What was it that happened between 2023 and 2024? Here's all i can think of but none of these really explain it:

* Major terrorist attack in israel; its obvious we care way too much about this random country on the other side of the planet but even so i can't see that impacting people's happiness this hard.

* general populace now knows LLMs exist and may someday potentially perform jobs which were previously thought to be immune to automation but i would expect this to be offset by the people amazed by this technology.

* It's becoming increasingly apparent that our then-current president might actually suffer from a more serious case of Alzheimer's than reagan did; simultaneously it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only viable alternative is going to be trump again.

#3 is the only one that sort-of makes sense but I have doubts that people are this invested in presidential circuses on a personal level.

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ajkjk a day ago | parent | next [-]

wait, is your point that there is some mystery about what happened to make the US even less happy? ... what didn't happen? It's hard to think of anything good that has happened in the last few years. Every month is scarier and more uncertain than the last.

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snickerbockers a day ago | parent [-]

i mean specifically between '23 and '24, i don't remember much happening on the national level then. COVID's been in the background for a few years and trump hasn't been re-elected yet.

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ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That was when the economy got more horrible for everyone that's not rich

	▲	snickerbockers 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		dude that's every year. I am specifically referring to something which did not happen between '22 and '23 but did happen between '23 and '24. I don't know if you actually bothered to read the article in the OP but there's a graph showing a major inflection point.

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jacobgkau 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted for asking a question that's simple and prompted by the graph visual. Everyone's so focused on talking about why people are unhappy in general, but why did it drop that much between 2023 and 2024 specifically? If it was politics, I'd have expected the drop to come between 2024 and 2025, unless it was the idea of the election itself that caused it. Any other explanation, and why wouldn't it have been the same in 2022-2023?

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georgemcbay a day ago | parent | prev [-]

As an older person (52 y/o) who remembers a time when a lot more people I know (of all ages) were optimistic about the future, I believe the major factor leading to generalized anxiety currently is not about one event, but all the additive effects of massive and ever increasing wealth inequality piling up year over year.

That combined with little to no hope that either political party will do a damn thing to fix it (Democrats at least have some politicians who actually want to, but they are stymied by their own leadership, never mind the problem of not having any real national level political power currently).

	▲	jacobgkau 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ok, but how did those things change between 2023 and 2024? The same party was in power and there wasn't a single monolithic wealth grab that happened that year.
	▲	pesus a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Agreed. Even as someone only on the tail end of the millennial generation, the total disappearance of hope in the past 10-15 years (but especially in the last 5) has been palpable. There's a tweet that's been floating around recently that says something along the lines of "basically nobody under 40 expects good things to happen ever again", and I think that sums it up pretty accurately.
	▲	snickerbockers 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But that isn't new. Housing has been unaffordable for anybody who wasn't alive in the '70 for at least 15 years now. Healthcare has been a clusterfluck that it's been a major talking point in at least six consecutive presidential elections. As far as the data presented in the chart goes, 'Happiness' is shown steadily climbing for a few years before '23, then it takes a massive dip in '23 then in '24 it declines but at a significantly slower rate than '23. Unless the way they measure 'happiness' is inaccurate and unreliable (in which case this whole article is garbage) there has to be an event that correlates with that.