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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
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href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opinion/global-sadness-rising.html">nytimes.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">Opinion | The Rising Tide of Global
Sadness</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">David Brooks</div>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">6-7 minutes</div>
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<p>David Brooks</p>
<p><time datetime="2022-10-27T19:18:26-04:00">Oct. 27,
2022</time></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>“I don’t dress for women,” she sings at one point,
“I don’t dress for men/Lately I’ve been dressing for
revenge.”</p>
<p>It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. The
researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex
Mesoudi <a
href="https://aeon.co/ideas/why-are-pop-songs-getting-sadder-than-they-used-to-be"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">analyzed</a>
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.</p>
<p>Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a
lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin
Halberstadt analyzed <a
href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">23
million headlines</a> 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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.gallup.com/analytics/394670/blindspot.aspx"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Blind
Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How
Leaders Missed It</a>.” 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>We live in a world of widening <a
href="https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/401216/global-rise-unhappiness.aspx"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">emotional
inequality</a>. 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.</p>
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