Americans Have Been in a Bad Mood for 20 Years
Surveys show it’s been more than two decades (!) since the majority of Americans felt “satisfied” with how things are going in the country. What’s behind our national funk?
Folks,
A lot of people I know are feeling…unsettled. I don’t mean clinically depressed or anxious, necessarily; I mean more…uneasy, off. Even if things are going fine in their own lives, there seems to be a broader sense that something isn’t quite right in the world.
In my own case, I attribute the feeling to the possibility of Trump: The Sequel and all that might bring with it. But there are lots of other things to feel agitated about. High prices for everything from grocery staples to houses. Mass shootings so common they barely get covered in the news. Constant political division.
I got curious about all this the other day, and I came across a monthly poll that Gallup does in which they ask Americans whether they’re satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. In February, only 19 percent of people answered “satisfied,” while 74 percent answered “dissatisfied.” It didn’t surprise me at all; in fact, it confirmed my gut feeling.
What did surprise me is how long we’ve all been feeling pretty miserable. As the chart below shows, the last time a majority of Americans said they were “satisfied” with the way things were going in the country was January 2004. More than 20 years ago! That’s a long time for a country to be in funk.
Our two-decade losing streak looks particularly dark when you compare it to the quarter century before that. The late ’70s and early ’80s were no great shakes mood-wise in America, and things tumbled again in the first half of the ’90s. But those troughs were balanced out by an era of good feeling in between and one positively giddy stretch right after. In February 1999, 71 of Americans said they were satisfied with the country.
Why have we felt so lousy over the last 20 years?
One possibility is that we’ve just been unlucky, hit by one unsettling crisis after another. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that went sideways. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The election of Donald Trump (who did more to divide us than unite us). COVID, George Floyd, the return of inflation, Ukraine, Gaza…
Not a lot of sunshine in there.
And yet, I can’t help wondering if something more fundamental began shifting in earnest a couple of decades ago that’s brought about our depressed mood. Climate change is one possibility—though I’m not sure enough people are so concerned about for it to have impacted the national mood so severely. Same goes for income inequality, which has become a bigger and bigger issue over the last 20 years. Plenty of people are concerned about it, but I’m not sure it’s enough to explain the numbers.
My own (completely unscientific) hypothesis? Technology. It’s by far the biggest shift we’ve seen in our daily lives in the last 20 years — the Internet, smart phones, social media. Much of it is a wonder — connecting with people so easily, getting information whenever we want it, buying things with a single click.
But it’s also true that we’re now never more than a click or two away from things that bring us down or get us riled up, whether that’s a depressing news story or a hot take about why things in this country are so f-ed up. We’re more connected than ever, but surveys show we’re also lonelier than ever. And while we have access to a truly staggering amount of information, our individual world views actually seem more narrow as we retreat into our ideological bubbles.
The result of all this: we live in a constant state of being told how bad things are, even if personally we’re doing okay. In such a world, who wants to say they’re “satisfied” with how things are going?
What the solution is to this I have no idea. The most intriguing take I’ve heard recently comes from Frank McCourt Jr., author of the new book Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age. McCourt is a billionaire, but he says the problem with our modern world is that we’ve surrendered our personal data to tech capitalists like Mark Zuckerberg, who’ve used it to make billions while shredding decency and democracy. McCourt’s solution: we need to re-engineer the Internet so that we control our data, which will prevent the Digital Oligarchs from manipulating us daily.
Whether he’s put his finger on the problem is hard to say, but we need to start talking more about all of this. Twenty years is a long time for a great country to feel bad about itself.