Happy days are NOT here again for an increasing number of Amerikans, despite our supposedly robust economy and status as the #1 destination choice for global refugees from climate change, economic collapse and failed state status of their home countries.  One they arrive, they find out it's not really Beverly Hills 90210 for everyone in the land of wage slaves and debtors.



https://www.axios.com/2024/03/20/world-happiness-america-low-list-countries

U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report

RE

From the report

QuoteToday's young people report feeling less supported by friends and family, less free to make life choices, more stressed and less satisfied with their living conditions, Lara Aknin, an editor of the report, told Axios.
    People under 30 today also feel less confident in government and have increased perceptions of corruption, she added.
    The report also found that older people are now happier than young people in North America — the opposite of many other regions.

"older people are now happier than young people in North America" 

Yes motherfuckers, so far we have survived.

RE, your recent postings on the horrors of underpopulation suggest the young have no purpose.  Most people can't find purpose on their own.  Families gave that purpose.  Children for the most part give parents purpose.  With that purpose gone, most people will have a tall glass of unhappiness.  Not everybody, just most.

Quote from: K-Dog on Mar 21, 2024, 12:54 PMRE, your recent postings on the horrors of underpopulation suggest the young have no purpose.  Most people can't find purpose on their own.  Families gave that purpose.  Children for the most part give parents purpose.  With that purpose gone, most people will have a tall glass of unhappiness.  Not everybody, just most.

I think finding purpose has become difficult for all age groups, but since young people are just starting out in life, having it all out ahead of you without purpose seems like a really long way to go without a destination in mind.  Sort of like looking out on desert in all directions around you and trying to pick which way to go.  All you can do is just start walking.

It's one of the reasons I think Zombie movies are so popular.  People see themselves as Zombies, just blindly walking in a daze looking for flesh to consume.  When you look at other people on the subway, sitting in traffic, waiting on the checkout line at the supermarket, sitting on a park bench with their face inches from their cell phones...they all seem like Zombies too.  Politicians are Zombies...literally, Biden and Trump look like the Walking Dead.  Not only do we individually seem to lack purpose, we lack it as a civilization.  What is the purpose of all this running around to buy new things, see the latest movie, the endless pursuit of "progress"?  For 99% of the population also, it's a constant struggle just to pay your next mortgage payment or car loan.  What is the point of this never ending treadmill?  Even having sex isn't that much fun for young people anymore.

Back in the 60's, hippies had a purpose.  "Turn on, Tune In & Drop Out."  Now, even dropping out doesn't seem possible anymore.  So you take a Gig Job, and you just keep walking toward the horizon.  Everything's the same in front of you, behind you and to either side.  There's nothing there.

RE

Oh come on!  Can this author or anybody on the Reddit Millenials subforum really be that clueless that they think the feeling of dread about the future and what is coming down the pipe is just PTSD from Covid?  Really?  The APA suggests we need "collective healing" to overcome the sense of impending doom.  This is what some idiots pay Psychiatrists $250/hr to tell them, then prescribe a bottle of Xanax on the way out the door.  Unbelievable.

No wonder these folks can't figure out if they're boys or girls.     We have rocketed past hopeless and now just need to be put out of our misery.

https://www.upworthy.com/gen-x-perfectly-explains-millennial-problems

Gen Xer explains sense of 'impending doom' that seems to define the Millennial generation


RE

QuoteNo wonder these folks can't figure out if they're boys or girls.

Which would be fine.  But they are stupid on our time.

Welcome to the Diner jupiviv.

Quotedefinitions of "happiness", "freedom" etc are usually several degrees removed from objective criteria

Not here.  I have been a disciple of Richard Wilkinson for a long time.  I have this book.

Objective Criteria is what measurement is all about if the science of happiness is going to mean anything.  If you are not objective you can't find causes and correlations.

Objective measurement reveals happiness is strongly tied to inequality.  People are social.  Unequal societies put up barriers between people and isolate them from each other.  Studies reveal that happiness is largely determined by healthy social connections.  Isolated people die sooner.  It is a fact.

Humans are social.  Society defines us.

Quote from: jupiviv on Mar 30, 2024, 12:25 AMHi everyone, just joined. Was a fan of this space/scene back in the 2010s. Good to see you guys are still around!

Always a pleasure when an old timer finds us again.    Since we didn't launch the original doomstead Diner until Feb 2012,  I'll assume by "2010s" you are talking about the whole decade.  Unless you were with us on my Reverse Engineering Yahoo Group, which I began in around 2009 I think after being booted off of the PeakOil.com website and a couple of others as well.  Do you remember the ScreenID you used bacck in those days?  I don't recognize your current one.

Personally, I think stretching the term "wealthiest" to 40% of the FSoA population puts too many people in the category of living the "American Dream" comfortably enough to be really "happy", which also is a kind of nebulous, hard to define idea.

However, if you look at FSoA income distribution, just to make the Top 20% of earners, you have to be making $100K/year.



Can you own a McMansion, have 2 late model carz in your garage and have enough money left over to pay your medical insurance, college tuition for your kids (at least helping them out if not fully paying for it), cover emergency expenses like major car repairs or a new roof on the McMansion, and take the occasinal vacation or go to a nice restaurant once a month?  Do you have 6 months worth of money to pay your bills if you lose your job?  Are you actually happy with the job you do have even if it is reasonably secure?

These are just the basic financial bellweathers for happiness, because if you don't feel secure financially, it's tough to be really "happy".  Then there are the less tangible things, like your marriage.  Are you and your spouse still happily married after 20 years with a great sex life (with each other, lol), and neither of you depends on antidepressants, legal or illegal drugs or alcohol to take the edge off a few times a week or even every day?  Your kids are both doing well in school and are happy with the sex equipment they were born with?  They have decent social lives where they actually meet people IRL, not just text each other all day on their iphones?

IMHO, I think few people in the FSoA who earn $100K/year would characterize themselves as happy.  Compared to another person of the same age and stage of life who is making min wage and grossing $50K working 2 jobs they are probably happi-er, but not really happy.  Perhaps they are satisfied with where they are if their debts aren't too big and they have a netflix subscription to keep them entertained after work, but I don't think that qualifies as happiness.

Finland is supposedly the happiest country, where their incomes are lower, but much more evenly distributed across the population.  They still have some sense of community in Finland I think, at least based on one documentary I saw while waiting in the Pain Clinic for my mnthly appointment to renew my opiates scrip.

So, IMHO, I think to have a reasonable shot at being happy in the FSoA, you need to be in the top 10%, not 40%.  But again, it's hard to say because it's hard to define happiness.

RE

Happiness may be hard to define.  To get around that objective measures are used.

Are divorced people in general more unhappy?

You don't look at questionnaires.  You don't get a caliper out to measure smiles.  Instead you look at the mortality tables and you find out that children of divorced families live on average four years less.  If the children themselves become divorced add another four years.  Is there a relationship between happiness and life expectancy?  Last I knew bears were still shitting in the woods.

If you found 1000 men who all own tools to turn wood and split the men into groups A and B by some criteria.  Something that does not interfere with turning wood, and ask which group is happier? 

Group A made 20% more things than group B last year.



Depressed people would make the difference.  And you never measured depression.  You don't know how to do that, but you can count wooden bowls.

It is counterintuitive, but by measuring indicators you get objective results that are far better than asking someone if they are happy or not.  The key to getting good results is to find a lot of indicators.

In 1907, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. None of them got the right answer, but when Galton averaged their guesses, he arrived at a near perfect estimate. When I first discovered this factoid it seemed supernatural but it is not really.

Shoot a couple dozen arrows at a target, average the position and you likely have a bulls eye.

Happiness is so subjective that you could make a case for just about any percentage, so any kind of study trying to determine such a thing isn't very useful anyhoww.  I mean, if you supply a heroin addict with enough supply and he had a nice place to shoot up safely, he's gonna be happy, right?  then there was that book back in the 70s, the "Happy Hooker".  Are any prostitutes happy?  The expensive Call Girls who only take the best clients and only have to flatback a few times a month to make a 6 figure income?  Maybe they are happier than Elon Musk's A List Vagina wives who work as baby factories for him?

Even dieing young doesn't necessarily mean you were unhappy.  Some folks live by the motto, "Live Fast, Die Young, leave a Good Looking Corpse".  Gven the divorce rate and the fact that rich men often go through several wives indicates they are never really happy either.  Money doesn't buy happiness, but neither does poverty.

The best you can do are look at some statistics on objective things, like how many mass shootings there are, how many suicides, how many homeless.  While there may be Happy Hookers out there, I don't think anyone who is homeless is happy about it.

Far as the rest of the collapse blogosphere goes, we've discussed that here and for the most part the old websites are gone or they've become repetitive in their content.  I try to keep things fressh by looking at the latest trends like the falling birthrate and the gender dysphoria that seems to be on the increase.  There's always some new manifestation of collapse popping up, so you don't have to stay glued to one concept and beat it to death, as some trolls like to do.  lol.

RE

Quote from: jupiviv on Mar 30, 2024, 03:26 PM

Quote from: RE on Mar 30, 2024, 02:31 PMMoney doesn't buy happiness, but neither does poverty.

Takes the sting out of being poor though.

Define "sting"? Those of us born into the condition didn't even really think about it, or consider ourselves that. In part because there was also someone poorer down the block. By comparison, with a working man in the family at a factory rather than just a farmer, we had a TV and some rabbit ears and sure looked "rich" to some other in the holler. They only had a radio. Nobody had health care, black lung was knocking off the miners regularly so we attended family funerals couple times between the age of 10 and 15 that I remember, what college educations handed out with unlimited loans to anyone who wanted them, so they could major in ethnic studies or symbolism in prehistoric art of whatever passes for upper level education nowadays. We were 14 years old and most already smoking because it was cool. You want protein? Here is a trap and a gun..go figure out how to get some meat or go hungry.

American changed as to even what "poor" means. Look at what "not poor" means to RE. To heck with that, folks feel poor if they don't have the newest iPhone. Whoa is me...I am poverty stricken. So a lifestyle that today might seem Third World in modern America isn't even what "poor" is nowadays. 

So what is the sting of modern poor? Not living up to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, or poor as in how some of us grew up that wouldn't even be recognized by modern welfare recipients? Collecting mailbox money and cards, provided health care, job training, education benefits and help, able to afford TVs and heat and electricity not provided mostly by woodstoves, FOOD STAMPS. We knew some people we referred to as "reliefers", I think that meant they collected something government wise that was terribly embarassing, now THOSE folks were the poor. The rest of us started at age 10 with the trapline, firearms at 12 and were damn proud of helping to support our families because we weren't none of them damn "reliefers"...whatever that ephiphet meant. I just knew it was bad to be one.

Quote from: jupivivYeah, collapse is a sum greater than its interconnected parts. I see it (the phenomenon itself) as a critique of the capital system.

I think collapse is just the result of humans being human, the way we treat each other, our economic and social systems, the things we strive for and turn to bad ends, the dismissal of the collective good in favor of the individual gain, and all the other mechanisms that have encouraged us to be selfish, mean spirited, dogmatic, anti-science, conspiratorial and just outright self centered "me first" humans. 

Nobody despises poor people more than poor people who got rich.

Yeah, back in the day, poor people were really poor.  Today's poor people have it too easy.  They get their tents from Walmart.    MKing slept in a cardboard box when he was a poor kid in Appalachia.  Today's poor kids get SNAP cards and school lunches.  In Appalachia, the poor kids ate bugs and chicken feed.  Alcoholic homeless people today get to drink brand name liquor,  MKings dad drank moonshine made from pigshit.

Yup, we need to go back to the good old days when it meant something to be poor.

RE

Quote from: jupiviv on Mar 31, 2024, 01:21 AMSometimes an egg is just an egg.

Interesting response.  You have now met our long time Diner Troll, who will no doubt take this opportunity to pontificate on his generally misanthropic POV and worldview.  I'll be interested to see how much patience you have for it.

RE

Quote from: jupiviv on Mar 31, 2024, 01:21 AM

Quote from: TDoS on Mar 30, 2024, 09:16 PMDefine "sting"?

'We' didn't write this post, you did. And it's pretty clear you thought about it a lot.

I wrote my post. Asking a simple quesiton and then putting a frame of reference of around it. I didn't come up with the idea of somehow being poor comes with a "sting" to it, only asked, and to some extent answered, what someone might think that is.

Quote from: jupivivYou just don't know what to do about it (for good reason) and rationalise that impotence into some kind of special superpower that you imagine wielding over people who 'don't know what poor is'.

Oh, I know what to do about it. And then did it. Solving current "poverty" (as you didn't answer what the sting of it was about, to you) might need to involve a serious redistribution of American wealth with the controls necessary to make it work. Not popular among the oligarchs.

Special superpower? Is that what people who survived being born into poverty have? You might have to elaborate on that one.

Quote from: jupivivWhich is patent bullshit.

Good thing it wasn't my idea then. Any reason you would suppose poverty is a special superpower and then blame me for it being bullshit? It was your idea.

Quote from: TDoSI think collapse is just the result of humans being human...... 

Quote from: jupivivThere is no innate human nature. If there were, the earliest modern humans woulda created and destroyed industrial civ tens of thousands of years ago. The conditions and processes of social organization which led to surplus accumulating slave society, the one we inhabit, are also the ones that created the potential for a universal humanity. But just because something can happen doesn't mean it will. Just because eggs can lead to chickens doesn't mean they always do. Sometimes an egg is just an egg.

So no innate human nature is quantified by what we ultimately became and are? Cool. Sounds same as innate to me. Collapse is also part of the consequences of that innate human nature.

A related question that could be pondered is it's opposite, or what makes us unhappy, especially in 2024 which factors seem to be increasing, causing increased unhappiness.
 
  There is a significant amount of economic uncertainty and financial instability, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased homelessness, going further into debt, and fear of not having a sustainable life.

There is a large increase in social isolation and loneliness, which have been exacerbated by the shift towards remote work and social distancing measures. K-Dog has nailed this one down.

There is constant political polarization and increasing civil unrest, that create feelings of anxiety, fear, and division. This makes any "future" for us very suspect.

Then there is environmental concerns, such as the climate crisis and natural disasters, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and despair, because it is causing such major issues with all of life's sustainable aspects. See Maslow's pyramid of human necessities for happiness. Food and shelter being first.

  Which brings us to unhappiness which makes us unhappy, or mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, which affects anyone regardless of their circumstances.

As resource depletion continues at a rapid pace, the general atmosphere of living for the majority of humanity is very uncertain. The volatility index is very high.

Quote from: Knarf on Mar 31, 2024, 07:33 AMA related question that could be pondered is it's opposite, or what makes us unhappy, especially in 2024 which factors seem to be increasing, causing increased unhappiness.

And the definitions of those factors, be they "unhappy" or "happy". To some, food on table twice a day is a happy factor. To others, eating out twice a day at nice restaurants is happy, bologna sandwichs unthinkable, and if the personal chef doesn't show up at least twice a week, they are miserable.
Relative terms make the measurements sketchy without a bunch of definitions and explanations in advance of the question, and that is before screening out natural bias, or physical bias, or socio-economic bias.

Quote from: KnarfThere is a significant amount of economic uncertainty and financial instability, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased homelessness, going further into debt, and fear of not having a sustainable life.

Or fear of not sustainable their once "fine" life. Times of change, regardless of why, generate uncertainty among the populace, and no one likes change. People suffer fear of the unknown no different than the cavemen did. There is some innate stuff right there.

Quote from: KnarfThere is a large increase in social isolation and loneliness, which have been exacerbated by the shift towards remote work and social distancing measures. K-Dog has nailed this one down.
There is constant political polarization and increasing civil unrest, that create feelings of anxiety, fear, and division. This makes any "future" for us very suspect.
Then there is environmental concerns, such as the climate crisis and natural disasters, which can lead to feelings of helplessness and despair, because it is causing such major issues with all of life's sustainable aspects. See Maslow's pyramid of human necessities for happiness. Food and shelter being first.

There is certainly change in the air. Concerns. And I agree with Maslow! The food part of those necessities was occasionally dodgy when I was young, never thought of it as unhappy though? More like....desperate? Hungry...which taught its own lessons, mostly had a roof over my head though except with I was homeless for about 4 months once. But that was more of a plan, rather than some weird combination of circumstances that just landed me on the street.

Quote from: KnarfWhich brings us to unhappiness which makes us unhappy, or mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, which affects anyone regardless of their circumstances.

As resource depletion continues at a rapid pace, the general atmosphere of living for the majority of humanity is very uncertain. The volatility index is very high.

All of which is true. But another dynamic, particularly on this website, is we all appear to be old. And I never hear about fears discussed in terms of fears for our children? We aren't a sample size of much of anything representative of the world nowadays maybe? Raised in different eras, with different fears, and some of us with obvious predilections and irritations because "I want my end times and I want them now!" has been a mantra going back into the last century.