Everything is great and nobody is OK

How are you doing?

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

I wrote that headline in my head months ago, but I wasn’t ready to write the words that came after it until a week ago.

The genesis was a feeling within myself and one observed all around me: We are living in an era of unprecedented privilege, in which many of us have almost anything we want seemingly whenever we want it.

But this ease of living has not translated into widespread happiness. Quite the contrary, a lot of people are struggling to be happy.

Many of us are strapped for time even though we have conveniences and shortcuts that allow us to obtain and do things quickly. A lot of us feel strapped for money even if it seems like we should have more than enough of it. We are past the pandemic stage of COVID, but some of us are having a hard time re-emerging.

The ingredients are there for more of us to be living our best lives, but I do not sense that is the reality in many cases.

Hence, everything is great and nobody is OK.

That’s overly dramatic, of course, but the spirit of it feels like the subtext of 2024.

What I didn’t completely have a handle on — and still might not, you be the judge — is why? A few thoughts kept tumbling around in my head, but they felt incomplete until one final piece fell into place recently.

My process started as I tried to understand why people these days can’t seem to appreciate everything they have.

It would drive me crazy to think about our lives compared to those of generations-ago ancestors — scrapping for food, working hard just to stay alive, with none of our modern conveniences — and then hear complaints about how hard things are now.

As it turns out, our brains aren’t really wired to make those sorts of rational comparisons. We can try to be grateful for all we have now compared to the relative material struggles of the distant past, but inevitably our true measures brings us back to the present.

Do we have as much as we can have? And do we have as much as the people around us? Each innovation or life-altering advancement is quickly absorbed into our day-to-day lives.

Even material gains are fleeting.

As Richard Layard — a British “happiness economist” — is quoted in a New York Times piece: “Each person would become happier because he was richer, but less happy because other people were richer. The two effects would cancel each other out, because relative income would be unchanged.”

So that helps explain why we have a hard time appreciating what we have. It’s not relative to a fixed past. It’s fluid and present.

But I was still stuck. I generally consider myself to be a happy person. There are days of struggle, but the faces I see walking down the street in daily life often seem more distant, checked out or flat-out sad than I remember them being, say, 10 years ago.

I’m happy. Why aren’t you happy?

The reflection here is this: I tend to conflate my own experience for that of the world at large. If I learn a new fact, for instance, I am often guilty of assuming countless other people already know that fact and now we all share in this knowledge.

If I’ve adopted a worldview in 2024 that allows me to be happy, my instinct is to imagine that others have done the same.

When I come back to a rational point, it’s clear this is a fallacy. My life is distinct — a unique sum of parts, beliefs and memories.

Additionally, my privilege as a white male of solid middle to upper-middle class income in the United States means that, yeah, I have it pretty good.

But that gets to the third thing I had been thinking about: Even if we take relativity out of things, there are some things in the world that are just really hard right now.

The political climate is exhausting. Speaking of climate, there’s existential dread over our warming planet. Wars dominate headlines. The news in general feels so bad sometimes that we’d all rather just escape. Even if inflation is getting under control, our lived experiences don’t seem to reflect that. Things are expensive and out of reach.

Even with the counterweight that people throughout the history of time have had to deal with wars, famine and other bad news on a larger scale than just their own lives, the here and now (getting back to that first point about relativity) can still feel very heavy in and of itself.

But even as I understood that we don’t compare our circumstances to past generations, that I needed to check my own privilege and that yes, there are truly bad things happening in a world where a lot of good things are also happening, I was stuck thinking: We have so much. We should be happier.

The final observation, which helped me get unstuck, can be viewed as either sobering or a point of hope.

Nobody is OK because everything is great.

This shows up as a central theme in the book I’m currently reading: “The Comfort Crisis” by Michael Easter, and it was reinforced in his recent Substack post about results from this year’s World Happiness Report.

Particularly in wealthy countries like the United States — which dropped in one year from No. 16 to No. 23 in that recent happiness report — our material wants and needs are delivered with such ease that even minor inconveniences now seem like massive struggles.

Fewer of us are willing to go through a real struggle and come out stronger. We have become too comfortable and consequently out of touch with the sorts of challenges and relationships that, in the end, make us happier and more fulfilled.

It’s a little too simple to say “smartphones are ruining us,” but it’s particularly worrisome that when broken down by age group those classified as “young” in the happiness report in both U.S. and Canada are far less happy than those who are old.

I would say economic insecurity and climate concerns drive this age gap along with the isolating impact of technology.

But this point isn’t arguable: The things that we think of as advancements, and which might be thought of as components of the “everything is great” part of the headline, are actually making us less happy.

How do we flip this into some sort of good news? Basically by continuing to believe in the power of the individual to make choices and understand their own free will — to get out of the loops and habits that drag us down and use all the tools at our disposal to truly live well.

One of Easter’s takeaways in that Substack post really resonates with me:

“Think of happiness not as a destination but a rolling average of my behavior. If I simply do more of the things I know are good for me and others in the long-run and less of the things that aren’t, I experience more happiness.”

Not everything is great. But maybe more of us can be OK?