It's housing. Fix housing, and people will be happier.<p>Seriously, I lurk a lot of places, and everyone is up in arms about cost of living at the moment. Reading most Reddit threads that mention housing will have 5k+ comments, all saying the same thing. People are at their breaking point.
A bit of a chart crime going on here. The source:
<a href="https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends" rel="nofollow">https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends</a><p>The original source shows more clearly how they only survey once every 3 years. So it's 2018 and 2021. The curvy line in the HN source suggests that 2019 and 2020 saw equal declines but this is an illusion as there's no data.<p>Obviously the pandemic likely explains the difference between 2018 and 2021, but another interesting difference is that where they normally do in-person interviews, this time they used email. This might only strengthen the effect of "misery" as people tend to shy away from saying they're unhappy in person but gladly do so via email.<p>Finally, some perspective is missing. Change the response in the link I shared to "Pretty happy" and it's a stable 55%, rising even. If you combine "very happy" and "pretty happy", you end up at some 75%.<p>"For the first time in polling history, in other words, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy."<p>Versus:<p>"Consistent with the entire polling history, the vast majority (75%) of Americans are pretty happy to very happy, despite the pandemic causing a spike in unhappy people."
As an American, I know I'm miserable because I have realized that I'm going to have to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich in all elections for the rest of my life, with any alternatives being disqualified for being a "socialist" or a "conspiracy theorist".
The graph makes it rather look like as if the decline in happiness began half a decade ago. The pandemic certainly didn‘t help but I would guess it all started with the polarization during the Trump administration.