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If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

derekthompson.org

681–690 of 1001 posts

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#681

I feel like wealthy americans live like poor Europeans - they live far outside the city in crowded suburbs, no amenities walking distance so they have to drive everywhere, having to commute an hour to their job, eating bad manufactured food... I'm American but moved to Europe years ago. It may be even better being poor here because at least you might live in a village and you'll have healthcare and your government wo…

Young people with good jobs who live in dense urban areas seem uniquely unhappy, though.

Corporate jobs and happiness are incompatible.

If it's any consolation - older people at corporate jobs are also unhappy.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#682

I think everyone I see writing anywhere whether these comments or substacks or just talking to in real life, we all pretty much agree on why we're sad. Its the same 5-6 reasons. We all know. There are much deeper analyses showing trends that started in the 1980s that took away our power too. It's just that the government does not properly measure any of these things and doesn't work for us anymore. We've all been tra…

would you please recap the 5-6 reasons?

1. Breakdown of community & support structures. Isolated, atomized society. Few friends and family, weak relationships between them, dating market accustomed to infinite choice.

2. Power increasingly shifting to capital over labor, leading to tougher and exploitative work conditions, lower wages, tougher job markets etc. for labor. Also affects us as consumers dealing with oligopolies or monopolies. Somehow we saw a world where a ton of us worked remote, it worked at least 80% as well in exchange for huge worker benefits, but its going away because we don't have any power and no one is looking out for us. Now we have massive inflation and I don't think anyone believes that a big chunk of it isn't just greedy opportunistic price gouging. Every single thing I see about any job in any field, its about how they are losing power, getting more work for less pay, jumping through more bullshit hoops, field is turning from being run by practitioners to being run by psychopaths in PE firms. This is even in medicine, like people who directly help people everyday feel their job lacks purpose because of the amount of paperwork, huge overwork and under-staffing in general coming down to centralization in the health care system, increasing oligopolization and insurance power - same power shifting from labor to capital.

3. Absolute breakdown of government institutions, regulators and justice for powerful people. Epstein files - actual child abusing pedophile billionaires, lawyers, senators all face no consequence besides maybe losing a very cushy job. President pardons all kinds of corrupt buddies. What kind of clown believes in a justice system when this happens weekly? ICE officers kill or abuse victims without consequences. Can't build a single train line in the time China built millions and millions of miles. Congress gridlocked for a decade now. Perception that government is completely ineffective, and not at all accountable to us or working for us. Its linked to point above as well, with capital being more powerful than government, or in bed with them in many cases.

4. Higher exposure to negative news, media algorithms, social media etc. It's all been covered before. Fear and anger sells. Billion dollar companies with 1000s of very smart employees trying their hardest to addict you to their app, which makes your life worse. Seemingly constant state of emergency or crisis, one crisis to the next.

I read the article after writing this, I think the author had very similar points. I think most complaints roughly come down into these buckets and root causes.

The only missing piece is the understanding that this will not fix itself anymore, the will to collectively agree on the bad actors, organize, take back power, enforce consequences.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of it is that literally almost every major US city has a self-inflicted housing shortage ( https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... ), which then has cascading effects on every other part of cost of living.

sadly Austin is one of the best US cities at allowing new housing development

That's very true, but it's still subject to demand overflow from other cities where a lot of people can't even hope to afford anything.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The French have excellent government benefits and services and that’s partly due to their willingness to riot.

[flagged]

Agreed. Being Dutch myself, I prefer that we lay out a long-term vision and plan for enhancing the society through democratically chosen representatives over caving for a violent minority that will literally set the town on fire if they don't get what they want.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#685

I wonder if the 'English language speakers saw the biggest increases in unhappiness' is related to something else I keep reading about, which is that countries like Russia are spending huge amounts of money on campaigns to decrease stability in the west. If they are making a concerted effort to drive the narrative in English speaking online communities, it would make sense that English speakers would be most affected…

I've been suspicious of this. It's typical for mainstream social media to become negative because that's where legitimately unhappy people go to complain, but things like Reddit and Twitter seem completely bot-farmed on top of that. And more and more people have been online, especially starting 2020. Even seems like Trump or his close contacts are browsing Reddit comments.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#686
post #409

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the mi…

People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry.

For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.

The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#687
post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.

> Not just the wealthy I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p > because they think it will be beneficial The Capital-class have , on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.

Meh, it's not strictly commutative, and money is ultimately an abstraction for real resources, not just an abstraction.

Really, if you didn't have a job you'd be working much harder for less. The vibes say that's bullshit, but whatever.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might use oat milk as a proxy for ultra-processed food. I used to live next door to a farm and I know how milking works - don’t ask me to milk an oat, though.

At least oats don't have to be perpetually kept pregnant while taking their offspring away from their mothers. See, snide comments cut both ways.

Indeed. I’m only making the suggestion that the metric might not be good as a proxy.

It’s a brutal business.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#689
post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, yes. My 24 year old coworker makes $65k/year and has a $2200/mo mortgage. It's an old starter home in the Midwest, nothing fancy. It stresses him out to the point of not going to a happy hour once in a while unless there's a buy one get one deal or something or I offer to buy (which I do happily). No vacations, no eating out, no fun. It's super sad to see. He talks about being in his prime but…

fast-forward 15-20 years. He has most probably paid out his mortgage (salary growth/inflation, etc. so most people i know paid their mortgages in about 15 years, and some by that time got second or even 3rd property - the observations are over the last 30 years here, included are only salaried employees and excluded are the ones who made "exits" which is completely different game level). Even if he is still paying hi…

Until he gets laid off and now is in a complete panic because he MUST make that mortgage payment.

I have watched this scenario dissolve marriages over and over among my friends.

You cannot assume your job is stable for 15 years nowadays.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#690
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Europeans and Canadians and Australians are not nearly as much "traumatized" by idea that OMG lockdown happened due to covid. The complete societal inability to adapt seems to be bigger issue in USA. Neither Europe nor Canada are as much affected despite having more lockdowns. It was not lockdown as such, but something else about Americans

Interesting how the stay-at-home orders were much more serious and enforced outside of the USA, yet it was the USA that complained and moaned about them the most. Nobody was forcing us to stay inside our homes, and a lot of people ignored the order and went out anyway. Yet, so many Americans were absolutely outraged and indignant and complaining about Their Freedom, at the minor inconvenience of having their favorite…

The US may have had the most visible polarization about it. We had a President threatening to "open up the states" while state governors issued more and more restrictive orders. Depending on what news media you watched, there were ERs filled with bodies or there were people on the beach enjoying their spring break.

The contradictory messages from every levels of government for years did a lot to break the underlying faith in the system.

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