Thank you for this article. I’ve ignored a family member for days after he texted me on Sunday morning gleefully saying rain and storms were going to cancel the event. It bothered me. A lot.
He’s ex military, former defense contractor, we come from a military patriotic good family - why is he like this?? But your article helped me: He’s a sour person. He doesn’t want to change or look inward. He’s bitter and sarcastic and - while he can be very funny - it always turns MEAN. Sometimes downright nasty.
I’ve invested enough emotional energy in anyone, family or not, who gets their kicks this way. Enough.
There are actually people who are angry that Trump cleaned up the pool in front of the Washington Monument. Once you're to that point, you've obviously got a lot of personal issues you're processing via politics.
"On the other hand, some people are just deeply unhappy. They don’t like themselves. They’ve embraced ideas, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world that make them miserable, and they just happen to be in America.
If they moved from here to France, Japan, Dubai, or Australia, they’d be just as depressed because the real problem is them, not where they live. Even if the place they live in changes, they’re stuck with the real source of their own misery everywhere they go."
Excellent piece.
The part quoted above very consistent with this recent Mike Munger piece:
"Using the same Track Your Happiness dataset, they found that people are mentally disengaged from what they are currently doing roughly 47 percent of the time — and that this mind-wandering is among the single strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset, outpacing income, activity type, and most demographic variables.
This finding reframes the whole income debate. The chronically unhappy group for whom money stopped working were almost certainly not unhappy because of insufficient funds. They were unhappy for reasons internal to their own patterns of attention and thought."
Great piece John. There isn't anything I disagree with here. However, I have a perspective of the source of this increase in miserable, unhappy people situation.
The human condition has many flaws that are also mechanisms of survival... most of them designed over centuries through an evolutionary biological process. It is a ying vs yang... blessing vs curse.
One of those flaws is always wanting more. It is a bit of that Hedonic Treadmill theory... that we reset to a new normal and want the next thing. When we think about human progress and the mechanism behind it... the motivation of individuals to invent, explore, achieve, advance... you can easily calculate that without it the human animal would likely have become extinct by now. However, the same impulse for more also explains all the wars and related death and carnage.
The other flaw is relative measure of status. I believe this relates to the fact that the human animal is dependent on others for more years than any other animal on the planet. If our life expectancy is 85, but we are dependent children until age 18, then 21% of our life we are dependent on other adults for our lives. So, consider the situation with a bunch of siblings. Or were there are a bunch of children congregated in the tribal village. Those that don't get enough attention would tend to have a lower life expectancy. But it is relative to the attention that other children get. Our survival requires that we achieve some level of status that gets attention to maximize our survival. The problem with this is that a person might have every reason to be happy and satisfied in life, but for the observation of others around him seeming to have higher status. This also explains hypersensitivity... as people on the razors edge of self-confidence for their attained status that barely meets their minimum expectation would be averse to any criticism that sets them back.
These are primitive emotional impulses and behaviors. They are meant to be overcome and rationalized as adults as impulsive emotional behavior is the stuff of children.
Some people are good at compartmentalizing and rationalizing their primitive emotive impulses. They are more often male and more often conservative. Some people are terrible at it. They are more often female and more often liberal.
But I think there is a tipping point where there is enough access to more, and enough access to status attainment, relative to peers, where more people on the middle of this spectrum would be satisfied enough with their situation.
I think the pursuit of globalism and the US-funded global order that has raged for 80 years is responsible for the tip the other way. Globalism has enabled some to become fabulously rich and globally popular... thus pushing the relative status bar quite high. Also, social media seems to inflate the status of some luck enough to go viral for some reason. The loss of our industrial and manufacturing economy has, at the same time, eliminated many paths that all people would take to make a good life for themselves... to earn more for them... to help their children advance... and to feel like they had upward mobility in status related to peers.
I think then the explanation for the crash in liberal love for country is explained to some degree by these things. They are people that are already prone to the childish emotional impulses built by evolutionary biology... and their bad behavior has been put on rocket-fuel because we have both increased the income and wealth of a smaller top-level, while eliminating much of the old access to income, wealth and status. We have also expanded the entire cohort of people that compete for these things to be a global community and not just our city, state and country.
Conservatives are more adult. They have God. They are more at ease with their simple good life. They are no longer children run by their childish emotional impulses. Liberals... not so much.
I absolutely believe that status, accomplishments, posessions are all seen through the lens of what other people are doing. That's the whole idea behind the whole, "Keeping up with the Jones" thing.
I also think liberals are generally much more consumed with status than conservatives and they fit very well with a great quote from Naval Ravikant about status games.
"The problem is that to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up."
There are some great American women, for sure. Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Lucille Ball, Dolly Parton, Helen Keller, etc, but the only one I thought could have maybe been on the level of the men I was listing there was Marilyn Monroe. It felt weird to put her in the list primarily because she was super hot, so I didn't.
Let me just put it this way -- there are plenty of great American women and if the list had been bigger, you would have seen their names on it. I was just going with the absolute biggest giants in American history and they're pretty much all men, if only because women mostly weren't allowed to do what they did when they did it.
The historical record supports both extraordinary achievements and profound failures. A persuasive response doesn’t require denying either. It argues that mature patriotism is compatible with pride, criticism, and an honest accounting of the past. How many years were Black people “freeish” from July 4, 1776? 89 years if you start from the written record, 87 from Juneteenth. 61 from the end of Jim Crow. My mother couldn’t use ANY water fountain, visit ANY pool/park, attend any school, without harm. She graduated from high school in 1973 that freedom. Currently, racial disparities exist in nearly every facet of this country.
The same way I can love my child while correcting him, or love my profession while criticizing it, I can love my country while condemning its failures. Love without honesty isn’t patriotism. That’s
idolatry.”
Historically, this idea isn’t new. It’s reflected in the speeches and writings of figures like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. They criticized America not because they rejected it, but because they believed it could better live up to its own ideals. That tradition is one of the most enduring forms of American patriotism.
Thank you for this article. I’ve ignored a family member for days after he texted me on Sunday morning gleefully saying rain and storms were going to cancel the event. It bothered me. A lot.
He’s ex military, former defense contractor, we come from a military patriotic good family - why is he like this?? But your article helped me: He’s a sour person. He doesn’t want to change or look inward. He’s bitter and sarcastic and - while he can be very funny - it always turns MEAN. Sometimes downright nasty.
I’ve invested enough emotional energy in anyone, family or not, who gets their kicks this way. Enough.
There are actually people who are angry that Trump cleaned up the pool in front of the Washington Monument. Once you're to that point, you've obviously got a lot of personal issues you're processing via politics.
"On the other hand, some people are just deeply unhappy. They don’t like themselves. They’ve embraced ideas, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world that make them miserable, and they just happen to be in America.
If they moved from here to France, Japan, Dubai, or Australia, they’d be just as depressed because the real problem is them, not where they live. Even if the place they live in changes, they’re stuck with the real source of their own misery everywhere they go."
Excellent piece.
The part quoted above very consistent with this recent Mike Munger piece:
https://kidsprefercheese.substack.com/p/money-and-happiness
"Using the same Track Your Happiness dataset, they found that people are mentally disengaged from what they are currently doing roughly 47 percent of the time — and that this mind-wandering is among the single strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset, outpacing income, activity type, and most demographic variables.
This finding reframes the whole income debate. The chronically unhappy group for whom money stopped working were almost certainly not unhappy because of insufficient funds. They were unhappy for reasons internal to their own patterns of attention and thought."
Outstanding… 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Great piece John. There isn't anything I disagree with here. However, I have a perspective of the source of this increase in miserable, unhappy people situation.
The human condition has many flaws that are also mechanisms of survival... most of them designed over centuries through an evolutionary biological process. It is a ying vs yang... blessing vs curse.
One of those flaws is always wanting more. It is a bit of that Hedonic Treadmill theory... that we reset to a new normal and want the next thing. When we think about human progress and the mechanism behind it... the motivation of individuals to invent, explore, achieve, advance... you can easily calculate that without it the human animal would likely have become extinct by now. However, the same impulse for more also explains all the wars and related death and carnage.
The other flaw is relative measure of status. I believe this relates to the fact that the human animal is dependent on others for more years than any other animal on the planet. If our life expectancy is 85, but we are dependent children until age 18, then 21% of our life we are dependent on other adults for our lives. So, consider the situation with a bunch of siblings. Or were there are a bunch of children congregated in the tribal village. Those that don't get enough attention would tend to have a lower life expectancy. But it is relative to the attention that other children get. Our survival requires that we achieve some level of status that gets attention to maximize our survival. The problem with this is that a person might have every reason to be happy and satisfied in life, but for the observation of others around him seeming to have higher status. This also explains hypersensitivity... as people on the razors edge of self-confidence for their attained status that barely meets their minimum expectation would be averse to any criticism that sets them back.
These are primitive emotional impulses and behaviors. They are meant to be overcome and rationalized as adults as impulsive emotional behavior is the stuff of children.
Some people are good at compartmentalizing and rationalizing their primitive emotive impulses. They are more often male and more often conservative. Some people are terrible at it. They are more often female and more often liberal.
But I think there is a tipping point where there is enough access to more, and enough access to status attainment, relative to peers, where more people on the middle of this spectrum would be satisfied enough with their situation.
I think the pursuit of globalism and the US-funded global order that has raged for 80 years is responsible for the tip the other way. Globalism has enabled some to become fabulously rich and globally popular... thus pushing the relative status bar quite high. Also, social media seems to inflate the status of some luck enough to go viral for some reason. The loss of our industrial and manufacturing economy has, at the same time, eliminated many paths that all people would take to make a good life for themselves... to earn more for them... to help their children advance... and to feel like they had upward mobility in status related to peers.
I think then the explanation for the crash in liberal love for country is explained to some degree by these things. They are people that are already prone to the childish emotional impulses built by evolutionary biology... and their bad behavior has been put on rocket-fuel because we have both increased the income and wealth of a smaller top-level, while eliminating much of the old access to income, wealth and status. We have also expanded the entire cohort of people that compete for these things to be a global community and not just our city, state and country.
Conservatives are more adult. They have God. They are more at ease with their simple good life. They are no longer children run by their childish emotional impulses. Liberals... not so much.
I absolutely believe that status, accomplishments, posessions are all seen through the lens of what other people are doing. That's the whole idea behind the whole, "Keeping up with the Jones" thing.
I also think liberals are generally much more consumed with status than conservatives and they fit very well with a great quote from Naval Ravikant about status games.
"The problem is that to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up."
I LOVE this article! My only quibble, however, is that you didn’t list any women in that long list of accomplished Americans. 😉
There are some great American women, for sure. Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Lucille Ball, Dolly Parton, Helen Keller, etc, but the only one I thought could have maybe been on the level of the men I was listing there was Marilyn Monroe. It felt weird to put her in the list primarily because she was super hot, so I didn't.
Thank you for explaining your reasoning. I still don’t quite understand it, but no biggie. 😉
Let me just put it this way -- there are plenty of great American women and if the list had been bigger, you would have seen their names on it. I was just going with the absolute biggest giants in American history and they're pretty much all men, if only because women mostly weren't allowed to do what they did when they did it.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond. 🙌🏾
That's only because he is racist, sexist, homophobic... ;-)
I'm actually not racist or homophobic, just sexist. Lol.
The historical record supports both extraordinary achievements and profound failures. A persuasive response doesn’t require denying either. It argues that mature patriotism is compatible with pride, criticism, and an honest accounting of the past. How many years were Black people “freeish” from July 4, 1776? 89 years if you start from the written record, 87 from Juneteenth. 61 from the end of Jim Crow. My mother couldn’t use ANY water fountain, visit ANY pool/park, attend any school, without harm. She graduated from high school in 1973 that freedom. Currently, racial disparities exist in nearly every facet of this country.
The same way I can love my child while correcting him, or love my profession while criticizing it, I can love my country while condemning its failures. Love without honesty isn’t patriotism. That’s
idolatry.”
Historically, this idea isn’t new. It’s reflected in the speeches and writings of figures like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin. They criticized America not because they rejected it, but because they believed it could better live up to its own ideals. That tradition is one of the most enduring forms of American patriotism.