The Miserable Left

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

1 in 3 Americans feel lonely every week and 1 in 5 feel lonely every day. Less than half of households are headed by married couples and the marriage rate hovers at 16.7. 63% of single people are not looking for a relationship and the majority of Gen Z didn’t date as teenagers.

Romance, relationships and sex that are disappearing, If you want to understand teenagers escaping into an upside down world of pronouns, identifying as the opposite sex, as asexual or anything except a normal healthy relationship, the collapse of those relationships is the place to start. “I choose me” is the narcissistic gateway to ‘self-marriages’ and online rabbit holes.

But it’s not just opposite sex relationships that are collapsing. Family is on the chopping block. 1 in 4 Americans are estranged from a close family member. Gen Z is the generation least likely, by far, to have a close relationship with their grandparents. Or to socialize in general. People of all ages interact with the world through social media. And social media is inherently lonely.

What replaces relationships for the social media savvy is an endless search for self-actualization. The constant virtue signaling, the reflexive shift in flags and banners, is a testament to a life lived online even when it’s acted out in public. Moral panics have become childishly easy to set up and detonate while knowing that today’s crisis will be forgotten tomorrow. Black Lives Matter and DEI give way to Gaza which gives way to illegal aliens which will give way to something else. Political activism is every bit as transitory as pop music. Greta Thunberg isn’t abandoning a cause when turning from environmentalism to Hamas.

Attention is the cause. The issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution may be true on the macro, but in the micro, the issue isn’t the issue, the issue is attention. Lonely people need attention and the more attention they get, the less lonely they feel. Parroting back a slogan, learning a TikTok dance and joining a crusade is still lonely, but it feels more communal. And more importantly it fills the void that is currently occupied by the expectation of nothingness.

Fewer members of Gen Z look forward to marriage, children, a career or life getting better. What’s left is someone to blame. Movements, extremism, angry words and hate.

The Left innately understands this. It politicises and then tears apart human relationships, between men and women, between parents and children, and between larger families, to undermine rival social ties and to create the unhappiness that makes for terrorism. What began with shattering economic relationships, pitting businessmen and workers against each other, escalated to deconstructing and then pulling apart all human relationships as power structures.

What do you do when you have no one and no hope? You click, swipe and then march.

Screen time is everywhere. Its pale light shines from giant 75 inch flat screens dominating living rooms at night and from 5 to 7 inch handheld phones. Media and social media pervade everything but neither are really real. Gen Z excels at social media literacy much as earlier generations did at media literacy. But that literacy comes at the price of investing media and social media with personal identity and making media and social media a part of your life.

Social media for young girls is an experiment in adapting themselves to a society that really exists only online. Rather than adapting themselves to the traditions and truths of their family, they adapt to the much more vivid and rapid social media feed. And when it tells them to mutilate themselves and become transgender, that’s just one more transformation among many.

With nothing to look forward to, the bravado of self-destruction becomes their anthem.

The Left pretends to be progressive, but its substantive message is doom. The oceans are rising, inequality, racism and every social ill are somehow worse than ever. Nothing ever really gets better. Its recruitment strategy is to convince the next generation that everything is not only terrible, but the worst its ever been, and that there’s no hope for the future except them.

We are always the ones we are waiting for. Narcissism is the superpower. The world won’t ever really get any better. That’s the bygone message of the sixties. But what can get better is your self-esteem. Center your feelings. Focus on you. And see the world as a uniquely traumatic experience that you survive with TikTok dances and self-care self-involvement.

What sort of people does that message appeal to? Deeply unhappy people.

And that is what the Left is in the business of making. Every one of its revolutions has left people more isolated, divided, cut off, resentful and lonely than ever. They are taught to bond only over politics and through politics. To see themselves as members of tribes. To distrust anyone who doesn’t share their politics. And to identify entirely through politics.

The problem with that is politics, especially of their kind, is horribly miserable. Making it the center of your life is a formula for being miserable, angry, unhappy, resentful and fearful.

Those are the qualities you tend to see in the latest leftist rally against something.

BLM, No Kings, Save Gaza, Save Iran, Save the Whales, Stop the War, Stop ICE, Trans Lives Matter and Drag Queens Now. The emotions are the same no matter the cause. And the people who used to go to these things are becoming burned out from the unhappiness of rally culture.

The Left has made them miserable and it teaches them to turn that misery outward, but all that does is make them more miserable. The more the Left talks about “joy”, the more it reveals that as a commodity that it utterly lacks. The Left is many things, but happy is certainly not one of them. What the Left does is manufacture, commodify and weaponize misery for power.

The Left is designed to fail. Its policies are designed to fail. And its quest for joy through power is doomed to fail. All it can ever do is produce misery, failure and resentment over them.

The worse the failure, the more the resentment and the worse the unhappiness. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

Toxic Ideology: Progressives Are Less Happy, Sane Than Conservatives

Study finds leftists aren’t quite the happy warriors they like to portray themselves as. 

By Graham J Noble Jan 2, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

It is often said in conservative circles that liberalism is a mental disorder. That’s not really accurate, though, and it’s a result of many people continuing to conflate liberalism with progressivism or socialism. In truth, the two latter ideologies bear almost no resemblance to classical liberalism. Still, studies have found correlations between political views and state of mind. Progressives, on the whole, are less happy than conservatives. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks recently discussed his latest findings on the subject, which show that not only are conservatives collectively happier than progressives, but the latter are more prone to mental health challenges.

It should be noted, as any statistician will confirm, that correlation does not mean causation. A connection between two data sets is not proof that one set has directly affected the other. But we are dealing with human beings and emotions, here, and not just numerical variables. For anyone passionate about their political and cultural values, psychological well-being is surely not an unrelated issue.

Happy Warriors and Haters

Brooks sat for an episode of The Genius Life podcast in September, discussing the state of “happiness” in America today. The study of happiness is, for Brooks, a specialty that he’s been pursuing for years. Indeed, around ten years ago, the professor wrote in The New York Times that, when political identification is factored into the study of happiness, conservative women were the most blissful demographic and liberal men the least content with their lives. Brooks mostly used the label “liberal” but also acknowledged the shift to progressivism among those on the political left.

The distinction should be considered significant. There’s really nothing in classical liberal philosophy that might evoke unhappiness or mental disorders. But progressives, in attempting to rationalize and justify their worldview, must deal with a host of contradictions, hypocrisies, and rejections of traditional values. Perhaps, above all, they feel the need to commit to the practices of dehumanizing – and disassociating themselves from – anyone who does not share their beliefs. Essentially, unbridled hatred for dissenters has unfortunately become a core tenet for modern progressives. It can’t be easy to feel happy and maintain perspective when so much of one’s time and energy is spent on despising everyone who thinks differently from you.

Spend some time perusing the posts on Bluesky, the social media platform now favored by progressives. The fanatical commitment to hating their political opponents is so pervasive – and often expressed in the most extreme terms – that it’s a wonder anyone active on the political left could be either sane or happy.

Brooks says that “liberal” women (and, again, one should probably read that as progressive women) have now sunk lower than their male counterparts on the mental and emotional health scale. Back when Brooks wrote his piece for The Times a decade ago, 40% of conservative women felt very happy – just a bit happier than conservative men and considerably more cheerful than liberal women. Meanwhile, only around one-fifth of liberal men considered themselves very happy.

Troublingly, the professor observed, “New data show that white liberal women under 30 have almost a six in 10 chance of having been diagnosed with a mental illness in America today.”

Progressives Reject the Keys to Happiness

In his years of research into what he terms “the art and science of happiness,” Brooks has discovered what seems to be the “big four” founding dynamics of happiness: faith, family, friends, and purpose – or “work that serves,” as he put it during the podcast. Faith, Brooks pointed out, doesn’t have to be religious devotion but “doing something that makes the universe big and you little.”

As host Max Lugavere observed, these seem to be the values embraced by conservatives. More pertinent is that they are all values categorically rejected by progressives. While it isn’t difficult to find moderate Democrats who consider themselves either religious or spiritual, progressives scoff at the notion of a God or higher power in some other form. For them, the government is the Alpha and the Omega, supposedly providing everything we need and guiding every aspect of our lives. Interestingly, this idea forms the very foundation of fascist doctrine – a system progressives claim to oppose. That’s one of those many contradictions with which progressivism constantly wrestles.

Family is also rejected. The institution of marriage is trivialized, abortion for any reason – or no reason at all – celebrated, and even the disowning of family members who hold opposing viewpoints is now encouraged on the extreme left. Progressive politicians, along with healthcare and education officials, sneer at the concept of parental rights, seemingly determined to promote and enforce the idea that children are, from birth, essentially wards of the state.

Friends, too, must be chosen based on ideological kinship. As for purpose or fulfillment through work, progressives, much like their socialist cousins, see employment as oppression or even a form of slavery. The one and only purpose they appear to revere is a battle for control over their fellow human beings.

Couple all this with bizarre and confusing notions of “gender fluidity,” the destruction of traditional community life, and the mindset that vilifies the idea of citizens defending themselves or others from physical assault. It‘s little wonder progressives are unhappy when everything that they or anyone else does or says must be measured against an unbendable standard of ideological purity. If the standard isn’t met, the thing said or done must be raged against, ridiculed, vilified, and ultimately suppressed or destroyed – along with the person responsible for the said words or actions.

Such a philosophy requires a tremendous amount of negative energy. So much, in fact, that there can’t be very much room left for happiness.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Graham J Noble Chief Political Correspondent & Satirist

The Happiness Plateau

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On March 9th Arden Dier published a piece entitled, $75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It,  with the subtitle "$75K Yearly Income Where Happiness Plateaus? There's More to It" saying:

Study suggests only the unhappiest 20% see emotional well-being flatline after $100K. Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has admitted his influential study from a decade ago—suggesting happiness increases with household income only up to $75,000—didn't get it right. The question of whether money can buy happiness has been much debated since Kahneman's 2010 research with fellow Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton. In 2021, University of Pennsylvania happiness researcher Matthew Killingsworth published a study indicating there was actually no limit to the amount of money that boosted happiness. Hoping for a final answer, Kahneman and Killingsworth teamed up for a new study and found that for most people, Killingsworth's findings ring true.

The truth of the matter is, I think these studies are a load of horsepucky.  Time and circumstances change all the parameters, they always have and they always will, so they're always going to have to come back and admit they were wrong, and why.

There's a book out there entitled "Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It", which I found to be enlightening, and boring, as my eyes have to tendency to roll back into by head reading too many charts and statistics.  But one thing came clear to me, the happiness quotient is ignored by political leaders, and I can explain why.  They don't have a clue!  The reason for that is happiness is as difficult to define as defining "fair".  What's fair?  Who wrote the Book of Fair?  No one, and it's been my observation that fair is usually defined by who's ox is being gored.  And that's pretty much the same for happiness.

After reading that book, I concluded Machiavelli had the answer in his book The Prince, (which should be required reading starting in junior high school) published in 1532, where he outlines there are only two groups in the world.  The privileged and the masses.  The privileged only want to maintain, or expand, their privileges, and the masses just want security.  Individuals within those groups will have varying wants, but for both classes happiness is predicated on those two criteria.

Having owned a pest control company, I became involved in my industry's affairs serving as an officer of four trade associations in Ohio, and President of two of them. One of my associates once said I was "an enigma" to him. I answered, I'm easy to understand. I don't want money, power, position, privilege, or prestige, I just want what's right.  A nationally prominent scientist friend of mine told me once he always wanted to be important, to be someone, and he was, and he was amazing. I said I never wanted to be anyone, I just wanted to have a nice life, and I only got into these things because I didn't like being pushed around. It's the Serbian in me.

Happiness for the two of us, who were very much alike in many ways, was very different. Time and circumstance change our parameters. He wanted to be more prominent, and I wanted to be less prominent, so trying to find the "plateau" for happiness is in my opinion nothing more than academic welfare. It doesn't exist as a permanent equation.

Time and circumstance will change those parameters, but Machiavelli understood this one all important fact. If neither the privileged or the masses, as groups, are threatened as a group, governments are safe from both the privileged and the masses. Assuring their positions in life, the government can then reach in and pluck out any troublesome individual from the respective group and the group will not only remain silent, they will find justification for such action. And we've been seeing that currently.

When one or both groups feel threatened as a group, governments fall, and we're seeing talk of that now.  It's the first time in my 76 years I've seen the phrase, "America is in an existential crisis", touted more and more often, and with supporting evidence.  

As for these kinds of studies; I consider them academic welfare, since the parameters will change as circumstances change, and they'll have to do another study to apology for the errors of the last study.

The New Lawlessness Gripping America

Mindless nihilistic destruction is now tolerated by the elites.

Sean Collins 17th October 2022

One evening a few weeks ago, about 100 young people ransacked a Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia. The mob stole merchandise, knocked over shelves and threw food and drinks around, leaving the store looking like a natural disaster had hit it. Many got their phones out to record the madness. As chaos reigned, a young woman twerked on a counter. Fighting spilled out into the parking lot.

The rampage in Wawa mirrored an incident in Philadelphia a month earlier, when dozens of youths trashed the Zion Cuisine restaurant in the Germantown area of the city. Teens flipped tables, broke glasses and threw chairs at the staff. And scenes such as those at Wawa and Zion Cuisine are not unique to Philadelphia – they are happening all over America. Two weeks ago in Virginia, a group of teens assaulted a movie-theatre employee while ransacking a concession counter.

There is a lot of talk about crime in the US at the moment. Republican candidates have prioritised the issue while campaigning for next month’s Midterm elections. Their focus on crime is understandable. Since 2020 and the George Floyd riots, there have been spikes in assaults, burglary, robbery and car thefts. Homicides jumped up 29 per cent in 2020 and rose again by 4.3 per cent in 2021. Crime is also a concern shared by many Americans. A Morning Consult poll finds that more than three-quarters of voters think violent crime is a major problem in the United States. And another poll, from Monmouth University, finds that crime is the second-highest priority, after inflation, for all voters going into the Midterms............To Read More....

 Rep. Cori Bush Spends Nearly $500,000 on Private Security While Pushing to Defund the Police  - AWR Hawkins 17 Oct 2022 -  Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) has spent nearly $500,000 on private security during the current election cycle while pushing to defund the police.  FOX News Digital noted, “Bush has now directed over $490,000 into private security for the 2022 election cycle.” The Daily Mail reported that Bush spent this money “despite…openly calling for defunding the police, a movement which exploded following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer and the deaths of other Black people at the hands of law enforcement.”  FOX News Digital pointed out that Bush recently told Good Morning America, “The thing about defund the police is we have to tell the entire narrative. People hear ‘defund the police.’ But you know what they’ll say? Say ‘reallocate,’ say ‘divest,’ say ‘move.’ But it’s still the same thing.”..........

My Take - Where did she get a half a million dollars for this? Has there been a misuse of funds involved here?  I hope someone looks into this. 

Cop-Hating Marxist in Seattle Begs for Police Protection After Vandals Continue to Hurl Sh*t at Her House Every Night - By Jim Hoft October 18, 2022 - Marxist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant led the charge against police officers in Seattle. Sawant pushed to defund the police in Seattle.  Now vandals are hurling human sh*t at her house every night and she is begging for police protection. .........