WHY ARE SO MANY YOUNG AMERICANS "UNHAPPY"?
Article by LiveReal Agents Courtney and Kevin
Why are young Americans "unhappy"?
It’s an important question, to put it mildly.
It’s also one that – strangely – rarely seems to get much in the way of serious attention.
For that, opinion writer Sara Pequeño gets credit for asking it recently in a USAToday article, and offering her answers.
But the most interesting part of the problem might lie in what she didn’t say.
Her answers, boiled down to their simplest forms, were the following: young Americans are unhappy because
• of Covid (or more precisely, our dysfunctional responses to Covid)
• things are too expensive
• political polarization
• abortion laws have changed
• we’re inundated with dysfunctional rhetoric, and
• social media
A topic as important as this deserves a closer look.
Some of Pequeño’s points are on target. Yes, social media is often toxic, the financial strain of inflation is real, and our response to Covid was clearly disastrous.
Yet by several measures, young Americans were already becoming increasingly unhappy well before Covid. Downward trends had been in effect long before inflation began skyrocketing, before either Biden or Trump were elected, and before social media even existed. As measured by rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, deaths of despair, mental health, military fitness, and other measures, things have been in a rapid decline for decades.
A Senator – Chris Murphy of Connecticut – also decided to chime in on the topic.
Why is the U.S. no longer officially one of the happiest countries? According to Murphy, it’s because of relationships – in his words, “connection and community” – as if unhappy people being connected to other unhappy people would solve the problem. Of course, he blames other factors – low wages, unemployment, long work hours, corporate monopolies, and so on, as fueling the problem. But the core issue, as he sees it, is “our connections and obligations to one another.”
What’s missing from both of their analyses?
Here’s one suggestion.
There was a complete and total absence of any sort of spirituality, religion, or philosophy.
It’s the elephant in the room. It’s the Great Taboo That Apparently Must Not Be Spoken Of in modern society.
Pequeño presumes that religion, philosophy, and spirituality are irrelevant, at least in the sense that they play no role whatsoever in one’s level of happiness or suffering. She implicitly assumes a perspective of atheism – a logical extension of a worldview of materialistic naturalism. According to this approach, happiness and misery are due entirely to factors that are exclusively external, material, tangible, and measurable. Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Jesus, Plato, Moses, Confucius and so on apparently have nothing important to say on the matter. They’re old, and therefore can’t know much, apparently, and we must be smarter than them because we have iPhones and Wikipedia and they didn’t.
It’s not that the Big Questions of life don’t have answers.
It’s that they aren’t even asked.
America’s spiritual, religious, philosophical, and psychological bureaucracies have failed her, and many like her. They’ve left individuals like her spiritually illiterate, and at least in some ways, utterly unprepared for reality. Religion, as they apparently see it, is either boring, crazy, or corrupt. As a result, young people today have been raised more by media, phones, celebrities and marketing departments than any sort of serious religious, spiritual, or philosophical framework. They swim in the shallows and wonder why they keep hitting bottom.
Why are America’s young people so unhappy? There are plenty of variables at work there. Pequeño touched on some of them.
But one of the most critical factors isn’t even on the map. Many young people today are spiritually malnourished, and don’t even know it.
This isn’t an unsolvable problem.
It’s possible to become spiritually, philosophically, and psychologically stronger. Existential fitness is a way of life that’s entirely within our control.
In these areas, there are plenty of reasons for hope. These are problems we can solve.
But before we talk solutions, we need to understand the problem.
And even before that, we have to understand that there is a problem.