By most measurable accounts, and more than a few unmeasurable ones, people today are more miserable than they used to be. You have likely read the articles and seen the studies. The data is hard to dispute. But what I keep turning over is a more restless question: what, if anything, can be done about it?
The writer Derek Thompson recently offered what he called a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties (as in the 2020s.) His diagnosis is worth sitting with:
“American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied… while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.”
Thompson’s diagnosis is accurate and sobering. But diagnosis is not a cure. I suggest three things that might help.
I. Life Is Difficult
That is the opening sentence of M. Scott Peck’s 1978 book The Road Less Traveled, a work that managed to land Buddhist insight about the nature of suffering in the middle of American individualism’s relentless cheerfulness. Peck’s argument was deceptively simple: because we refuse to accept that life is genuinely hard, we are perpetually ambushed by its difficulty. Our denial of suffering does not spare us from it. It only leaves us less equipped to bear it.
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made a similar observation when he wrote that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” What he meant is that when we refuse to meet our pain honestly, it does not disappear. It goes underground and finds other, more destructive, ways to surface. A grief-phobic culture is not a happy culture. It is an anxious one.
I have officiated at enough funerals to know how poorly we handle this grief. I once stood beside a seventy-five-year-old mother, grieving at her forty-seven-year-old son’s wake, when a visitor leaned in and said, “At least you still have two other children.” The impulse behind such words is not cruelty. It is discomfort, the same discomfort that underlies every forced smile, every hyper positivity post, every cultural message insisting that you should be happy, always, or else something is wrong with you. After all, we are the country built on the pursuit of happiness.
Ironically, I suggest that the first step toward a pursuit of, let’s call it contentment, is to embrace that life is difficult, life is hard, life endures suffering.
II. Community Helps
We are not built for solitude. Even those of us who tend toward introversion, who recharge in quiet alone time, still need other people. We simply prefer them in smaller numbers and at lower levels of intensity.
The sociologist Robert Bellah warned in Habits of the Heart that American individualism, taken to its logical conclusion, produces a kind of radical isolation that hollows out the self. Without communities of memory, without people who know our stories and hold us accountable to something larger than our preferences, we lose the thread of meaning. Thompson’s diagnosis confirms what Bellah feared: the self-isolation of modern life has not made us freer. It has made us more adrift.
For years, I have carried a variation of James Carville’s famous political shorthand. The insight that cut through the noise of the 1992 campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid.” My version is “It’s community, stupid.”
Despite its many faults, religion can foster a sense of community. The healthiest religious communities I know embody two key values: they are welcoming and actively serve others. (Spoiler alert for what’s coming) Healthy faith communities are places where people feel they belong and where they help others.
Community can also be found in music ensembles, neighborhood groups, reading circles, recovery programs, or anywhere else people show up regularly and begin to know each other’s names. The problem today is that many of the mid-twentieth-century structures that hosted this kind of belonging, the Grange halls, the bowling leagues, the civic clubs, have declined or disappeared. Some of them needed to go. But the need they met did not disappear with them.
My mother, now ninety-one, relocated to a new community fourteen years ago. She adopted a rule: visit each interest group and club at least once, then select the ones that truly suit her. This kind of intentionality does not come easily; it requires effort. Nevertheless, it is precisely the kind of determination the present moment calls for. The community you seek will not come to you; you must go out and find it.
Dorothy Day, who spent her life building exactly this kind of community at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, said it with characteristic plainness in The Long Loneliness: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” She was not speaking of sentiment. She was speaking of a practice, daily and concrete, chosen again and again, especially when it is inconvenient.
III. You Gotta Serve Somebody
Bob Dylan was onto something in the song with this title. The title captures a truth that social science has now documented with some rigor: service to others is among the most reliable routes to personal meaning and well-being.
The psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write Man’s Search for Meaning, argued that the deepest human drive is not pleasure, not power, but meaning. And meaning, he found, is discovered not through self-satisfaction but through self-giving. “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances,” Frankl wrote, “but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” I would suggest that much of the meaning in life involves serving others.
No one claims a cruise vacation is life-changing. However, many return from a week spent building Habitat for Humanity homes, teaching reading, or sitting with the dying and report how impactful the time was.
For years, my wife and I led groups to a remote mountain town in Honduras, where we spent a week building a church for a community in Yuscaran. We slept in rustic cabins, ate together, and worked alongside people whose language most of us barely spoke. On the last day, the conversation always returned to the same point. A teenager once voiced what everyone in the room was thinking: “We came here thinking we were going to help people, and it turned out we were the ones who got helped.” Every head nodded in agreement.
The Good Samaritan in Jesus’s parable is not the one who felt moved by compassion while safely on his way. He is the one who got off his donkey. The hero of the story is the one who served. The research bears this out: volunteering regularly is associated with lower rates of depression, greater life satisfaction, and even longer life expectancy. Serving others does not diminish us. It is, paradoxically, among the most effective things we can do for ourselves.
A Choice
The age of despair is real. Derek Thompson named it, and the data confirms it. The faces around us reflect it. But despair, for all its weight, is not the last word available to us.
Carl Jung believed the second half of life was an invitation to move from building the Self to building the Soul. That requires a maturity that comes, in part, from honestly facing life and seeking a more generative posture. We, as a culture, are in what might be understood as a collective second half. The old structures are not coming back. The question is whether we will build something better in their place or simply scroll until we forget the question was ever asked.
We have a choice. We can wallow, or we can get off our donkeys.
Previously Published on The Notebooks of James Hazelwood
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