Something to Say
“There are plenty of pretty voices with nothing to say. Do you have something to say?”
U.S. voters have already begun to cast their ballots for the Senate, House of Representatives, and scores of state and local offices this year. As Election Day approaches – it’s Tuesday – the economy and crime remain exceedingly important issues for voters.
Despite voter concern, the economy is in pretty good shape. Unemployment is very low; there are more jobs available than workers looking to fill them. Inflation is a problem and interest rates are higher, impacting the housing market but, all in all, things are pretty good generally.
And, while violent crime rates began to increase in the latter half of the Trump administration and have continued to rise on President Biden’s watch, they remain very low historically.
Yet people are more bothered than the objective data suggests they have reason to be. That’s the subject of this week’s TBL.
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Something to Say
By almost any measure, life in America today is pretty great and a lot better than it used to be. These measures include life expectancy, financial well-being, health, the relative threats of crime and war, safety, and much more.
Whether the comparison is to 50, 500, or 5,000 years ago, just about everything today is amazing…
…and nobody’s happy.
For 50 years, since 1972, the General Social Survey has monitored societal change and studied the growing complexity of American society. Over time, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category has increased by more than 50 percent.
Every year Gallup surveys about 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions hit a record high last year, continuing a long-term trend. People feel more anger, sadness, pain, worry, and stress than ever before. The share of people reporting their worst possible lives has more than quadrupled. And the unhappiest people overall are far more unhappy than that cohort used to be.
An analysis of 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 popular American news outlets found that those headlines grew significantly more negative over time. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, while headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.
If it bleeds, it leads.
Over 50 years, between 1965 and 2015, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits was cut in half. Due to the “Pollyanna principle,” there are always more words associated with positive emotions than there are words associated with negative ones. However, the number of times pop songs contained words like “hate” (not even mentioned in a top-100 song before the 1990s) rose sharply over that same period.
A different analysis of 500,000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015 found a similar decrease in ‘happiness” and “brightness,” coupled with an increase in “sadness.” A review of over 1,000 American Top 40 recordings from 25 years spanning five decades confirmed that popular music has become more sad sounding over time.
Why are so many people so unhappy and what can we do about it?
If Instagram is correct, getting rich is a path to happiness. A major research study debunked a popular myth that there is no effect of money on happiness beyond $75,000 per year, but did confirm a law of diminishing returns with respect to money. Artists have long warned us that money alone can’t buy happiness – as even a cursory review of the lives of lottery winners confirms.
Satisfied minds are hard to come by.
Reality TV has won the day culturally, driven by the “internet of beefs.” A television fad has morphed into a general way of life.
Today’s leading motivators remain the same tired tropes that have led the way for centuries. Money. Fame. Power. Pleasure.
However, our reality TV world means that fame alone can now provide money, power, and pleasure. In 2016, for example, Donald Trump played the part of a reality TV cad into a $5 billion in-kind contribution from the mainstream media and the Presidency of the United States.
And crazy is the best shortcut to fame.
All of this adds up to nihilism all the way down. Negative fat-tails become essentially inevitable, as we’ve seen.
None of this is a good recipe for well-being. Does Dinesh seem fulfilled to you, quote-tweeting “Catturd”?
The things that matter in terms of happiness are those you’d expect: a good marriage, a loving family, personal autonomy, and being charitable. The happiest people are fulfilled by their work, have little financial stress, live in great communities, have good physical health, and have loved ones they can turn to for help.
The unhappiest people do not. They don’t have a decent job, they’re struggling to make ends meet, they live in broken communities, they don’t have enough to eat, and they don’t have people in their lives they can count on. These people are getting sadder, more stressed, and angrier than ever before.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of financial stability and good health, but fulfillment requires more. Nearly all of us want the world to be a better place and desire to contribute to it. What we desire is a kind of ultimate or final value.
We want the world to mean something and we want our lives to matter.
Those who highly value work and responsibility, emphasize what they can control rather than what they cannot, are compassionate, and resist the temptation to feel envy and resentment of others, are most likely to find their lives meaningful. Americans who volunteer, who are religious, and who go to church are far more likely to find purpose and meaning in their lives than those who don’t volunteer, who aren’t religious, and who never go to church. I suspect that’s largely because a faith community provides many of the elements of a “purpose-driven life.”
How might we get there? In today’s world, I suggest we can best do that by focusing on what is true, what is real, and what is important. Doing so is incredibly countercultural.
Truth today is hard to find, hardly expected, and rarely valued.
The line between “real” and “fake” is disappearing, whether in the “metaverse,” the news, “catfishing,” or “deep fakes.”
And we all know what is important: our marriages, our children, our families, our loved ones, and those with whom we interact. We know we should use things and love people but we get it backwards far too often.
In Jeff Buckley’s words, Grace is “about not feeling so bad about your own mortality when you have true love.”
As the music teacher asks in the movie, CODA, “There are plenty of pretty voices with nothing to say. Do you have something to say?”
We just celebrated Halloween. Many of us watched more than our fair share of slasher flicks. Yet, we tend to miss a key point of every horror story, and the human story: Instead of remaining focused on what is true, real, and important, we offer evil an invitation to the party and we keep renewing the offer.
Do you have something to say?
Totally Worth It
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The boat used as the S.S. Minnow for the “three-hour tour” in Gilligan’s Island was a 1964 Wheeler with a cruising speed of 12 knots. That means the castaways could have barely traveled 40 miles. I’m starting to doubt the show was realistic.
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Benediction
Pentatonix provides this week’s benediction.
Amen.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 128 (November 4, 2022)
The boat used as the S.S. Minnow for the “three-hour tour” in Gilligan’s Island was a 1964 Wheeler with a cruising speed of 12 knots. That means the castaways could have barely traveled 40 miles. I’m starting to doubt the show was realistic.
Another childhood belief crushed.... but i still think it was more realistic than Survivor.