happiness – Martin Simpson

What Makes People Happy, Part 6: Final Thoughts (posted 7/31/26)

As I try to wrap up the thoughts that I’ve discussed in this series, I’ve arrived at two main conclusions, at least for now. The first is that it’s much easier to be happy if you take reality on reality’s terms rather than trying to swim upstream against truth in all its forms.

The second is that while I can’t answer the chicken-and-egg question about leftism and unhappiness – i.e. does leftism cause unhappiness, or are already-unhappy people naturally drawn to leftism – there are enough connections between leftism and unhappiness to establish a strong correlation, regardless of which direction the causation arrow is pointing.

“Take reality on reality’s terms” is a very loose paraphrase of a key principle of stoicism, as found in (among other places) the writings of badass Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Accept everything which happens, even if it seems disagreeable.”

So much of what has gone wrong in recent decades seems to boil down to our inability to face disagreeable realities and adjust to them. Many people want to get rich quickly, or without a lot of hard work and persistence, but that’s not how reality works. Many people want to be thin and ripped, but don’t want to be extremely disciplined about exercise and diet. Some people want to change their gender, and to make everyone else accept their “new” gender. (Spoiler alert: You can’t, and they won’t.)

Life is so much harder – and your unhappiness so much greater – when you are constantly beating your head against the wall of reality.

While many of the realities of life are biological, or psychological, or financial, or demographic, all of those play themselves out in our national life through politics. And many Americans (especially those on the left) want to get things through politics that reality will not allow.

They want all of the material blessings produced by free market capitalism… without free market capitalism.

They want low gas prices… without any oil exploration, drilling and refining.

They want citizens to be unable to own guns, so that the only ones with guns and the ability to protect citizens will be the police…but they want to abolish the police.

They want to prevent big developers from building more, and increasing the supply of housing…but they also want lower home and rent prices that can only come with an increased supply of housing.

They want to keep spending more than we collect in taxes…without the broken economy that eventually results from spending more than we collect in taxes. And they want the government to collect billions more in taxes…without paying one dime more in taxes themselves.

In short, they want a free lunch. But as you should learn by grade school, there’s no such thing.

All of us are susceptible to these kinds of fantasies, and we all have to discipline and restrain ourselves, and get over our outrage when the facts of life don’t conform to our wishes. Because as Marcus Aurelius says, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Or was that Ben Shapiro? Either way, it’s true, and there’s no getting around it.

Unfortunately for the Left, their entire political worldview and program depends on making reality conform to their feelings. And that’s an endless source of unhappiness for them.

Which brings me back to where I started this series, when I was struck by how happy and appreciative so many America conservatives and European visitors here for the World Cup were about our 250^th birthday – especially by comparison to how sour and unhappy the American Left was, and how most leftists don’t love the country as much as conservatives do. (That’s not an insult from me, but the results of many polls over decades, in their own words.) Some of that feeling can obviously be ascribed to their unhappiness with Trump being in the White House.

But many polls over many years have shown a consistent pattern: on average, conservatives identify as more patriotic/proud of America than liberals do. And while there is some fluctuation for both groups when the opposition controls the White House, the difference is stark. Conservatives’ love of country drops a few points when Dems are in control, but liberals’ patriotism plummets when the Nazis – er, I mean the conservatives – are in power.

And here is where I turn to the wisdom of the great Thomas Sowell (peace be upon him). In his book The Vision of the Anointed (1995), he summarized the worldviews of the left and the right. He called the left’s approach the titular “vision of the anointed,” because they saw themselves as the experts who know how to run society, if they could just get enough political power to do so.

He called the right’s view “the tragic vision,” which doesn’t sound like great marketing for our side. But it’s shot through with stoicism, and has the advantage of being true. I quoted John Nolte previously about how conservatives have come to peace with flawed human nature, which is what Sowell is getting at when he calls our outlook “tragic.” One of his most famous arguments is that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

That line could have come straight out of Marcus Aurelius. Or Ben Shapiro, for that matter.

Since the Left’s view is utopian, it brings with it constant disappointment. Leftists look out at the hicks and deplorables – in their eyes, we put the “lump” in the “lumpen proletariat” – and are infuriated when we don’t recognize their anointed status, and follow their orders. We are the human manifestation of “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and they can only take so much of our stubborn resistance before they are driven to despair.

That’s what I think explains much of their pessimism. How great can this country be if it’s filled with the likes of us? They’ve gone to the right schools and come out with the right grievance-studies degrees (and six figures of debt), only to watch a bunch of blue-collar rubes start their own businesses and out-earn them. They post signs in their lawn to lecture us that “science is real” and that “trans women are women,” and we drive by and laugh at their signs. It’s infuriating!

They look at us the way Cornwallis looked at our continental militias during the Revolution. They were a cultured, sophisticated empire, and we were a provincial, untutored rabble. So how can we be beating them as often as we do?

Their pessimism has created a self-reinforcing psychological death spiral as real as the economic death spiral that their sanctuary city policies have created. They can’t even recognize the many good things going on in America, and they wildly over-estimate the negative.

I’ll cite one example. It’s a truism among leftists that Americans are extremely racist, and they often point to crime statistics to suggest that blacks are treated disproportionately badly by police. Several years ago Americans were surveyed about how many unarmed black men they thought are killed by the police every year, and the average responses were way off.

The average guess was around a thousand, and many people thought the number was 10,000 or more. In reality, the number was between 12 and 30 per year in recent years. I researched this, and found a comprehensive compilation of these deaths for every year since 2014, with a paragraph-long summary of each such killing. The results were eye-opening, and showed how much of an over-estimate even those small numbers are.

The biggest problem is the misleading use of “unarmed.” That term calls to mind a defenseless man, possibly with his hands raised, being gunned down by heartless cops. But even a quick skim through the summaries of the deaths in any given year destroys that narrative. Sometimes the dead guys had been driving a car directly at cops when they were shot; sometimes they were physically fighting with the cops – trying to beat or strangle them with their bare hands, often trying to get their guns or tasers – when they were shot.

Many times they weren’t even shot at all, but died after getting tased, or falling as they fled on foot, or dying in a wreck as they fled in a car. Many perps were drunk or high, and died of overdoses or heart attacks. In some cases cops tried various non-lethal tactics first – bean bag rounds or tasers – before finally shooting someone who kept coming at them. A handful of cases involved “suicide by cop,” with the perp brandishing a fake gun or air rifle – in one case an air pressure gauge! – so that a cop would shoot them. Many times mental health crises resulted in erratic and violent behavior absent any weapon.

After accounting for all of those, I’d guess that the accurate number of black people WRONGLY killed by cops probably doesn’t amount to more than half a dozen per year, in a nation of a third of a billion people, in which millions of cop-citizen encounters occur annually. And in those few cases, the cops are almost always fired at the least, and most of them are criminally charged and tried.

I think this example is typical of so many erroneous ideas that leftists hold about America. Even a very short time spent researching one issue after another would disabuse them of many of their most depressing beliefs. But it seems like they are not interested, and would rather remain willfully ignorant, if the alternative is embracing a more positive vision of their own country.

Finally, I’m reminded of one more fact about our recent European visitors, specifically the Brits who were here. Within the last month it came out that Mississippi’s per-capita income had risen enough that the average Mississippian now earns more than the average Brit. And since Mississippi ranks 50^th in per capita income of all American states, that means that the Brits are poorer on average than the residents of all 50 American states!

During the World Cup games, British journalists surveyed British visitors here, asking them where the UK would rank in terms of per capita income if it joined America as our 51^st state. Their average guess was #7, and the lowest I saw was somebody who guessed #30. They were shocked when told that they’d be dead last, right behind Mississippi.

Seeing that, it occurred to me that the pro-America Brits are almost the polar opposite of our own pessimistic, anti-American leftists. Not only do the Brits appreciate America, they optimistically overestimate their own nation’s wealth in comparison to our own. Meanwhile, our own leftists don’t rightly appreciate America, and they are (incorrectly) pessimistic and negative about her.

I know which position I’d rather be in, and which group I’d rather hang out with. I think our leftist elites might be beyond help, but I do want better for the everyday, well-intentioned lefties who have been taken in by the dour representation of America in our universities and our media.

I hope that they can be brought around to see the truth, especially because the saddest part of the patriotism gap and happiness gap is that they are both unnecessary! Their dark view of America is based on wildly inaccurate and false beliefs, which then inevitably create a self-fulfilling prophecy which leads to needless suffering.

Honestly, that is a shame.

So let’s not participate in it, and let’s do whatever we can to help our lefty fellow citizens to reject it too.

Have a great weekend!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

What Makes People Happy, Part 5: Optimism, Gratitude, & Their Political Consequences (posted 7/27/26)

In this series I’ve touched on many factors that affect an individual’s happiness: health, age, gender, net worth, career choice, social media intake, religious belief or non-belief, and political ideology. But after having considered all of those, I find myself returning to the concepts of optimism and pessimism.

It seems almost insulting simplistic, to say it, but pessimists are more unhappy, and optimists are happier. I know: duh! Isn’t “pessimist” essentially a synonym for “sad,” and “optimist” for “happy?”

Sort of. But this might be a classic chicken-and-egg question. Does pessimism cause unhappiness, or does an unhappy person naturally become a pessimist? Though I can’t confidently answer that question, I am confident that the cynical take on these two mindsets – pessimists are just realists who accurately perceive the world, while optimists are delusional about reality – is wrong.

Because the quintessential illustration of the idea is the cliched question, “Is a glass of water half full, or half empty?” And both answers are objectively, equally true. It’s Schrodinger’s water glass.

To complicate things a bit, there is a kind of pessimism that is healthy – as when you consider all of the possible bad outcomes of a decision or course of action to prepare for them – and a kind of optimism that is unhealthy – as when one has unrealistically sunny assessments of possible outcomes, and thus doesn’t consider or prepare for reasonable risks.

Still, a considerable portion of one’s outcomes in life are the result of self-fulfilling prophecies, and those prophecies largely boil down to the question of optimism or pessimism.

An optimist believes that hard work and perseverance will eventually be rewarded, and that belief energizes and arms him against negative, contradictory (but real) feedback. He works hard for a dysfunctional employer who fires him anyway, and then for a dumb one whose business goes under. Then he starts his own business that quickly fails, then he starts a business that thrives for a while before stagnating. But he’s still in the game, and his third business succeeds.

A pessimist thinks that he’s not likely to succeed – because of his ethnicity, or lack of funds and connections, or his family’s dysfunctional history, or an economic downturn. So his first failure – the bad boss who fires him, or the failure of his first business – confirms his belief. He gives up, thus ensuring that he will never succeed.

These thoughts remind me of a psychological concept that I wrote about a year or two ago: the idea of an external vs internal locus of control. The terms refer to whether you see your fate as mostly determined by outside (external) factors, or your own (internal) actions. External factors could include the racism, sexism or ageism of your society; or macro-economic trends (we’re in a recession and interest rates are high, so nobody’s hiring and I can’t buy a house); or unpredictable events like a stock market crash.

Having an external locus of control is almost synonymous with being a pessimist, whereas a fundamentally optimistic outlook – I’m the master of my fate; if it is to be, then it’s up to me – presupposes an internal locus of control.

Which brings me back to John Nolte’s final secret to happiness: “being grateful for what you have.” This might be the essential distinction between optimists and pessimists. Pessimists by nature have great difficulty being grateful, because their field of vision prevents them from perceiving facts that should elicit gratitude.

Seeing a glass of water as half full entails regretting that the top half of the glass is empty, rather than appreciating the water in the bottom half of the glass. You might have been grateful if the 12-ounce glass had held 12 ounces of ice-cold water. But it only had six ounces in it, and those were lukewarm. So no bueno.

And this is a point where I see important connections to both religion and politics. My Christian beliefs obviously create a bias in me, but I think it’s much easier and more natural to feel gratitude to someone than to random chance — even in situations where randomness works to your advantage, as when dice or lottery balls fall in a way that accidentally makes you a winner.

I’m sure that atheists who gaze at the starry night sky, or a chain of mountains at dawn, or a thundering waterfall naturally feel awe and appreciation. And I’m sure that most atheists feel gratitude to the artists whose writing, art or music moves them. I feel that way too.

But my gratitude is deepened and enhanced by the sense that those artists are not just talented individuals, but that they are in some sense touched by God, and are expressing part of the nature of Him in whose image they were created. When I hear great music or read a great book or watch a great athlete, I always think of Hamlet’s lines in Act 2, Scene 2:

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god.” (Those first few words sneak in a crucial implication, since “a piece of work” implies a “Worker” who created him.)

Similarly, staring at a night sky hits me hard, and always elicits in me an instinct – as I’m feeling unbidden awe – to thank the Creator of all this. And though I’ve had temporarily agnostic periods in my life, I can’t imagine feeling deeply grateful at the thought, “What an amazing confluence of blind, unreasoning natural forces must have resulted in this purposeless confluence of astral bodies that will one day burn out, leaving an eternal void of cold, airless darkness.”

(Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?)

My understanding is that most religions contain the expectation that humans will rightly be grateful to their Maker. In Christianity that feeling seems even stronger, since it posits a personal God who sacrifices Himself for each of us. How could that idea, if you believe it, not bring you to your knees with gratitude?

I mean, I literally owe that Guy my life. And my next one, too!

Speaking of which, a religious world view that promises a paradisiacal ending – in Valhalla, nirvana, or heaven – logically imbues one with a more optimistic outlook. (“These crises/troubles too shall pass.”) Especially when compared with the view that, “we’re alive for a moment and then dead forever.” (Or, as some wise guy put it, “Life’s a b*tch, and then you die.”)

And now that I’ve gone off on a religious tangent – sorry about that, my atheist or agnostic friends! – this column has gotten too long to complete my thoughts on the intersection of optimism, gratitude and politics.

So if you don’t mind, I’ll preview a bit of my take on how all of these factors interact in America.

On average, leftists are more pessimistic and unhappy than conservatives, and as a group, the Left has a much darker and more pessimistic view of America than does the Right. When they look at our history, they focus on and exaggerate the negative – slavery, racism, sexism, the treatment of Indians – and downplay or deny our accomplishments and contributions to the world. They compare us to non-existent utopian societies rather than other actual nations, because we inevitably fall short of the former, and kick arse when compared to the latter.

They deploy double standards to condemn us over actions for which they routinely excuse other nations. (“We imprison too many of our citizens because we are cruel racists, but the Soviets and Chicoms shouldn’t be blamed for murdering millions of their citizens, because they had to break a few eggs to create a beautiful socialist omelet.”) If there are multiple ways to interpret social statistics – amount of foreign aid given, infant mortality, racial unrest, etc. – they will ALWAYS choose the way that makes us look the worst.

Given all of that, it would make sense if American leftists were much less patriotic than are conservatives. And they are. Bill Maher discussed that uncomfortable reality in a “Real Time” episode from early last year.

Maher is a frustrating character. He’s a partisan leftist, but he’s also clear-eyed and honest about the faults of the left, even though when it comes to following his thoughts to the logical conclusion and leaving the left, he always falls at the last hurdle.

In a segment on racism and the disconnect between the worldview of white leftists and that of the minorities for whom they purport to speak, he reported the results of three questions in a nationwide poll.

When asked who agrees with the statement, “America is the greatest country in the world,”

75% of Hispanic and 58% of blacks agreed, but only 31% of white progressives did.

When asked whether, “Racism is built into our society,” 38% of Hispanics and 62% of blacks agreed, but 75% of white progressives did.

When asked who agrees that, “Government should increase border security and enforcement,”

49% of Hispanics and 61% of blacks did, but only 15% of white progressives did!

Maher’s immediate reaction focused on the disconnect between self-righteous white liberals and their black and brown counterparts, noting that “[Minorities] don’t want your pity. And blacks can’t afford to indulge rich white people’s need to endlessly flagellate themselves. They just want prices to go down, and good jobs, and the police to come when you call them…just like [the rest of] us!”

But I’m more interested in how those three poll answers relate to our discussion in this column. If leftists believe that America is racist and that other countries are better, why would they NOT want an open border that would allow foreigners to come in illegally, thus changing America to be more like their home countries? Policy is downstream from pessimism.

Pessimism and lack of gratitude not only explain a lot of unhappiness. They also explain a lot of our current political divide.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

What Makes People Happy, Part 4: Political Ideology? (posted 7/24/26)

To begin looking at the connection between leftist politics and unhappiness, I’ll mention the two theories I raised earlier in this series: most lefties think that they understand the world’s unfairness better than conservatives do, and they think of themselves as much more empathetic than conservatives are. Thus they think that their greater unhappiness is the result of their being more intelligent and more caring. As I mentioned, both of those are self-flattering diagnoses.

To be fair, again, most people’s rationale for their own beliefs are self-flattering. Even for a guy as humble as I am! Just ask me. Since I instinctively believe that I’m right about nearly everything, any explanation I give of my political views is bound to be self-flattering.

That’s just the cross I bear.

Sane lefty Nate Silver (whom I mentioned last time) noted a 15% happiness gap between conservatives and liberals, and offered three theories to explain leftist unhappiness, which overlap with mine above. He also provides one extra thought, having to do with one way in which the “social solidarity” offered by seeing injustice in the world can go wrong:

“This [solidarity with like-minded others] can snowball — misery loves company — while attracting some number of people who face serious mental health challenges.”

That rings true to anyone who has perused live video and subsequent photo lineups of antifa and BLM protestors/rioters. There’s a lot of obvious misery there, and more than a little mental illness. And as easy as it is to turn those folks into straw men in a political argument, and to mock them mercilessly (Lord knows I’ve done my share of that!), I’m trying to redirect myself. Because honestly, so many of them are damaged or broken, and I feel sorry for them, and want better for them.

Which is not to say that we should treat the violent among them with kid gloves. As a society, we need to meet their violence with force, and swift trials and punishment, both to protect the rest of us from them, and to provide them with the just consequences that give them the best disincentive to continuing down the disastrous path they’re on.

I agree with Breitbart’s John Nolte’s alternative explanation for the happiness gap, which counter-intuitively begins with the way most conservatives have lower expectations of human nature. He says that we “have made peace with…the messy, complicated, impossible to control” aspects of humanity, and he sees that truce as the cause of a quintessentially conservative goal: “All we want from the world (and our government) is to be left alone.”

That is a little overstated – we are willing to pay taxes for essential government services; we embrace a system of law and order that constrains our behavior – but it accurately contrasts conservatism with the leftist “[genetic predisposition] to a totalitarian streak.”

Nolte says it well: “This desire to control what cannot be controlled (human nature) breeds their unhappiness. How can anyone be happy if they get angry over someone misgendering someone else, someone voting a certain way, [etc.]”

Does that not ring true? Conservatives think leftist ideology is as wrong-headed as leftists think conservative ideology is…but only one side tends to end friendships, cancel co-workers and disinvite family members from Thanksgiving over political differences. The left was furious at DeSantis and other conservative governors because they allowed their citizens to wear masks, take the vaccine and close their businesses – or not – during covid.

The Right said, “It’s a free country.” The Left issued mandates, and made arrests.

In addition to “giving up your desire to control what you cannot control,” Nolte listed three other secrets to happiness: “having a work ethic, not taking yourself seriously, and being grateful for what you have.”

None of those three are necessarily political. And yet I think they are all at least politics-adjacent, i.e. a higher proportion of conservatives are on the positive side of each of them.

Conservatism and hard work have been associated with each other for a very long time, partly because of how much more religious conservatives are, on average. Biblical injunctions about working hard and avoiding sloth are common. (Proverbs like “hard work brings gain, but mere talk leads only to poverty;” warnings about idleness in both testaments; Paul’s admonition, which should be plastered all over every welfare office in the country: “If a man will not work, let him not eat.”)

I’m obviously not saying that there are no hard-working lefties, or lazy righties. But there’s a reason it’s called “the Protestant work ethic” and not “the socialist work ethic.” (The socialist work ethic produced…Bernie Sanders. I rest my case.)

Leftists often sneer at the idea that there is a connection between working hard and getting ahead, as part of their overall denigration of the “American Dream,” which they see as a myth used by the rich to trick and exploit the poor. A central belief on the Left since Marx is that you are entitled to the fruits of other workers’ labor “according to your need,” rather than what you’ve worked for and earned.

Similarly, “Not taking yourself seriously” needn’t be the property of the left or the right. But it mostly is, isn’t it? When you hear descriptors like, “self-serious,” “humorless” or “scold,” don’t you think of some pinched, frowning, Liz Warren type? (#wemustneverstopmockingher) Strict policing of language is almost entirely the domain of the left.

Because words are violence, and silence is also violence. And if you so much as raise your eyebrows when a hulking bruiser with a 5 o’clock shadow wearing a summer dress says, “Call me ma’am!” in a James Earl Jones voice, you want to genocide trans people. Shame!

I can think of several possible punchlines to a joke that starts out, “How many conservatives does it take to change a lightbulb?” But if you propose a joke with the set-up, “How many BLANKS does it take to change a lightbulb?” and the punchline is, “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” everybody knows that there is only one word that can fill that blank.

“Feminists.”

And God help you if you laugh at that in a staff meeting.

Finally, we come to, “Being grateful for what you have.”

Again, this trait is not necessarily politically coded at all, and there are plenty of grateful leftists, and sour conservative ingrates. And yet, in my next (and last) column in this series on happiness, I will argue that generally, gratitude is much more common on the right.

I think this is partly related to conservatism being more optimistic and leftism being more pessimistic, and that it accounts for a political “patriotism gap” that is as pronounced as the happiness gap.

I’ll try to make that case next time. In the meantime, the weekend is here. So be happy!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

Happiness Part 3: The Happiness Gap Between Conservatives & Liberals (posted 7/17/26)

In my last two columns on happiness, I considered the ways in which income, health, gender, social media and social connection, and religion all affect one’s happiness. Today, I’ve arrived at the factor that started me thinking about this topic in the first place: the ways that politics and political ideology impact a person’s happiness.

I’ll begin by noting that a substantial body of research and surveys supports the idea that in general, conservatives are consistently happier than liberals. For just one example, when center-left political analyst Nate Silver looked at a recent survey of self-reported happiness among 60,000 Americans, he noted some of the most important take-aways:

“The average American self-reports at a 60 on this [0-100] scale: in other words, somewhere between good and very good mental health. But liberals average a score of 53 and conservatives a 68.”

The survey included the categories I’ve already written about (e.g. income, religious affiliation) as well as some I haven’t (sexual orientation, marital status, parents vs. childless), but he acknowledges that “the liberal-conservative gap is fairly consistent across all of these characteristics,” and that respondents’ political ideology correlates more closely with happiness than any of those other factors do.

Other studies came to similar conclusions. A 2022 Tuft’s “Equity in America” survey asked a demographically balanced pool of around 2000 respondents to rate themselves as “Very happy,” “Pretty happy,” or “Not too happy.” The results – controlling for the usual other factors of income, race, health, religion, age, etc. – showed that conservatives were “significantly more likely to report being happy” than were liberals.

The trend is the same among many other studies – from Pew in 2006, the General Social Survey (GSS) in 2018 and again in 2023, the Institute for Family Studies in 2025, the World Happiness Report in 2024, the Harvard Youth Poll in 2023-24, etc.. A meta-analysis established the overall gap: 37-45% of conservatives describe themselves as “very happy” compared to only 12-30% of liberals.

For what it’s worth, my own anecdotal experience with many conservative and lefty friends generally follows this pattern from the research. Of course I’ve known some sunny liberals and some dour conservatives, but overall, the reverse is usually true. And of the smaller number in my social circles whose politics have changed over the years, everybody who has moved to the left has gotten less happy. Make of that what you will.

To be fair, there are various ways in which both of these findings – happy conservatives and unhappy liberals – can be interpreted. Unsurprisingly, both sides tend to interpret their own positions in the ways most complimentary to themselves. Because: human nature.

Lefties who admit that they are more unhappy or pessimistic, for example, usually explain that by pointing to a few common causes:

1.Their own greater understanding of the world. If we conservatives comprehended the deep, existential/philosophical limitations, unfairness and tragedy of life, we’d be dour leftists, too. In this view, “intelligent” is pretty much a synonym for “leftist,” as “shallow dullard” is for “conservative.”

During high school this position is more social fashion than an intellectual stance. Think about teenage “goths,” with their black clothes, makeup, and performative alienation that positions themselves as insightful and perceptive outsiders, as opposed to the normies – the jocks, cheerleaders and rich kids – whose blithe and shallow happiness is the consequence of their oblivious self-satisfaction. If you’re not scowling and scoffing, you just don’t get it.

(I don’t mean to criticize those who went through a goth phase more than anyone else. The teen years are tough, and pretty much everybody puts on performative selves. “Jock” and “cheerleader” are poses – with behavioral codes and uniforms – just as much as “goth” is.)

In college, the romanticized alienation of high school gets layered over with intellectual pretensions. I think of undergrad leftists as goths with a reading list. They trade in all-black wardrobes and pancake makeup for eccentric hair colors and styles, and fashionably critical/rebellious/anti-Western thinkers, writers and bands. The most pretentious among them might actually wear berets (very rare), and preach knowingly about Sartre, the postmodernists and Marx (not rare at all).

But the underlying intellectual prejudice – that lefties are smart and righties dumb – continues. Catastrophist climate change doomerism is the only defensible environmental position; the “masculinity is inherently toxic” take on feminism the only defensible gender position; socialist redistribution and suppression of free market capitalism the only defensible economic position; the superiority of Third-world anti-Westernism the only defensible global politics position.

Anyone who disagrees is a science denier, somehow. (Ask any Marxists, and they’ll tell you: they’re on “the right side of history.”)

2. Many lefties don’t just associate their politics with intellectual superiority, but with moral superiority too. Leftists see themselves as having great empathy and sympathy with the downtrodden, the have-nots, and the racial, ethnic, gender and religious minorities. They often apply a concept I remember from a family psychology class – “Good parents are only as happy as their least happy child.” – to the entire society.

(That might sound good at first. What kind of monstrous parent can be happily unaffected by the misery of his children? But if you’ve got more than two children – and sometimes if you only have one! – one or more of them will regularly be unhappy to some degree. Therefore, no parent should ever be happy?)

Trying to apply this idea to any society leads one to a rhetorical question that is really an indictment:

“How can you sleep at night, knowing that [insert allegedly victimized person or group here] is suffering in [insert location or situation here]?” This could be “…knowing that gays are getting mocked or hassled by some straight people,” or “…women are being ogled/harassed by men” or “…blacks are being arrested in greater numbers” or “…poor people are living in food deserts” or “…Palestinians are being genocided.” Etc.

The message is consistent: if you’re not dour and miserable, you’re not a smart, serious, or moral person. That position naturally creates unhappiness, since if you catch yourself feeling happy, you start feeling guilty.

But I don’t want to let our side off the hook. We also choose self-flattering reasons to explain our happiness. We think that we know the truth about life – men and women are different and cannot transition back and forth; we’ll do better managing our own lives than the government would; individuals are responsible for their own choices, and should reap the benefits of good choices and suffer the consequences of bad ones, etc. (Okay, so we’re clearly right about those.)

Especially if we’re doing well in life, we can become cocky. If we are religious, we naturally believe that our religion is the true one, and that can make us self-righteously judgmental. We can also be uncharitable to our lefty fellow citizens, as I have often been. For example, it’s easy to watch some anti-ICE protestors, and point out that they are losers in life, rude and angry and hateful, as ugly on the inside as they have made themselves on the outside.

And though there is always some truth in that, there are also some errors and misunderstandings, arising from our limited knowledge of the lives and minds of others. Many of them are obviously hurting. They’ve had absent fathers or neglectful or abusive parents, and they’ve been badly educated in ways that made them vulnerable to propaganda and indoctrination. Some of them are not very intelligent. Many of them have had fewer opportunities than some of us have had.

Some combination of all of the above has given many of them less margin for error than some of us, and made it harder for them to recover from bad choices. The fact that they’re doing relatively poorly in our system naturally makes them too quick to blame the system rather than look at their own actions. But it’s also true that our own success can make us too quick to take all of the credit for our accomplishments, and to assign all blame for others’ failures entirely to their own actions. And that is rarely completely true.

In my next (and last) column on this topic, I’ll consider the chicken-and-egg question – are unhappy people drawn to leftism, or does being a leftist make one unhappy? – and the role played by general optimism and pessimism, and some potential ways to shrink the happiness gap…without making ourselves as unhappy as leftists!

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

What Makes People Happy, Part 2 (posted 7/13/26)

On Friday I started a series of articles about happiness, and I talked about how money and income, along with career and gender, impact happiness. I’m heading toward some thoughts on how politics and political ideology affect happiness, but on the way I’d like to consider a couple of other factors: the impact of social media and social connections, and the impact of religious belief.

First, it’s pretty easy to see social media as a big dose of brain poison that you’re inviting into your house and life on a daily basis. But I won’t go nearly that far. I think the internet is like many things in life, in that it is not intrinsically good or bad. It offers many possibilities that you can use to either improve your life or degrade it.

Sure, there’s lots of porn and conspiracy theories and political dreck that takes over way too many people’s lives. But there’s also smart conversation and music and all of the great achievements of humanity at your fingertips. And there’s the possibility of making a network of social connections, too.

Regular readers will remember that I only started this page because an impressive guy calling himself CO (the Cautious Optimist) started a Facebook page called Cautious Optimism over 10 years ago now, and invited me to join some early members and write occasional pieces there. The site dealt with everything from culture to music to politics and humor, and people were free to contribute links and commentary for everybody to discuss. A great person volunteered to police the site and kick out the trolls (Shout out to Laura Belveal!), and soon many hundreds of smart and interesting people started chiming in, and a great community of over 30,000 members grew up there. Facebook inexplicably shut the site down last November for no reason that they were willing to disclose, and that was a real loss to many of us – which is a sadly ironic testament to the positive impact that social media can have in our lives.

By the way, some of you have regularly been asking me if the mysterious CO might ever start the page up again. I can only say that I’ve been in regular contact with him, and have been encouraging him to do so; he seems to be considering it, but I don’t know more than that right now.

Anyway, having said all that, social media still has obvious downsides that impede personal happiness in ways that I think we’ve only started to grasp. Some of them are simply the opportunity cost involved in anything that takes up that much of your time. If you’re spending many hours a day consuming social media on screens, you’re by definition not spending those hours interacting with people in the real world, or reading books, or learning a language or an instrument, or walking in the woods.

Also there is the big problem of comparing yourself to others – most of whom have painted a falsely positive picture of their own lives in their online posts – which is a recipe for misery, and also for feeding the narcissism to which we are all susceptible. Everybody wants to be an influencer of some sort, with their own podcast or website, and will seemingly sell their souls for clicks. (And I say that as someone who has been on a few podcasts, and writes my own columns and has recorded a few videos for this, my own website!)

(Sidebar: Narcissism is terrible, whether it is exacerbated by social media or not. The quality that is opposed to narcissism – humility – is an old-fashioned and misunderstood virtue, because we often think of it as putting yourself down or feeling inferior. But I love CS Lewis’s definition: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”)

Another problem with social media is the way it can cut us off from community, social networks and inter-connectedness. (And of course, it is good when it does the opposite, as I think it does when people use it to establish worthwhile and nurturing online communities like the late, lamented CO site.)

Researchers who study happiness have long pointed to having friend networks and social connections as a reliable index of personal happiness, and though social media has clearly exacerbated the deterioration of these connections, it was already going on in America before the internet.

Robert Putnam wrote an influential book in 2000 called Bowling Alone, in which he documented the trend. He pointed to the marked decrease of people participating in social organizations like scouting (for children), and civic or fraternal organizations like The Lions Clubs, Elks Clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis, etc. for adults. His title comes from the fact that while slightly more Americans were bowling, many fewer were bowling in organized leagues. Hence “bowling alone.”

The declining participation in fraternal organizations – some of which were religiously affiliated, such as the Knights of Columbus or the Hibernians – was mirrored by decreasing church attendance and participation in religious organizations. And that trend influences human happiness, too.

There is a large body of research that suggests that actively religious people are happier than irreligious people. Some studies point to variations within the larger finding – looking at the way the connection between religious participation and happiness may be shaped by differences in nationality, economic status, and others – but the overall connection appears to be consistent.

A recent study from Pew Research of survey results from the US and 25 other nations is fairly typical. Those studied were categorized into three groups: the actively religious (who worship at least monthly), the inactively religious (who identify with a religion but attend less frequently), and the unaffiliated, or “nones” (i.e. the non-religious).

In most of the countries surveyed, the actively religious were more likely than those in the other two categories to describe themselves as “very happy.” In the US, 36% of the actively religious – compared to 25% of the inactive and 25% of the “nones” – described themselves that way.

The same pattern held when looking at how often the three groups also participated in other types of non-religious organizations, such as charities and clubs. Among the actively religious, 58% also participated in at least one nonreligious voluntary organization, as compared with 51% of the inactives, and only 39% of the “nones.”

I know it’s wise to tread lightly when it comes to religion, but I will say that I find these patterns both intuitive and counter-intuitive, in different ways. Because of my own bias – I’m a Christian – I’m predisposed to think that my faith would naturally make people generally happier. The word “gospel” means “good news,” and the idea that a loving Creator made me in His image is pretty sweet.

On the other hand, I can also see ways in which religion could make one unhappy, and atheism could make one happy. Because the idea of adhering to a moral code that forbids a lot of pretty alluring things – hookers and blow are off-limits, as is smiting the many idiots in life who strike me as quite smite-worthy – and teaches that at the end of this life I will be called to account by my Maker for every word and deed in my life? Not so giddy-making.

Conversely, atheism – to the extent that it sees humans as animals with a more developed frontal cortex, morality as human-devised and arbitrary, and conscience as an illegitimate restriction imposed on the individual by others in their own self-interest – gives one a desirable permission slip to do what feels good or serves you. Hookers and blow and smiting the smite-worthy are back on the table, along with raping and pillaging and all else that you can do without getting caught.

(Or, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, “If there is no God, nothing is impermissible.”)

Now I’m not here to tell you which is the One True Religion. I’ve made my call on that, but you’ll have to work that out on your own. (I recommend doing so with fear and trembling, so….)

But this last point provides me with a transition to my remaining thoughts about happiness, which I will explore next time.

Here’s a preview: politics strongly affects happiness, with conservatives generally being much happier than leftists.

My previous point suggests at least a partial explanation, because Republicans are per capita much more religious than Democrats. Another Pew Research Center study that has been conducted three times since 2007 – this one looking at the “religious identities, beliefs and practices” of over 35,000 Americans – includes the following findings:

81% of Republicans identify with a religion, as compared with 50% of Democrats

52% of Republicans pray daily; 41% go to church as least monthly; 48% say religion is important in their lives

For Democrats, those numbers are 35%, 24% and 28%, respectively

Another study found that even as the percentage of Republicans who are irreligious has grown, there is still a large “God gap” between the parties. This phenomenon played out in the 2024 election, when 80% of Trump voters identified as Christians, compared to just 40% of Harris voters. Two-thirds of Harris voters “seldom” or “never” attend church.

So if religious people are happier, and more conservatives than liberals are religious, that pattern partially explains the happiness gap between the left and right.

But only partially. If you’ll hang in there with me, I’ll look at some of the others causes in my next column.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.

What Makes People Happy or Unhappy? (posted 7/10/26)

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 250^th 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 250^th, 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!

0-0-0

If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.