1: The Pickle We're In

The Death of Hope

Please leave your comments below. My primary goals in this blog are to elicit feedback and make friends who share this interest.

This will be an optimistic blog, I promise. But first the sad context.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (per Jesus you should be living on top of the rock) you already know Americans largely believe that our society is in decline. In surveys, large majorities respond consistently that life will be worse for their children than it was for them.

Pundits make terrible forecasters, but it’s worth noting that across the political spectrum they basically agree that we’re in a tough spot as a nation in the short term with regard to social positivity metrics. Few suggest a realistic rebound in the long-term.

Hypothesis: Americans have lost hope.

While “hope” (like happiness) is not directly and consistently measurable, we can point to several measurable proxies that correspond with hopefulness:

1. Suicide: hopeful people don’t take their own lives.

2. Depression: hopeful people don’t claim to have lost the will to live.

3. Birthrates: hopeful people want to bring children into the world.

4. Organization: hopeful people join community organizations.

Let’s walk through these one by one. Note that where available I’m using other peoples’ compilations of data rather than going back to original sources.

Suicide

We see about a 25% increase in deaths by suicide for both women and men over the past 20 years.

Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2002–2022, NCHS Data Brief No. 509, September 2024

Broken down by age group, we see that nearly all this increase is concentrated amongst the youngest age groups. The two youngest cohorts old had their suicide rates roughly double between 2009-2018.

Suicide Attempts by Age Group, Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin (2018)

While this chart ends in 2019, the same trend has continued over the past six years.

Suicide rates are up a lot, and they’re up the most amongst the youngest people.

Depression

As you’d expect, depression increased significantly during the same period, also primarily for younger people.

As we can see here, rates of depression increased about 40% for groups under age 25 between 2005 and 2017. Like the charts for suicide, these increases have continued post-2017.

Major depressive episode in the last 12 months, by age group, 2005-2017, National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

While it is not our focus here, anxiety rates have tripled during the same time period for people under age 25.

Birth Rates

The following chart shows annualized total fertility rate in the U.S. You can see the dramatic end of the baby boom and the arrival of birth control here, along with the stagflation period of the 70s and early 80s.

However, despite the remarkable economic growth since 2007, we’ve seen a 22% drop in birthrates since 2007, or 1.4% fewer births each year.

Births Per 1000 Women in U.S. U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs -Population Division

Organizations

Robert Putnam wrote a popular book on organizational membership called Bowling Alone, which described the declining rates of membership in all kinds of social organizations in the past 50 years, which corresponds directly with both self-reported loneliness and school shootings.

The following two charts show average attendance per person for all forms of social membership organizations (churches, clubs, political parties, etc…) over time, and the percentage of people who’ve been in a leadership role in a social organization in the previous year. Both rates were been cut approximately in half between 1975 and 1995.

In another book called The Upswing, Putnam describes (amongst other things) how these trends continued post-1995 until the present day.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Conclusion

All the data described in this post has been described other places, and most readers will be familiar with the rough numbers.

The only real innovation of this post is to group them under the heading of hopelessness. All the compelling proxy variables for hope suggest that we are at a low ebb. While one could pull alternate proxy variables such as stock market participation, voting rates, etc… (and I’d love to hear suggestions in the comments) these four seem to me most-directly connected to hope.

They all tell the same story. Over roughly similar time periods leading up to the present day, our whole society has declined in hopefulness.

In future posts I’ll investigate data which explores the causes of this hopelessness, explain why I think all those causes are downstream of one primary cause, and describe what we can do about it.