[D66] The Rising Tide of Global Sadness :(

[René Oudeweg]

nytimes.com
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opinion/global-sadness-rising.html>


  Opinion | The Rising Tide of Global Sadness

David Brooks
6-7 minutes
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David Brooks

Oct. 27, 2022

Credit...Rafal Milach/Magnum Photos

Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006.
She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But
her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her excellent new album,
“Midnights,” plays upon a string of negative emotions — anxiety,
restlessness, exhaustion and occasionally anger.

“I don’t dress for women,” she sings at one point, “I don’t dress for
men/Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.”

It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. The researchers Charlotte
Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed
<https://aeon.co/ideas/why-are-pop-songs-getting-sadder-than-they-used-to-be>
more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that
time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved.
Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion
words, like “hate” rose sharply.

Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David
Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines
<https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367>
published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 news outlets popular in the United
States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a
greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and
sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, and
headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.

The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The
General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels.
Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the
lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that
was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000
people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of
negative emotions — related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and
physical pain — hit a record high last year.

Gallup asks people in this survey to rate their lives on a scale from
zero to 10, with zero meaning you’re living your worst possible life and
10 meaning you’re living your best. Sixteen years ago, only 1.6 percent
of people worldwide rated their life as a zero. As of last year, the
share of people reporting the worst possible lives has more than
quadrupled. The unhappiest people are even unhappier. In 2006, the
bottom fifth of the population gave themselves an average score of 2.5.
Fifteen years later, that average score in the bottom quintile had
dropped to 1.2.

In an interview, Jon Clifton, the C.E.O. of Gallup, told me that in
2021, 21 percent of the people in India gave themselves a zero rating.
He said negative emotions are rising in India and China, Brazil and
Mexico and many other nations. A lot of people are pretty miserable at
work. In the most recent survey Gallup found that 20 percent of all
people are thriving at work, 62 percent are indifferent on the job and
18 percent are miserable.

Part of the problem is declining community. The polls imply that almost
two billion people are so unhappy where they live, they would not
recommend their community to a friend. This is especially true in China
and India.

Part of the problem is hunger. In 2014, 22.6 percent of the world faced
moderate or severe food insecurity. By 2020, 30.4 percent of the world did.

Part of the problem is an increase in physical misery. In 2006, 30
percent of people who rated their lives the worst said they experienced
daily pain. Last year, 45 percent of those people said they live with
daily pain. Before the pandemic, the experience of living with pain
increased across all age groups.

A lot of those numbers surprised me. Places like China and India have
gotten much richer. But development does not necessarily lead to gains
in well-being, in part because development is often accompanied by
widening inequality. This is one of the core points Clifton makes in his
book “Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed
It <https://www.gallup.com/analytics/394670/blindspot.aspx>.” We
conventionally use G.D.P. and other material measures to evaluate how
nations are doing. But these are often deeply flawed measures of how
actual people are experiencing their lives.

Misery influences politics. James Carville famously said, “It’s the
economy, stupid.” But that’s too narrow. Often it’s human flourishing,
stupid, including community cohesion, a sense of being respected, social
connection. George Ward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
argued that subjective measures of well-being are more predictive of
some election outcomes than economic measures. Measures of well-being
dropped in Tunisia and Egypt before the Arab uprisings. Well-being
dropped in Britain before the Brexit vote. Counties in the United States
that saw the largest gain in voting Republican for president between the
2012 election and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 were also the counties
where people rated their lives the worst.

If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? Well,
rising levels of populism, for one. And second, greater civil unrest
across the board. Clifton noted that according to the Global Peace
Index, civic discontent — riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations
— increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.

We live in a world of widening emotional inequality
<https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/401216/global-rise-unhappiness.aspx>.
The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing the highest level of
happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The
bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust
and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.
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