In Monday’s column, I talked about my mid-year resolution (timed to correspond with the beginning of America’s second quarter-millenium on the Fourth of July) to turn away from political anger and toward a more charitable outlook on political differences.
Several factors have motivated me to try to make this turn. For example, I’m trying to follow Uncle Jesus over here, and I know that even though we all tend to characterize our own anger as the righteous variety, it’s more often the toxic and soul-harming type.
Also, the festivities around the 250th brought the difference between happy conservatives and miserable liberals into even sharper contrast than usual.
And that got me thinking about a topic that I’ve seen many times over the years: the purported happiness gap between liberals and conservatives. In recent years I’ve been keeping lists of articles about various topics that interest me, and this is one I’ve returned to.
In fact, I’ve got some thoughts on the subject of happiness and unhappiness generally, and I’m going to write a few columns on the subject. I’m hoping that some of you will share your thoughts on the subject, too.
To start with an overview, I’ve seen a lot of studies about happiness, and the various causes that researchers analyze, including gender, age, income levels, health, education levels, religious belief, political affiliation, and psychological orientation toward either pessimism or optimism. The subject seems endlessly complicated, with a great number of moving and inter-related parts.
For example, income and wealth would logically be a big factor. Anyone who is under financial pressure – who worries about where the next meal is coming from, or struggling to make rent before being evicted – would naturally be pretty unhappy.
On the other hand, the context of relative poverty – for example, if you’re young and living rough while trying to get through college or grad school – can often greatly mitigate any unhappiness around money. First, because being young and in school is a temporary phase you’re going through, with the expectation of much better things to come. Second, in that phase you are likely surrounded by others who are similarly situated, and a big part of money unhappiness (IMHO) comes from comparing yourself to others who are doing much better.
Making $25K as a TA in your late 20s, surrounded by others in the same boat is a lot less troubling than earning $35K as a teacher in your late 30s, when all of your college buddies are now making six figures.
So at first glance, it seems obvious that having more money would be correlated with being happier. Except that there are many cliches arising from how false that assumption is — “Mo’ money, mo’ problems” – and tons of cautionary tales of rich people who are miserable, sometimes even self-destructively so.
The research I’ve seen suggests that having money does increase happiness, but only up to a point. The idea is that having a decent job and enough money in the bank to relieve the fear of the wolf at the door makes most people a lot happier; as you move beyond that, though, there quickly comes a point of diminishing returns.
I remember reading a study – this was probably 10 or 15 years ago – that found that Americans’ sweet spot for the minimum salary to make them happy was around $60K per year. (Adjust that for inflation, and it’s probably around $100K now.) One interesting point in that same study was that when people were asked how much one would need to earn to be considered “rich” or “well-off,” that number was almost always roughly twice what the respondent was making. Somebody making $60K thought that someone bringing in $120K had it made. The person getting that $120K thought that a quarter-million would scratch his money itch just fine.
That finding strikes me as pretty accurate, given what I know about human nature.
Good health seems like a logical pre-requisite for happiness, too. But on the one hand, most of us are healthiest in the prime of our youth – maybe from mid-teens to early 30s? – yet most of us don’t associate the struggles of the teenage years and trying to figure out your place in the world, find a spouse and some kind of job, with unbridled happiness.
On the other hand, suffering from debilitating illness or long-term health declines would naturally tend to dent one’s happiness, to say the least. I got a little taste of that this spring, when I was struggling through my spine injury, and my life goals were reduced to trying to find a position comfortable enough to allow me to sleep for more than a few minutes, and trying not to get addicted to sweet, sweet oxycodone. (For those interested, you can read about that rough time in my columns from March.)
Now that I’m well past the very painful stage, and on my way to returning to being an awesome physical specimen with the strength of ten men, I’m happier.
Other aspects of happiness arise from fulfilling a purpose, and some such purposes are clearly gender-coded, if not gender-dependent. Both genders need to find an outlet for their talents and abilities, and both are generally happier – though there are always exceptions – if they can find a loving spouse and have a family.
I think men are designed by nature (or Nature’s God, IMHO) to be happiest when they are providing for and protecting a family. (I remember an old psychology text suggesting that if a woman admires and appreciates an emotionally healthy man, he’ll do just about anything for her.) That has been changing in recent years, with more women than men getting degrees and professional work, but I think a typical man’s occupation is still more central to his identity and happiness than it is to a typical woman.
One common topic of discussion when you meet a man for the first time is to ask him what he does, and losing a job usually hits a man’s sense of self and self-worth harder than it does a woman’s. It’s common for men to struggle when they first retire, and heart attacks in the first six months after retirement are not super rare. If you’ve defined yourself by your job for your whole adult life, it makes sense that a bout of post-retirement depression would be as common for men as post-partum depression is for women.
One of the main good effects of women’s liberation in my lifetime has been that women can develop and use their talents and pursue ambitions in the world of work outside the home. Yet one of the worst effects of feminism has been to pressure women to pursue a career, even if that thwarts their hard-wired desire for marriage and children, too. The ticking biological clock and sadness among childless older women have become cliches for a reason.
Having said all that, in my next several columns I’d next like to look at several other causes of happiness or the lack thereof, including religious belief, social connection and the largely pernicious effects of social media, and political affiliation.
To summarize and preview, the research I’ve seen suggests that social media has a lot of deleterious effects that we don’t really have previous experience with; that religious people are generally happier than non-religious people (but with some interesting/surprising caveats); and that leftists are generally much less happy than conservatives, even correcting for the many other causes involved.
This last point has a lot of permutations to it, and raises an intriguing chicken-and-egg question: does leftism cause people to be unhappy, or are already unhappy people drawn to leftism?
The political aspect of unhappiness vs happiness is what drew me back to this subject now. When I saw how miserable lefties were during the run-up to the 250th, I didn’t find myself being angry at them for ranting about what a lousy place America is, as much as feeling sorry for them, and wishing better for them. Obviously I think they’re wrong about the country, and that makes their dark mood even sadder, since it is (IMHO) unjustified and unnecessary. (As regular readers know, I have a few good friends who are lefties, and I truly do hate to see how miserable they get when our side is in office and doing all the right things.) (😊)
On the one hand, the leftists’ bad mood made some sense, since the president of the opposing party (and a particularly hated one, at that!) was in the White House on the nation’s birthday. (I know I would have been a little less happy if President Que Mala was giving a 250th speech that started with a land acknowledgment and then moved straight into word salad!)
But here’s another preview: recent surveys have consistently shown that liberals’ level of patriotism is much more dependent on whether their party controls the White House and/or congress than does conservatives’ patriotism. Conservatives are generally markedly more proud of America and happy to be American than are liberals. Also, even though conservatives are just as dissatisfied when a Biden or Obama is in office as Dems are when it’s Trump or Bush, our happiness levels don’t fluctuate nearly as much as the happiness of Dems.
I’m going to explore some of these questions next time. But in the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing some of your thoughts on the topic, too.
Have a great weekend!
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 