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

1. We stopped allowing housing to be built, skyrocketing the cost of existing housing.

2. Our healthcare system remains a Frankenstein of a half-government sanctioned oligopoly, half-capitalist nightmare. Driving up the cost of healthcare.

3. Our governments are at best incompetent, at worst corrupt. SF spends $100k/person per year on homelessness. NY spends $80k. Where is all that money going?? Would be better to give that money directly to the homeless.

Healthcare.

The answer to this shit is usually healthcare.

It got sad because enough folks across enough strata aren't doing well in enough ways that matter, and yet are constantly told that the numbers/statistics/data tell the opposite so clearly they're in the wrong.

Just look through the comments here for more evidence of that sentiment: for every commenter saying they did everything right but can't afford a home, there's someone else storming in with cherry-picked data showing that ahkshually homeownership for younger cohorts is getting better so obviously it's a problem unique to you and not the larger demographic. For every commenter complaining about wages not keeping pace with inflation, there's another commenter barging in with ahkshually the basket of goods indicator suggests you're wrong and everything has never been more affordable, so it must be a you problem.

America is so sad because we keep saying "we're having problems and need help," and the response is consistently along the lines of "Ahkshually everything on this graph is great and we're not going to look any deeper than that so it must be something you've done to deserve this." Nobody is listening to the meat of the grievance, just immediately punching down on the aggrieved. That makes us sad.

As for the "u rich why so sad" argument? Because you're conflating the wealth of the whole for the wealth (or lack thereof) of the components. Taken as a whole, America is fabulously wealthy; hell, taken individually, Americans earn and are worth more than any other society on the planet, period. Yet when you start boiling down to individual pictures, it becomes clear that the wealth of the country is intensely concentrated in fewer hands, and that those hands have no intention of ceding that wealth to the government nor using it to govern effectively. The problem isn't wealth so much as wealth inequality, and just mentioning that phrase is going to get this downvoted into oblivion because the last thing a country of pretend-billionaires wants to admit is that they won't actually be wealthy themselves someday.

EDIT: One little nugget I've been chewing on lately with regards to this whole thing is that perhaps the financialization of everything is a contributing factor. Before computers spat out "optimized" pricing for every good, service, and transaction out there in the name of maximizing profit via "objective" measures of value, human elements could choose to eschew that in favor of prioritizing other outcomes - like cutting tenants a break on rent when they got laid off so your building had a stable set of known inhabitants that were more predictable and invested in the community, for instance, or paying workers more and investing in their training so they wouldn't be tempted to leave. By optimizing for profit, we removed humanity from a very human system; by worshiping entities like "the invisible hand of the free market" and "efficient distribution of resources via Capital allocation" as if they were gods, we hand-waved away any obligation of those with outsized success to provide support for those who failed to achieve it themselves.

That would explain the vast chasm between the "mood" and the "stats", in a way: the system might be optimized for maximum profit, but it has come at the expense of prioritizing a healthy human society, and the humans are feeling that more and more.

As for all the talk about how humans are ultimately the ones making these decisions - are they, though? Are they really? Because it doesn't look like the C-Suite and Boardrooms and investor classes out there seem willing to sacrifice some profits for improved human conditions; the consistent pattern continues to be along the lines of "the computer said X", and that's the extent of the discussion lest a human risk being accountable for that decision.

Man, it's almost like materialism actually is a root of suffering. Who'da thunkit?

My personal theory, represented in the points in TFA but not quite pinpointed, is that it is due to smartphones and the overall media environment (not just social media). Specifically:

Smartphones enable unprecedented levels of reach as well as content personalized to you... as decided by The Algorithm. Media organizations and social media influencers discovered that ragebait gets clicks, which generates revenue. This also explains why news articles overall are very negative, as TFA points out. This is what influences The Algorithm.

This is all that is needed. Consider:

1. The psychological harms of social media are very well understood, as often shown in Meta's own leaked reports. But the discussion has focused on youths because "think of the children" (which is actually justified here) but overshadows the harm to the general population.

2. Elon and Twitter. 'Nuff said.

3. Beyond public channels, there is even more negativity in private message groups like WhatsApp and Telegram which is invisible from the outside. I've seen a lot of large influence campaigns and disinformation flow through those channels that have not made the news. Which also means that fact-checking is not a thing there.

4. The countries where happiness is rising has two main (mostly mutually exclusive) traits:

a) They have low inflation (from TFA: Portugal, Italy, Spain). Maybe this is sufficient to overcome the effects of negative media environment.

b) They are largely authoritarian states (from TFA: China, India, Vietnam) where the media environment is heavily controlled. So the constant media narrative is "Things have never been better!" (Though the cracks are showing in India, because people will tolerate this only as long as things are good, and genuine dissatisfaction is breaking the narrative barrier, since "fake it til you make it" does not work for national economies. I suspect cracks will show in China too if the gravy train comes to an end there.)

5. The lockdown from the pandemic was probably just the impetus that drove more people to their smartphones and got them hooked into this cycle of negativity.

So basically people have been inundated, via public and private channels, with constant waves of negativity and disinformation. Even the "positivity" is stuff like social media influencers portraying unrealistic, luxurious lifestyles ("a day in the life of a PM at a tech company".) This further breeds resentment in people even if their own lives are actually getting better.

In my tinfoil hat mode, I even suspect the global media environment is heavily manipulated to sow dissatisfaction and cause instability (hence the "vibecession") as a form of economic warfare. ("We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within." - Kruschev, maybe)

But Occam's Razor says good old capitalism is a sufficient explanation.

crony capitalism is the root cause

The answer to the question posed by the headline is simple:

The elites have built a propaganda machine / mind control device called "Social Media". Facebook, famously, sought to determine if they could influence people's emotions. They succeeded in manufacturing negative sentiment. This was then harness by the "elites" to wage class war against the rest of us.

They're gonna REALLY SURPRISED when the rope runs out and they find themselves hanging at the end of it. You can't endlessly create negative sentiment and expect positive results. That's lunacy.

My TLDR; version: urbanism and (economically) forced migration into large cities.

I partly agree with the argument that American unhappiness cannot be explained purely by economic indicators, and that the “Tragic Twenties” emerged from a combination of pandemic shock, accumulated inflation, declining trust in institutions and other people, increasing isolation, and a negative media environment.

However, I think this explanation is too simplistic in that it tries to compress everything into a single recent event.

From the perspective of an outsider, I believe there is a more fundamental cause. To me, the core issue lies in the structural illusion created by capitalism and meritocracy.

Capitalism, at its core, operates very differently from the moral frameworks that shaped pre-modern societies. In earlier narratives, labor and virtue were tied to value. In capitalism, value is increasingly tied to capital itself — capital generates more capital. In that sense, the subject is no longer the human, but the holder of capital.

The problem is that this creates a legitimacy gap. To justify this system, meritocracy is introduced as a kind of narrative “MSG”:

“Anyone can rise if they have the ability.”

But reality increasingly diverges from that story. Within this framework, people are encouraged to interpret failure not as a structural issue, but as a lack of ability.

Of course, ability matters. But what counts as “ability”? Even on Hacker News, people disagree. Some argue that only low-level programmers are “real” programmers. But I work at a higher level, assembling systems and libraries to provide convenience for others. Does that make me less of a programmer? I don’t think so.

This is where the real problem begins: how ability is defined, and whether that definition actually justifies who gets access to capital and power. In my view, it does not.

From what I can see, those positions are only open to a very small minority who were not born into them. That “opportunity” functions more as a symbolic opening — a narrow door that exists to legitimize the system, rather than to truly enable mobility.

From my perspective as someone from Korea, the U.S. appears deeply unequal. It often feels as though your path is largely determined by which family you are born into, which in turn shapes which university you attend. Beyond that, the only visible escape routes seem to be extreme outliers, like becoming a YouTube star.

If I reflect on my own experience — working outside formal academia and taking contract work from Western and Chinese clients — I see similar patterns. In academia, lineage matters: which professor you studied under. In industry, being part of certain organizations confers authority, which is then passed down and reinforced. What we are seeing now, especially among those born in the 1990s and 2000s, is the first generation fully experiencing the consequences of systems that were solidified during the baby boomer era.

Capital has a gravitational property. Once accumulated, it attracts more of itself. Initial conditions matter more and more over time.

Within this structure, individual effort and ability are not meaningless — but they are no longer decisive.

Yet society continues to maintain the belief that success is determined by merit. This creates a gap between expectation and reality.

People begin to feel:

“It’s not that I failed — it’s that I was placed in a game I could never win.”

At that point, what emerges is not just dissatisfaction, but resentment and cynicism.

And this feeling does not come only from those at the bottom. In fact, it can be even stronger among those who are educated and who believed in the system — those who tried to play by the rules.

This helps explain why unhappiness in the U.S. is not confined to a single class, but appears broadly across society.

The hostility we see on platforms like YouTube or social media — and even the strange satisfaction some people feel at the decline of other groups — can be understood in this context. It is less about simple malice, and more about a reaction to a broken promise.

From this perspective, the pandemic and inflation are not root causes, but triggers. They exposed tensions that were already present.

And this is where meritocracy becomes particularly problematic.

Meritocracy appears fair on the surface, but in practice it reduces failure to individual responsibility. It reframes structural problems as personal shortcomings, leaving people without a language to explain their situation.

What remains are two responses:

self-blame or anger toward the system

And that anger rarely expresses itself in a clean or rational way. It can manifest as political extremism, hostility toward other groups, or deep cynicism.

So the real issue is not simply that “the economy is bad.”

It is that the belief that “this system is fair” has collapsed.

And once that belief collapses, no amount of positive economic data is enough to restore people’s sense of stability.

From this perspective, I also begin to understand why communities like MAGA can become so extreme. As people are pushed to the margins, they lose not only economic stability but also social connections. Without work, it becomes harder to meet others; as people age, their social world narrows. What remains, at the edge, is often religion — one of the last forms of community that still provides meaning and identity.

I do not believe in God. But I can understand why they do — and why they fight to defend that sense of legitimacy.

We normalized the rustbelt/loss of famliy farms/loss of real decent jobs in small town America/the cities' working class forgetting those were the pipeline that generated the children that went on be the young vibrant energy that knew how to do things/grew our economy/contributed to our culture and strength.

We normalized children working in sweatshops making our things overseas. We made their suffering a cheap punchline and labeled comedians gritty for normalizing it. Extended the apathy to seniors working Walmart to not starve. To the treatment of factory farmed animals. Extended it to Amazon workers literally forced to piss in soda bottles/dying on the warehouse floor as managers tell co-workers they can't perform CPR to try to keep them alive until an ambulance comes, it's more important they just work around the body. We lost all moral compass and are horrific people. That horribleness/acceptance of horribleness is leaking from consumerism and into more and more just being what our society is now. And cheap social commentary humor absorbed the energy that would have been put to changing things and instead just normalized bad behavior. You don't get Donald Trump without Jon Stewart/Joe Rogan both normalizing behavior and building apathy. We went from serious talk about societal problems in our papers/magazine/church groups/social clubs to nodding our heads as we consumed negative/lowest value humor from comedians, the most depressed/live horrible disgusting lives people in our country.

We made eagle scouts the but of jokes (again crappy humor with crappy results) and convince kids they are too cool for programs that foster everyone coming together and doing shared programs/experiences. We removed so much experiential growth/community that was baked into being a youth in the past. Instead of community sports it's fancy paid programs for the cool kids that get accepted or have high talent. You can't do anything with friends that is cheap let alone a revenue driver (buy fix junk cars, do yardword, do sidework for a friends parent who have their own business). So much we value later in life came from doing things that weren't cool or maybe we didn't want to do when we were kids or we needed to be guided into. Now we let children choose but also don't guide them to making growth choices or protect them so they can do uncool things (other than distracting games maybe or 'cool in a geeky way' things).

We slavishly worshiped the tech economy that pushed bits around in machines but don't really do anything other than replaced workers jobs or figure out how to suck money out of systems as a middle man, and made that our ideal 'dream and future'. Efficiency goes up for what was there, but we arent' really creating new just optimizing while tech bros suck the moving dollars out of the system causing entropy.

Current culture inflicts a horrific level of sexual abuse against young women. Maybe it was always that way and I was naive, but the amount of manipulation/lieing/emotional betrayal by men is unacceptable and beyond anything I experienced in the past. Add in so many more women doing sex work either online but also lots more irl. That really burns someone out/detaches. Between the two our previous social construct is gone and in the new one I personally expect women to just give up on men.

I think that there is something very medically wrong that got waived away as an 'obesity epidemic'. I hope Ozempic will lead to figuring it out and not let it be waived away as 'fat people' one the people impacted has lost the weight but still have problems. I've watched my mom and so many others go from happy, healthy, energtic to putting on weight and every day life just being very very hard that it doesn't make sense.

There's a lot going on. Past America would have addressed things as they came up. But we stopped doing that. We've looked away for so long/from so many things we no longer have a direction to look away to.

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This trend will continue as long as tax payers money is wasted in useless and unnecessary wars …

Can be explained with one word: Inequality. America being rich is a smokescreen. Some Americans are very rich. Most are not. The very rich Americans are not sad, actually.