/ Biden 2020 style campaigns) want to not get trounced in 2024, they need to make a substantial difference in peoples lives to win that election. Otherwise, 'Trumpian' style campaigns will become the norm, as they'll be show to be more effective at winning elections. Might actually be more riding on 2022/ 2024 than 2016. 2016 proved it possible; these next elections will decide if its reproducible.
  - yerwhat01010 5y ago
    Ron DeSantis will be elected president in 2024. You heard it here first.
dominotw 5y ago
> And it’s entirely possible a Trumpy figure, or even Trump himself, will return to power in 2024. Wouldnt that be good for this particular measure given the scores reached 'new recorded high's in his presidency.
- ChrisLTD 5y ago
  The job market really started to heat up for the first time since the 1990s under Trump, which I think explains that phenomenon. On the flip side, even my friends and family that support Trump were growing tired of the baseline level of anxiety he was causing with his erratic proclamations.

burlesona 5y ago

I mean, it’s not hard to understand. Give everyone a bunch of money and most of them will fix a bunch of problems in their life, feel less stressed, and be more optimistic. On top of the federal stimulus, this housing bubble has a lot of people thinking “okay I can retire off the sale of my home now,” though I doubt they’re thinking through where they’ll live after that sale, nor how inflation may devalue what seems today like a vast accumulation of wealth on paper. The current situation makes me (a) more convinced that policies like a negative income tax are a superior safety net to the bureaucratic means tested programs we use today, and (b) more concerned that zero interest rate policy and the incredible distortions in the financial markets are going to end very badly.

Clewza313 5y ago
The article doesn't talk about money though, but factors like "significant enjoyment the day before", which obviously took a huge hit during the various phases of COVID lockdown. And this in turn is tied largely to social interaction and the general reopening the US has been experiencing.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Why does it have to end badly? Why can't money just always get funnier? If Central Banks guarantee to always pay more for bonds than what the Federal Government sold them for - what difference does it make if the interest rate is 0% or -5%? It's still some fixed, semi-guaranteed return. Inequality doesn't seem to be a major talking point in any major economy despite the fact that we surpassed The Belle Epoch peak a couple years ago. The masses don't seem concerned that inequality is sky rocketing. Almost everywhere >50% of people own homes -> A lot of them on a lot of leverage. Why should they care if Jeff Bezos is making >$70Bn a year on paper - when they're also making more on paper than they do working their jobs? Until the homeownership rate starts to plummet - I don't see why >50% will ever care. And if the homeowership rate does plummet - why can't the government just Federally back negative-percent-down, interest-only loans to increase homeownership and inflate housing prices more (both of these exist already in other countries)? Things can always get funnier. You know what's not going to happen... The government just sit back and watch 80% of the world's wealth disappear.

randcraw 5y ago

In monkey studies, when a subordinate monkey is removed from the presence of the alpha male, its stress level goes down and it shows clear emotional signs of 'thriving'. I wonder if that might help explain this improved outlook on life among humans since covid arose, now that so many subordinates are working from home and no longer under the mindful eye of a less-than-beloved boss.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
The article includes a graph that shows well-being was depressed during COVID. Well-being didn't reach pre-COVID levels until into 2021 as lockdowns were ending. There isn't much mystery here: Average people do better when they're more social. > I wonder if that might help explain this improved outlook on life among humans since covid arose, now that so many subordinates are working from home and no longer under the mindful eye of a less-than-beloved boss. The raw numbers would suggest the opposite: That people reported worse life satisfaction during the times most associated with WFH.
watwut 5y ago
Basically, when you remove aggressive assholes, other sentient beings become happier? This can be reproduced in human prisons or boarding schools. If you are not locked with bully you are happier.

axpy906 5y ago

> The most recent results, captured June 14-20, 2021, are based on 4,820 U.S. adults surveyed by web as a part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based, non-opt-in panel of about 120,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. People surveyed online have higher life ratings. Edit: to show that it’s always important to understand how data is collected.

_rpd 5y ago
You shouldn’t be downvoted. Web only vs. conventional phone surveys is a significant change. Cheaper, but definitely excludes poorer demographic sections. You can’t ignore this for a survey about ‘life ratings’.

CalChris 5y ago

A lot of this optimism is just not having Trump drive the news cycle everyday.

matmatmatmat 5y ago
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, I think you're right. Whether deserved or not, the news cycle 2016-2020 was one conflagration after another, sometimes with not even a day between them to absorb things.
- steve76 5y ago
  If liberals win, then you are allowed to be happy. If liberals loose, prepare for your city to burn and disease from their marxist friends.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Make News Boring Again

mrfusion 5y ago

Why can’t we measure our progress by ratings like these instead of gdp and unemployment rate?

gardnr 5y ago
You would need to ask S&P Global Ratings that question.
goodpoint 5y ago
Because such rating is really misleading.

irthomasthomas 5y ago

Really? While places like Chicago and Baltimore have murder rates now up there with warzones. And where they filmed Rocky in Phili looks like the zombie apocalypse: https://youtu.be/-FD7xxo5ApY?t=518 https://youtu.be/-FD7xxo5ApY?t=518 Same place but parental warning, this one is rough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i45JMm9hM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i45JMm9hM4

adventured 5y ago
The areas you're talking about are isolation zones. That's how the US functions, it's huge, sprawled out and heavily bifurcated as a society. The war zone areas of St Louis (60 per 100k murder rate, astronomical, from ~2015-2019) don't directly touch the majority of people that live in or near St Louis and go out of their way to avoid those areas. The same is true of Chicago. They don't buy houses near those areas, they don't drive through those areas, they don't shop in those areas. That's how you get Baltimore in a country with a GDP per capita of $68,000 - fourth highest in the world, after Switzerland, Ireland and Norway. Consider the context of matching up on per capita economic output to hyper rich tiny nations with 5m-8m people. The US low outcome is very low compared to those nations, it's median is high compared to the EU median, and it's top 1/4 is exceptionally high. The top 10%-15% in the US are far richer than the top 10%-15% in Europe. Economically the top 10%-15% outcome in Europe is Germany, Britain and France. The top 10%-15% outcome in the US is Switzerland. People that think of the US as one nation economically, are thinking about it entirely wrong. The US is more like Europe as a whole in both its diversity of outcomes and crime, with a far higher median income and wealth level. The worst parts of Baltimore are as dilapidated as the various ghettos of the eastern EU like Stolipinovo Bulgaria. When you picture the US top 10% you should picture Switzerland; when you picture the US ~10%-35% bracket you should picture Germany or France. When you picture the bottom 10% in the US, you should picture poverty in poor EU nations, you should not picture the bottom 10% in Switzerland. That will help you get your head around how the US is arranged.
- neither_color 5y ago
  I wish people were more mindful of this when they critique our "averages" so incessantly. Certain parts of the country bring down the average hard, and while we SHOULD be doing everything possible to improve these areas, I roll my eyes when a European tries to use an average weighed down by places like Baltimore to tell me my likelihood of getting shot, having access to healthcare, or overall risk of catching a certain pandemic disease. My state had lower case rates than most of Europe, buddy.

jdhn 5y ago

One thing that may be influencing optimism about the future is the fact that the job market is tilted in favor of job seekers right now. I know this is an anecdote, but I have coworkers who are quitting and seeing vast increases in their salary because the job market in tech is tight and is seemingly not getting any looser anytime soon. Now, they weren't earning table scraps before, but when you have people earning 20k to 60k more, that has a really big impact upon how you view the future.

armchairhacker 5y ago

"% thriving" pre-covid was about 56%, the worst of covid was about 46%, current is about 59%. "% suffering" is about 3.4%. Anecdotally, I started getting depressed during the start of the pandemic and again during September-December of 2020. The pandemic loneliness and cynicism was getting to me. Albeit, it never got really bad. In May of 2021, I started feeling a lot better. Because everything is open again, and everyone else is optimistic.

narrator 5y ago

Working from home and spending more time with family is probably a big part of it. Commuting was such an enormous daily waste of time for millions of people.

mertd 5y ago
Note that it was around all time low just six months ago. The chart seems very volatile. I don't know if it is a bad survey or if people are fickle.

dominotw 5y ago

> based on 4,820 U.S. adults surveyed by web This is a bit much to call it " American's life ratings" based on 0.0013% of American population who we aren't even sure are americans.

ZoomerCretin 5y ago
4,820 is a large enough sample size to be representative of the population within a few percentage points.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > is a large enough sample size What logic are you using to say that( for my future reference). I am having hard time wrapping my head around how .001% of something can be representative.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    If you assume that your sampling is random, it's actually not too hard. If you were able to pick randomly from all over the planet and ask who was male and who was female, you'd probably get a number of around 50-50 with a sample size of just 10. Maybe it's 60-40 or 40-60, but it's unlikely to be all of one or all of the other. That would happen about 1 time in a thousand. If you asked a thousand people there's basically zero chance you'd get all of one or the other. Your low number might be 490 or even 480, but it would take a bizarre coincidence if it were even as low as 450. The big "if" is assuming that you can sample randomly. That's the hard part. There are a ton of ways they go about trying to ensure that they're doing a random sample, but yeah, you do have to take it with a grain of salt. But setting that aside, the fact that they sample only a tiny percentage isn't really a problem. The exponential nature of coincidences makes significant departures from reality unlikely. One coincidence is rare; hundreds is basically impossible. Most of the math behind statistics assumes that there are infinite populations of people. It requires special corrections if you're dealing with only small groups like hundreds. Once you get into the millions, it might as well be infinite. And as long as your sampling is random, it still works out to give reasonably close answers.

anonAndOn 5y ago

It's not mentioned in the article because it just started, but I suspect we will achieve new highs with the Child Tax Credit.[0] It will likely have a massive impact. [0]https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/child-tax-credit/

codingdave 5y ago
The Child Tax Credit has been around since 1997. The timing changed this year, but the credit itself is not at all new.
- ZoomerCretin 5y ago
  In its current form of being deposited monthly into people's accounts? No, it's very new.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  Except it's been massively increased and now comes with monthly cash disbursements sent via direct deposit whether you filed your taxes or not (eg, those who are too poor to need to file taxes and never got any tax "credit").

gardnr 5y ago

"The percentage of Americans who evaluate their lives well enough to be considered "thriving" on Gallup's Live Evaluation Index reached 59.2% in June..." And "homeownership rate of 65.6 percent"[1]. Everybody else is fucked. 1. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

moltenguardian 5y ago

Wow, the graph of happiness almost matches the S&P500 returns.

dmosley 5y ago

In other news, chocolate rations have been raised to 20 grams.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

Interest rates are lower and the unemployment rate is lower than when the “morning in America” ad aired.

aflag 5y ago

I think people are hopeful that after the vaccine rollouts, things will be back to normal - and people are starting to do what they used to do before the pandemic. When you down it's easy to overshoot a little when you go back up.

lkrubner 5y ago

Actions speak louder than words, and so drug overdoses must speak louder than a poll. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the USA was stagnant or falling because of the upsurge in "deaths of despair". This is pre covid: https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-experts-say-rise-1481975 https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-exper... A poll has limited value and people are famously bad at self-reported happiness. There have simply been too many cases of people saying they are happy with their lives and two years later they commit suicide, or kill their spouse. Some researchers have argued that self reported happiness is worthless. Instead, look at actions. After the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union men over the age of 40 engaged in one of history's greatest alcoholic binges, such that life expectancy in Russia dropped for men during the 1990s. Actions speak loudly. Killing oneself with alcohol communicates how one really feels about the future. We've seen something similar in the USA since the crash of 2008. Until such time as we see real evidence of people acting in the way that we might expect happy people to behave, including planning for the future and taking care of one's health, don't believe a poll that says Americans are happy. But still, in 1945, on VE day or VJ day, if you asked Americans "Are you happy?" obviously everyone would have said "Yes". This is well known. But what they were feeling was relief. The same is true now. People feel relief, thinking the pandemic might be coming under control. Such relief is fickle. It could be different next month. It does not signal long term happiness.

lkrubner 5y ago
Why was this downvoted? Does anyone disagree with the basic idea here? People's actions are more meaningful than what they say to a pollster. This should be obvious.
- staticman2 5y ago
  There are entire fields of medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, that believe surveying people on how depressed, anxious, etc. they feel is the scientific basis of research, diagnosis, and treatment. Your idea to just ignore what people say is just totally out there...

machinehermiter 5y ago

My personal life is wonderful. The country? This chart from the Fed is just astounding. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

ZoomerCretin 5y ago
Contrary to what right-wing media claims (curiously, only during Democratic presidencies), deficit spending isn't actually bad.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Just imagine if we could have spent all that free money on human needs instead of stupid unnecessary wars...
throwntoday 5y ago
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist but if covid was made in a lab this seems like the biggest grift of all time. I can't imagine how much of that money just disappeared.
lkrubner 5y ago
That looks like unadjusted dollars? It's a crazy graph, as the biggest pre-pandemic event in USA fiscal history (World War II) is simply invisible on this graph. As a point of comparison USA debt hit 101% of GDP in 1946, a level we only rose above recently, because of the pandemic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
- lkrubner 5y ago
  Why was this downvoted? World War II was the largest fiscal event in USA history (before the pandemic) and it is invisible on this graph, therefore the graph has little explanatory power. Why would I be downvoted for pointing that out?
  - 5y ago

snambi 5y ago

Sounds like propaganda material.

deertick1 5y ago

I do not even remotely believe this study. Myself and everyone else I know are not very optimistic about our economic prospects for the future and are scared of the direction the country is heading morally and socially.

GaryTang 5y ago
I agree with you. This is another propaganda piece.
- jl2718 5y ago
  If people believed it, it wouldn’t be newsworthy.
losvedir 5y ago
Sounds like you're in a sad bubble that's all part of the 40% then. But it's great out here in the 60%. I recommend you get out of your comfort zone and meet some new people, who statistically will be optimistic and happy.
0x5f3759df-i 5y ago
This is about the same logic as "How did Trump get elected I don't know a single person that voted for him" I am very optimistic about our future economically and socially. So you can add that data point.

grecy 5y ago

Life expectancy in the US just dropped by 1.5 years in 2020, the biggest drop since WWII. [1] Life expectancy for Black people fell by 2.9 years and life expectancy for Hispanic males dropped 3.7 years to 75.3 [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-22/us-life-expectancy-in-2020-saw-biggest-drop-since-wwii/100313330 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-22/us-life-expectancy-in...

lkrubner 5y ago

Self reported happiness is notoriously unreliable. Check out “Are you really happy?” https://www.psypost.org/2016/01/self-reported-well-being-doesnt-match-up-with-external-observation-40289 https://www.psypost.org/2016/01/self-reported-well-being-doe... Here is a basic primer on the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study Given that self-reports are unreliable, we should instead focus on what people actually do. And since 2008, the USA has seen a rising number of “deaths of despair”: https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-experts-say-rise-1481975 https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-exper... If you look at peoples actions, and ignore their words, it would seem the USA is suffering an epidemic of despair.

orzig 5y ago
Importantly, they measure different things. If there's a dynamic "happiness disparity" (like income disparity, and plausibly correlated) changes on the lower end won't differentiate between a change in mean or variance.

readonthegoapp 5y ago

I'm assuming they only talked to upper class white people Even then I don't believe these results No way

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jl2718 5y ago

“Gallup selects potential panel members using random-digit-dialing (RDD) of landline telephones and cellphones or address-based sampling (ABS) to contact U.S. households at random.” Also a bunch of weird stuff about weighting responses. Overall, I think this is the result of asset price inflation. Everybody thinks they got rich last year while everybody else was struggling.

falconroar 5y ago

As mentioned elsewhere, self-reported happiness is notoriously inaccurate, and is not correlated with objective statistics like suicide rate. The suicide rate in 2021 is at an all-time high [1][2]. I think it's more likely that after months of forced self-isolation, people are less willing to show vulnerability and express unhappiness. Sources: 2021: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/suicide-rates-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/suicide-rat... since 1999: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide

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