The State of the Nation: Unhappy and Burned Out

By Jim Miller

If our morning commutes tell us anything, it’s that there are a lot of miserable, angry people out there.  Sometimes on my drive to the gym, I make the mistake of counting the number of people who either cut me off, speed up to not let me change lanes, or dangerously tailgate my car.

Let’s just say the numbers are regularly dismaying.

It’s a Social Darwinist nightmare out there on the road in F-You Nation, and I have long thought that this phenomenon spoke to something larger afoot in the country—a collective darkness seems to be on the rise, and not just on the political front.  We are an unhappy bunch.

As the Washington Post recently reported:

Americans are unhappy, according to the report, an annual list ranking the overall happiness levels of 156 countries — and it’s only getting worse.

For the third year in a row, the U.S. has dropped in the ranking and now sits at No. 19, one spot lower than last year, according to the report produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a U.N. initiative. The top three spots this year were occupied by Finland, Denmark and Norway. At the bottom were Afghanistan, Central African Republic and South Sudan . . . The United States’ current rank marks its worst showing since the report was first released in 2012. The country has never cracked the top 10.

DG Wills Books in La Jolla hosted a reading of Jim Miller’s “Flash” on December 4, 2010

Some of the researchers involved in the World Happiness Report speculate that this could be the result of our overreliance on economic factors as a source of happiness and/or the growing trend toward addictive behavior, whether it be to opioids or to our electronic devices.

This news from the World Happiness Report comes on the heels of another study, this one from Gallop last year, that noted:

Our happiness, or what researchers refer to as “subjective well-being,” is down across the nation, according to a detailed study by the Gallup Organization and the healthcare information service Sharecare. The study takes into account survey results from more than 2.5 million Americans. It examines how people feel in their day-to-day lives across key dimensions of well-being, including physical health and wellness; having supportive personal and family relationships; financial and economic security; having a sense of purpose; and connection to one’s community.

The drop in well-being reported in this study was the worst in the 10-year history of Gallop’s research on the subject.  Of course, things like poverty, income inequality, racism, lack of education, and other factors play a part here, but what is interesting about these studies and others like them is that once you get past a basic level of economic security, there is no huge increase in happiness after that point, even as people get richer and accumulate more stuff.

In fact, it might just be one of our most cherished material possessions that is exacerbating this trend more than anything else — our electronic devices.  A number of studies have indicated that for both teens and adults, screen time in particular leads to unhappiness.  So perhaps, unplugging might lead more of us to engage in the world and the dense texture of the rich, real things around us rather than getting lost in a vortex of distraction.

Distracted people, it seems, are unhappy people, and when we are addicted to our source of misery, not much good will come of it.  Of course, it is easy to think that more authentic, deep social interactions would be good for our communities and our politics. And renewing our connection with the natural rather than the virtual world just might pop the bubble that insulates us from feeling more connection with our imperiled home.

We might also discover something about our work that could make us a bit uncomfortable: not much of it is of real value to us and it’s making us sick.  As the Washington Post observed in a recent story on the epidemic of burnout from doctors to moms, “Ninety-five percent of human resource leaders say burnout is sabotaging workplace retention, often because of overly heavy workloads.” This is part of another one of our addictions, this one to chronic stress, that isn’t just making us less productive, it’s stealing our lives.

If this is our culture now, perhaps we need another counterculture.

Hence, as the author of this piece suggests, we need to “make space in our lives” so we aren’t always in an unnecessary hurry.  The practical solutions offered by psychologists are simple: cutting tasks out, going for walks, getting extra sleep, etc. That is all well and good, but for a better antidote, I’ll turn to Henry David Thoreau, who, in Walden, muses, “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work.”