I wonder if there’s any National Mood data from previous iterations and how that has changed over time. I’m guessing it’s gotten worse, but would be curious to see for sure if so and how much.
Thanks for this post, Liz. It's about the very thing I write about, "structural grief," the idea that grief has become the signature emotional experience of our time. We're losing so much so fast, and it's hard to track that we're living in an unprocessed grief state. You're touching on that kind of loss and grief here. I have two daughters about to graduate. And I'm grieving not only their transition out of our household, but even more, the disassembling of a (relatively predictable) democratic future. The difference between our parents' and our children's life experiences is more than generational. It's a difference of worlds.
My daughter graduated last year and is headed into medicine—like so many South Asian kids. When I was her age, that was the path I consciously rejected because it felt too predictable. Funny how history turns.
What I once spurned as conventional now seems, if not safe, at least sturdier than so many of the professions that once promised freedom and fulfillment. Or maybe that’s an illusion, too. I wonder whether medicine is genuinely more resilient—or whether structural grief simply makes us search for solid ground wherever we can find it.
I think about the lack of a shared vision for the future a lot lately and, it does feel like the reduction in religiosity in America has had a negative impact in that way. I say that as an atheist/agnostic. I felt like we used to have a shared vision in advertising, a shared vision in community, religions, and monocultural media that at least gave us more in common. Feels like a big loss. Not sure how to fix it, but at least do recognize the void left in the absence of that.
Congratulations and I feel all of this so much except I was the first to go to college in my family. Anyways, happy that two of my kids are on the college path even though they both feel uncertain about the future. We also all went to the polls together in solidarity and hope for the future.
This is the first one of your posts that I read that I have a little push back on. I agree with your conclusion that we are happy but we are lost at the same time. But I disagree that it's "because we replaced collective stories about the future .... with an individualized therapeutic language that is only equipped to help you feel better right now."
I think the individualized therapeutic language has come into existence because the system that we created (strong institutions, individual freedom, weak social/familial ties, and disconnection from deeper meaning) created conditions that necessitated a mass form of therapy to fill the gap left from this system. The therapeutic language is helping people heal from their trauma and find ways to connect to the energetic life source that empowers individual agency.
We do need to develop a positive vision, through story telling, of the future for people to believe in, which is what keeps me coming back to your substack. I personally can sense a need for reimagining religion where it is more relational and less hierarchical and to the extent that there is any hierarchy its the powerful serving the weaker. Either way, there is a need to help connect people to religious practices that help them live with agency aligned to a hopeful future.
I wonder if there’s any National Mood data from previous iterations and how that has changed over time. I’m guessing it’s gotten worse, but would be curious to see for sure if so and how much.
Thank you for sharing this important, and sobering, data. (Also, I have the same best friend dyanmic with my daughter-- I'll take what I can get!)
Exactly: I'll take what I can get (and try to be okay with the change that is coming).
Every generation inherits a world it did not create, but leaves one it did. Our greatest responsibility is not what we receive, but what we pass on.
Thanks for this post, Liz. It's about the very thing I write about, "structural grief," the idea that grief has become the signature emotional experience of our time. We're losing so much so fast, and it's hard to track that we're living in an unprocessed grief state. You're touching on that kind of loss and grief here. I have two daughters about to graduate. And I'm grieving not only their transition out of our household, but even more, the disassembling of a (relatively predictable) democratic future. The difference between our parents' and our children's life experiences is more than generational. It's a difference of worlds.
My daughter graduated last year and is headed into medicine—like so many South Asian kids. When I was her age, that was the path I consciously rejected because it felt too predictable. Funny how history turns.
What I once spurned as conventional now seems, if not safe, at least sturdier than so many of the professions that once promised freedom and fulfillment. Or maybe that’s an illusion, too. I wonder whether medicine is genuinely more resilient—or whether structural grief simply makes us search for solid ground wherever we can find it.
I think about the lack of a shared vision for the future a lot lately and, it does feel like the reduction in religiosity in America has had a negative impact in that way. I say that as an atheist/agnostic. I felt like we used to have a shared vision in advertising, a shared vision in community, religions, and monocultural media that at least gave us more in common. Feels like a big loss. Not sure how to fix it, but at least do recognize the void left in the absence of that.
Congratulations and I feel all of this so much except I was the first to go to college in my family. Anyways, happy that two of my kids are on the college path even though they both feel uncertain about the future. We also all went to the polls together in solidarity and hope for the future.
Liz,
This is the first one of your posts that I read that I have a little push back on. I agree with your conclusion that we are happy but we are lost at the same time. But I disagree that it's "because we replaced collective stories about the future .... with an individualized therapeutic language that is only equipped to help you feel better right now."
I think the individualized therapeutic language has come into existence because the system that we created (strong institutions, individual freedom, weak social/familial ties, and disconnection from deeper meaning) created conditions that necessitated a mass form of therapy to fill the gap left from this system. The therapeutic language is helping people heal from their trauma and find ways to connect to the energetic life source that empowers individual agency.
We do need to develop a positive vision, through story telling, of the future for people to believe in, which is what keeps me coming back to your substack. I personally can sense a need for reimagining religion where it is more relational and less hierarchical and to the extent that there is any hierarchy its the powerful serving the weaker. Either way, there is a need to help connect people to religious practices that help them live with agency aligned to a hopeful future.