A thousand chalk-drawn “We’re All In This Together” signs on sidewalks, 10,000 “You are coming out of this stronger” video graduation speeches, and 10 million “We’re literally being asked to stay home and watch TV” social media snarks haven’t done the trick.
This whole thing is bringing us down.
The public is more unhappy today than at any time on record. The novel coronavirus and its lockdowns have made us less happy than ever before, according to a massive study by the University of Chicago.
The percentage of people saying they are “very happy” hit an all-time low of 14%. The percentage answering “not too happy” jumped 10 points compared to two years ago, hitting an all-time high of 23%.
Do you often feel irritable while your children’s schools are closed, their playgrounds taped up, and their summer camps canceled? Has the closure of your town’s Main Street, your local pub, and your church made you feel depressed? Did you lose hours at work and so are feeling anxious?
These are all increasingly common, according to the study, which examined answers to the General Social Survey. Those “often” feeling depressed, anxious, or irritable rose from 13% two years ago to 18% in May.
A full 30% say they often lose their temper nowadays. Scholars compared this to the periods after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and after the Kennedy assassination and found the numbers rose to only about 20% back then.
The virus itself surely causes some unhappiness, but looking at the data, it’s hard not to blame our reaction to the virus. The lockdowns and closures have exacerbated America’s plague of loneliness and alienation.
Compared to two years ago, almost twice as many people feel they often lack companionship (18% compared to 10%). Half the country sometimes or often feels isolated, compared to less than a quarter in more normal times.
It turns out that if you lock people in their homes and take away their communities, their friends, and their neighborhoods — that is, if you take away their lives — you make people less happy.
