Happiness Comes Naturally

But unhappiness is a learned behavior

Unfortunately, however, it can’t buy happiness…

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The annual World Happiness Report came out recently, and all those who revile America must have been pleased to see that it has slipped to twenty-third place on the happiness index. No doubt they snickered over the fact that the Land of E Pluribus Unum has devolved into a sinkhole of discontent and despair.

I’ve never placed much credence in the WHR, which is based on self-reported data. For all anyone knows the people of Finland, which captured the top spot this year, feel obligated to profess themselves happy as a gesture of social solidarity. Conformist societies are like that. But this year the WHR has done something interesting: It broke down happiness by age cohorts. And it turns out that America’s slide in the happiness rating is mainly due to people under thirty:

In the West, the received wisdom was that the young are the happiest and that happiness thereafter declines until middle age, followed by substantial recovery. But since 2006-10, as we shall see, happiness among the young (aged 15-24) has fallen sharply in North America – to a point where the young are less happy than the old. Youth happiness has also fallen (but less sharply) in Western Europe.

Here we have solid evidence that Oscar Wilde knew what he was talking about when he observed that “Youth is wasted on the young.”

This comes as no surprise. For years now we’ve been bombarded with the whining and crying of young people whose lives, to hear them tell it, is a daily slog through Purgatory. Happiness is impossible, everything sucks, life is scarcely worth living. This is odd when you consider that few of these youthful complainants have missed a meal recently, or live in a cardboard box at the end of some filthy alley, or slave away for seventy hours a week in some satanic mill. Physically, their lives are comfortable—so much so that to maintain their sense of martyrdom they feel compelled to invent imaginary scourges like “microaggressions.” But at bottom their discontent is psychological. For kids nowadays, the world just isn’t as it should be.

If you believed that you live in a society controlled by sinister forces like the Patriarchy, White Supremacy and predatory capitalism; if you believed that the country of your birth is a fascist hellhole; if you believed that “climate change” will assuredly destroy the world before you reach the age of forty; and if you believed that there is nothing to be done about any of it—you too would be profoundly unhappy. But you’re lucky—you were educated in public schools, colleges, and universities that had not yet succumbed to the toxic ideology of postmodernism. Or maybe you just got older and came to realize that all that stuff you’d been taught about the horrors of existence is simply crap.

In short, the unhappiness of young people today is a learned behavior.

Young Americans derive their unhappiness from three sources: education, ideology, and culture. These, indeed, are overlapping categories. For instance, the anti-American attitudes of young people are drummed into them in public schools and higher education, which have been captured by postmodern progressivism. The teaching of American history, to the extent that it’s taught at all nowadays, is disfigured by narratives of racism, patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, etc. The general line is that America is rotten to the core. And the implication is that America is irredeemable—nothing can be done to change things—this is your life.

As Marxist ideology was founded on a theory of class, postmodern progressive ideology is founded on theories of race and gender. Both ideologies sort humanity into two groups: oppressor and oppressed. Marxism’s variant was straightforward: there were the bourgeoise (oppressors) and the proletariat (oppressed). Progressivism’s version is more complicated, if no more sophisticated: Individuals earn social debits and credits based on certain characteristics. Thus a heterosexual white male is the acme of the oppressor class, while a transsexual black female is the exemplar of the oppressed class. To be sure, this is no more than a stupid little game of victimology but it’s just the sort of dogmatic nonsense to which young people are drawn. It also valorizes victimhood—and as we know, young Americans today crave that status above all others. The one thing it doesn’t deliver is happiness.

Then there’s the cultural milieu inhabited by young Americans, which reviles and denounces the very things that could make them happy.

Take the war on work. In progressive circles a theory has appeared that work is a form of oppression, an intolerable obstacle to the full development of one’s personality. Supposedly, drudging away at some corporate office job steals the time that could be devoted to poetry, painting, music, political activism, etc. It’s a beguiling narrative but a false one. The truth is that most people, young people included, are not particularly creative or committed. If they had more free time, they’d just fritter it away.

But if you must work, at least don’t work hard. Hard workers are simply agents of predatory capitalism and besides, they make the rest of the team look like slackers. Ambition and a strong work ethic are denounced as antisocial traits. Since mediocrity is the norm, all must be mediocre. The idea that one’s work is a noble calling, a source of personal pride, is heretical. Work is just another form of oppression.

Marriage and family as well. Contemporary feminism in general, and the narrative of the Patriarchy in particular, persuade young people that marriage is a trap, children a burden. Conveniently, “climate change” extremism supplies a reason to avoid the parent trap: It would be immoral, you see, to bring a child into a world on the eve of destruction. This is comical if you like—or tragicomical. It’s to deny oneself the opportunity to do the most important and satisfying things that most of us will ever do: build a life in partnership with another and bring new life into the world.

The third strike against young Americans is their enormous sense of entitlement.

This entitlement mentality is fostered by the multiplication of positive rights: to education, to healthcare, to a certain standard of living, to a safe space where never is heard a disquieting word, to happiness itself. But for all their talk of “equity” and “fairness,” young people seem uninterested in working toward those ends. They’re passive consumers of “social justice”; it’s somebody else’s job to deliver the goods. Accordingly, they look to government—which invariably disappoints.

And there you have it: Young people in America today are programmed to be miserable.

Here it becomes necessary to point out that of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Young people serving in the armed forces, for instance, have chosen to inhabit quite a different social and cultural milieu. They’ve embraced a higher calling that valorizes service above self. Incidentally, this probably explains why progressive dogma in the form of DEI/CRT malarky is being force-fed to the military: It needs to get with the postmodern program. Well, the next war will take care of that.

Even outside the armed forces, there are young people who live by the values that produce true happiness. But as the World Happiness Report shows, the generality of youth in America is mired in misery. No doubt many of them will grow out of their unhappiness, finding satisfaction in lives well lived. If only they could recover what was stolen from them—the lost promise of their youth!