A Study Shows Being Woke Makes You Unhappy. Here’s Why.

There are reasons why woke people always seem to unhappy

So, there’s a new study going around that shows that “woke” people are unhappy. You may be thinking, “Well, duh! Did we really need a study to figure that out?”

We did not. Still, this study is useful because if you look at how they determined people were woke, it gives us some clues to the problems with their thinking that make them so unhappy. It’s good for all of us to understand that kind of thing because we or someone close to us, may be making the same kind of mental errors.

Let’s start with a description of the study:

A study conducted by psychological researchers in Finland and published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology suggests that individuals who have a commitment to wokeness have poorer mental health and overall happiness levels….

The study surveyed 5,000 adult participants in Finland and found that those who are “woke” are more depressed, have more anxiety, and lack happiness. As reported, “Being more anxious and depressed and less happy was more pronounced in” those who consider social justice to be a huge issue.

“I had been paying attention to a development in American universities, where a new discourse on social justice became prevalent in the 2010s,” study author Oskari Lahtinen said, hence her desire to investigate. 

The study identified seven truisms of woke people:

· “If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism.”

· “University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.”

· “Microaggressions should be challenged often and actively.”

· “Trans* women who compete with women in sports are not helping women’s rights.” (reverse scored)

·  “We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.” (reverse scored)

·  “A white person cannot understand how a black person feels equally well as another black person.”

· “A member of a privileged group can adopt features or cultural elements of a less privileged group.” (reverse scored)

Those who agreed with the scale had a high prevalence of anxiety and depression. As the New York Post summarized, “More broadly, they found that those who identified as left-wing were most likely to report lower mental well-being.”

First of all, it’s worth noting that studies have consistently found that liberalism is correlated with unhappiness and mental illness, so this result is not unexpected.

However, as you look at what the article calls, the “seven truisms of woke people,” it’s worth noting a few obvious patterns that jump out at you.

The first is how race-centered the whole thing is, particularly given that the study was done in Finland where the population is roughly 1% black if you believe Wikipedia. In other words, this survey of “woke” people almost has to be mostly white Europeans who come across as actively disliking white Europeans. I’m sure if one of the few black Finns in their country came up to one of them and said something like, “Black people like me are inferior to whites. We cause most of the problems in the world. I’m always going to be a loser because I’m black,” they’d quite correctly go out of their way to convince that person that none of that was true and that it was totally unfair to look at the world that way.

Yet, that’s basically how they view themselves. They think they’re keeping black people down, being racist to them, and are advantaged compared to them, purely because of their skin color. I hate to use the “self-hating white people” cliché, but isn’t that essentially what it is? It’s bad enough to assume that race trumps individualism, but it’s even worse to assume that race trumps individualism and YOUR RACE is the problem.

Also, after looking at this list, I can’t help but be reminded old quote from P.J. O’Rourke:

Although they certainly wouldn’t put it that way, there seems to be a heavy dose of butting into other people’s business to essentially pick fights in that list. For example, a “microaggression” could be any trivial thing you go out of your way to take offense over, yet you’re supposed to challenge them “often and actively?” In other words, being woke means believing it’s your duty to pick fights over minor things most people wouldn’t even notice or might even consider a compliment. For example, here are some actual “microaggressions” listed in an article from Business Insider:

* “Ha, you're so OCD with how you manage projects” or “Damn, you work on so many things, it's like you have ADHD.”

* “Oh, sorry, wrong person.”

* “My boss is crazy.”

For woke people, these are three fights. For a normal person, the answers to this, in order are, “Thank you,” “No worries,” and “Why so?” They are not offended. Their day is not spoiled. They don’t need to “challenge” anyone. 

Similarly, do we really need to talk MORE about race? Because doesn’t that often end up in a contentious fight anytime people don’t agree? Then there’s “cultural appropriation,” which almost inevitably ends up being some historically illiterate person claiming only one group of people in history ever gets to do something while ignoring the fact that almost all culture is borrowed to one extent or another and it’s usually considered a compliment to the culture it’s borrowed from.

Recorded history goes back 5,000 years, the oldest city was founded roughly 11,000 years ago and human beings were stomping around for tens of thousands of years before that. Are none of us supposed to light a fire or use a wheel because some guy in a cave came up with it first? It’s dumb, but woke people think it’s worth fighting over.

Is it a surprise that people who feel obligated to create this kind of completely unnecessary strife around them are anxious, depressed, and less happy than other people?

Last but not least, here’s one of the little truths of life you don’t hear a lot of people talk about.

All of us have these mental maps of how life is, none of which exactly match the real world. This is what one of my all-time favorite quotes is referring to here:

That being said, the closer your mental maps are to what the real world is like, the smoother your life tends to go because you are in accord with reality. On the other hand, when your mental map of the world is wildly out of accord with reality, you do things like try to change your gender, launch a massive terrorist attack at your much more powerful neighbor, and expect them not to really hit you back, or just have “one drink” at the local bar if you’re a recovering alcoholic and it creates havoc in your life.

Woke people have to live with all sorts of glaring contradictions that make it impossible for them to be in accord with reality. For example, if they hear some of the obvious reasons why black Americans have lower incomes on average than white people that don’t involve racism, they have to pretend not to understand it. Unless they’re stupid, they can easily understand the physical differences between men and women, and they can see how unfair it is for a man to play women’s sports. On some level, they get how dumb it is for a university to replace Mark Twain or Shakespeare with the laughable dogsh*t Ibram X. Kendi or Nikole Hannah-Jones crap out for guilty liberals. Having their maps so far out of touch with the territory undoubtedly eats at them, but it’s more than that.

Not only do woke people have maps that are out of accord with reality in a wide variety of ways, but their maps are ever-changing because they’re based on trying to gain status with other woke liberals. What’s a “microaggression” or “cultural appropriation” may change from month to month based on whatever sort of virtue signaling happens to catch on.

When you have no real intellectual principles and your beliefs are based on trying to gain status with a nasty, fickle, intellectually vacuous group, you’re going to believe and do all sorts of foolish things that will create grief in your life.

If you want to know why woke people are depressed, anxious, and unhappy, it’s not Republicans, conservatives, Christians, or Trump causing it. It’s the broken way that they think. If they were a little wiser, they might realize that any way of thinking that consistently makes you anxious, depressed, and unhappy when so many other people in similar situations are cheerful, unbothered, and happy is likely to have something intrinsically wrong with it.

---