Yes, this: “…the solution isn’t more stuff, it’s policies that don’t actively punish the people trying to live out the primary cultural script…” and that we have reached a point that we have less time AND we can’t afford the things we could just a few years ago. Example: In other countries, say Europe: you see people of all ages out enjoying apperitivo hour. In Vietnam out laughing and eating together. Throwing block parties. Now in the U.S. just about any outing is a luxury. We’ve maintained the bullshit American Dream while simultaneously making it so even people who have it, don’t have it. So we’re lonely and broke and working our asses off to the exclusion of everything that makes life fun. And, here’s the kicker, it’s all by design.
Cool, wonder if you considered the spiritual/religious aspect? Seems like much of the god-business in the US is led by rich guys who preach that rich guys like themselves and their rich sponsors are rich because they're chosen by God. Sort of like going full half-circle from Jesus who glorified the materially poor, spiritually rich. Much like the caste system of Hinduism -or worse, because there, you're cleaning toilets for the rich because you were a bad person in your past life, expiate your crime you skinny former evil poor; in the US, you're cleaning toilets for the rich because you are a bad person now, expiate your crime you fat lazy poor loser.
Wouldn't that be the voice in the head of many believers who follow those sects that glorify the earthly rich as chosen by divine providence?
The United States is a massive country, the third largest nation in the world. Within its borders are large urban concentrations, rural farms, and everything in between. In my view, the main conflict in the US right now is actually regional- the US political system through giving all states regardless of size equal representation in the Senate, which is then reflected in the electoral college, subtly advantage rural states with fewer population. Rural communities are inherently more individualistic and libertarian than urban communities- the economy of scale from government support simply does not exist in the countryside, and rural communities are too population-sparse for any form of top-down social controls to be both necessary and practical (i.e. loitering laws, jaywalking). This would explain much of the US's historic bias towards individualism and self-motivation, as well as the unhappiness often concentrated in poor working-class urban Americans.
In fact, the American Dream is quite easily attainable today, but only in certain parts of the country. In the Midwest, a standard three bedroom detached house can easily be purchased for $100k, often in a neighborhood not pillaged by investment properties. This is not the case in expensive coastal cities, especially in the West such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, where the same three bedroom detached housing can go upwards of $3 million. You could live like a king in Iowa or Michigan on $1 million, while that is barely enough to even afford a place to live in downtown L.A. (the flip side being that Iowa and Michigan has much less high-paying jobs, hence the American "yuppie" strategy of temporarily moving to a high cost of living city to generate a large amount of capital, then moving to a lower cost of living area to retire).
This reads as though you are suggesting that cultural differences are divorced entirely from class realities. In a country where wealth inequity is so significant and capitalism rampant, the culture of socialising is increasingly impacted in an unequal manner. It’s not only about access to social spaces or environments; but it’s also the right to claim access to these things.
Your thoughts are so very interesting and so very well expressed, like ones I have just read about Americans being Unhappy and also a visit to now decrepit England. Even if you are unable to walk much more, I hope you keep expressing your thoughts about the world. Thank you!
Chris, You’ve nailed an important distinction between the cultures of Europe and America, childcare. But there is another one that also gets into the meritocracy to your point, and that’s education and the cost restrictions for those who are able to and demonstrate academic success. The work and government subsidies associated with those two dynamics in the workforce are enormous! after just finishing a 35 career in Tk-12 education system , I can’t tell you the number of employees that have left or stagnated in the system simply because of childcare or healthcare or educational benefits is immense. The impact to the economy and the ability of people to move freely between jobs given those factors cannot be underestimated. Imagine our most brightest and able minded coming immediately back to the workforce if their childcare was affordable, and their family healthcare transferable between jobs, you might see the shifts we need so desperately of things like movement back to small town, rural america, or heaven forbid mothers staying home with their newborns, because healthcare was affordable…. The impacts are imaginable
The USA has by far the largest percentage of poor people among the Western Democracies. The reasons for this include American governments at all levels spending insufficient monies for a just society on education, health care, and social issues, compared to other Western countries. There is also a lot of racism in the US, which causes friction among different communities. The governments in the US, in my view, need to invoke better laws to fight racism.
Here in Canada, we have good education, health care, and social systems. Racial, sexual, and religious etc. discrimination is illegal, which makes for a generally happier society. In my city, there are whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, First Nations peoples (Native Americans in the US) etc., and there is generally mutual respect and understanding among all citizens, at a level that the US can only dream of.
It is also beyond myself to offer the ‘correct’ solution to the dissatisfaction many Americans hold. Though I wonder if an opt out or alternative choice could aid in the happiness metrics.
It’s hard to imagine the 350m Americans would all be game for the largely single choice hustle/work cultural narrative. A zealous Christian may prefer to live out his humbly allotted days on a farm with a big family and ‘accomplish’ nothing. While the atheist SF transhumanist wants nothing more than to build the sci fi ASI future.
And of course a more common middle ground person who’d like to work a meaningful vocation, make enough money to support a family, and have a town/community of people.
I don’t imagine the US government decreeing West Virginia an anarchist or religious opt out state, or Mass a cafe-on-every-corner socialized European styled state, or even CA as a pure techno-progressive state. But I think people would be happier if they could pick a team amongst options (and still be in the US).
2. re: "So the solution isn’t more stuff, it’s policies that don’t actively punish the people trying to live out the primary cultural script we’ve given them, or we need a change in the script, and I’ve got no idea how to make that happen, or even if we should. "
I am not an American and don't live in the USA. It is therefore hard for me to judge how effective Magoon's proposals are/would be. But it's a vast amount of work he has been doing for years, so there is that.
The first part of your walk, from Clifton to Belleville, will in no way prepare you for what you are going to encounter in the entire rest of the walk. Be careful in that traffic!
I think your prognosis fails your own criterion, namely you are evincing a single issue cause/solution, that somehow this is all about materialist culture / loss of community, a social perception problem due to some kind of spiritual hollowness with the modern lifestyle.
I grant you that's possibly some of it-- but then also want to point out this loss of community is not because we are all mindlessly lost to the life of the consumer.
So let's get to brass tacks-- churches used to be the center of a lot of American community. Today there are fewer churches than ever. Why? Well, there is the growth of the great religious 'none;' many Americans left the church, or are now born into families where their parents never went to church. That is largely a problem of the political weaponization of the church for culture-war issues. And that weaponization is two fold-- one, there are the people who leave because they are not on the same side as their church in the culture war. But the flip side of that is also the non-denominational mega-churches at the forefront of weaponizing the church in the first place. They are the ones who have hoovered up what remains of the congregations of the smaller mainline protestant churches that are disappearing the fastest. The mega-church is the church on consumerist steroids, leveraging the culture wars to outcompete the more local houses of worship by offering lattes on the way into church service, a full service community center that replaces the municipal community center (as their members loudly complain about tax money 'wasted' on public parks and libraries). These mega-churches are actively displacing former centers of community, while enforcing cult-like ideological orthodoxy for their members. The culture wars propagate this corrosion of community-- the mega-church evangelicals would rather tithe to their church than pay taxes for a library where God forbid some drag-queen might read to some children.
But the sense of material well being is not wrong either. You elude to a suburban house with a pool. Who but Gen X and the Boomers can afford a suburban house with a pool? There is a generational comparison to be made; the Millenial generation, Gen Z, soon Gen Alpha are in fact generations that are materially worse off than their parents generation.
Personal example: the most successful member of my mother's generation of the family was my uncle. He was/is (he's semi-retired) a plumber. My uncle owned a big suburban house. He owned a motorboat for fishing, a snowmobile, even a Harley Davidson. He had a cabin on a lake up north for family vacations.
On paper, I am more materially successful than my uncle, at least I earn more than he did on an inflation adjusted basis. I have a college degree in engineering and work a white collar job at a respectable company; I have worked for several Fortune 500 companies, in fact. But I can't afford to buy my own home, because housing prices are crazy, and I spent most of my 20's and 30s paying off student debt. Much less can I afford an array of recreational vehicles-- no motorboat, snowmobile, or motorcycle for me. And a cabin on a lake for summer vacations and hunting season? That's a pipe dream. And fuck me if I could get two weeks of summer vacation in the first place. So on paper I am materially better off, but in tangible things, I materially less successful than my uncle was at his age, both in physical stuff and in lifestyle.
Maybe I should have been a plumber, you might say! But I have cousins who did become plumbers in the trade, and they are just as screwed as I am. We might be on paper better off than our parents generation, by some metric-- but we are not getting to live the lifestyle our parent's generation lived, which we watched them have growing up.
Some of that is very much self-sufficiency; we have less economic autonomy than our parents had. Americans used to be able to move halfway across the country for better job prospects. People used to have the liberty to quit jobs working for bosses they hated, because getting a new job was easy enough and not damaging to a career. Who has that kind of job security anymore? No one.
We have side hustles now, driving Ubers or Etsy stores, etc. just trying to afford the rent (!) and pay our bills.
Am I worse off than someone living in subsistence poverty in rural China? No. But neither am I happy that 'success' today doesn't translate to the lifestyle that I watched the adults around me when I was growing up have.
Church activity fell off even sooner in Europe, and they did not experience the politicization and mega-church phenomena to which you ascribe the decline in America.
There are other parts of your comment I don't understand. Why can't people move across the country for a new job anymore? I hire a dozen or more engineers every year. Most of them moved hundreds of miles, if not thousands. I also don't understand student debt, especially for an engineer. I have a son-in-law who grew up in poverty or near it, but who worked his way through a bachelor's degree without any debt, and without any family help. So it is possible if you're frugal and don't choose an expensive school. You mention you have worked for several companies, and then say people don't have the liberty to change jobs.
My engineers have plenty of toys. A cabin on a lake, if they didn't inherit one, is more of a late-stage capstone for them than a way of life as a young family. But then it's there for their grandkids.
I think the real issue driving misery is liberalism, including a social welfare state. Which Europe pioneered before America, just as it lost its religion. Liberalism atomizes society. It forces women into the workforce, which stresses the family and doesn't actually earn more net money after childcare and job expenses.
As for the other lifestyle stuff: the invisible truth is generational wealth.
As an engineer, I work with a lot of coworkers with various forms of generational wealth. Maybe their parents helped them pay off their student debt. Or they got a massive cash influx in the form of help with a down payment on a first home. Or maybe their folks didn't pay all of their student debt, but they went to an extremely expensive top-tier university (MIT, CalTech). Parents or grandparents gift them with a car as a gift. They get recreational vehicles as gifts because their dads bought a new toy and now they get dad's old toy. Etc. etc. etc. This is generational wealth transfer, and this is more about how wealthy your parents were/are.
There is much more of this in Engineering, because Engineering is such a gatekept field of study and industry. 'Weed out' courses in college have been mostly shown to gatekeep college graduation rates in Engineering to men, who are more tolerant to receiving Cs and Ds before graduating, whereas women who get the same grades are more likely to drop the major. Not to mention so much other cultural gatekeeping practices. I once had a coworker explain to me that the company I was working at (which was at the time one of the many companies getting merged up in the great aerospace mergers of the 2000s and 2010s) used to check an applicant's political registration and only hire registered Republicans before they got sued for that practice (and eventually bought up by successively larger parties).
But there's also this underbelly of people who are effectively perpetual contractors once they graduate from an ABET school. Almost always engineers of color, especially if they were foreign born. If you look up the official figures, you'll see that most engineers of color get stuck in this contracting cycle where they are rarely retained as direct hires. Engineering has a very pronounced 'last hired, first fired' phenomena, where 'brain drain' becomes an excuse to use seniority as the metric by which layoffs are decided, and the people with most seniority tend to be whites hired straight out of college.
So yeah, there are disproportionate numbers of engineers with generational wealth enjoying great lifestyles.
But also there's a moving of the goalposts here-- if I were to compare my current lifestyle as an engineer not to my uncle the plumber's lifestyle in the 80's and 90's, but to the lifestyle of engineers of similar seniority at the companies I've worked in the same timeframe? That is even more of a radical lifestyle downgrade. Senior engineers I worked with at the start of my career had lifestyles that far surpassed my Uncle's humble cabin up north and recreational vehicle collection. Houses that are today multi-millionaire homes, not just recreational vehicles but luxury vehicles (and the recreational toys). Globe-trotting vacations ("Oh, you've never been to Germany for Octoberfest! You gotta go!") And a lot of them had elaborate benefit packages I'll never see to boot. I knew an Electrical Engineer who had basically three months of vacation a year because they were trying to convince him not to retire early and they couldn't find someone with his level of expertise in EMC to hire.
So yeah, comparing lifestyles across generations even within the same industry/career path, Millenials, Gen Z, Generation Alpha-- we're all getting boned. Especially if we don't come from families with generational wealth transfer.
Anecdotally-- as an engineer since my career crossed the ten year mark more or less every week I hear from a recruiter trying to convince me to move somewhere for a job. Like half of these don't even match my current pay. and like all of them are to move to some middle of nowhere place I'd never want to live in the first place; Iowa, for example, Alabama. Kansas City. etc. etc. etc. To get a job someplace I'd actually like to live, other than where I currently live (which I like!) would require me to chase hiring managers in those locations, where I would need to both (a) get higher compensation, to compensate for the higher cost of living, (b) convince them I am a safer hire than someone more local, that basically I'm not going to move back home after 6 months or a year. During the great recession I learned my lesson, moving from a high cost of living area to semi-rural Midwest with a pay cut because the cost of living was 'lower,' and that's a mistake i won't make again.
Then also I have a family. So then that's gainful employment opportunities for another adult in an entirely different career field; I need to find housing in a decent school district, etc. So sure, maybe you see a lot of single guys move, you see maybe some guys with stay-at-home wives too (there's that generational wealth again). But moving a two-income household across the country is way complicated, and incredibly complicated with a housing crises. So yeah, it is more difficult to move to better opportunities-- not that there are great opportunities out there right now. The only industry that's booming right now is AI data centers. Manufacturing jobs have declined every month since Trump took office this time around, because surprise surprise, tariffs and trade wars are not great for industries with global supply chains.
Community in Europe was never as centralized around church life in the first place. Europe has always been less religious from the start; America has an especial history of being particularly religious, starting with Europe's religious fringe moving to the American colonies (literally-- the Pilgrims, the Puritans, Quakers, etc.) Europe shipped it's most religious to the US and especially the US frontier until European migration fell off after the Great Wars. But also social life and infrastructure was never as church centric. Part of that is that due to exporting it's religious fringe to the US over the colonial/antebellum/Reconstruction periods,
Europe is much more religiously homogenous in most European nations; many European nations are Catholic by extremely large margins, for example, or Eastern Orthodox. Where they are Protestant they are specifically not fractured along denominational lines, they are largely uniformly a very similar denomination, for example Anglican in Britain, or classically Lutheran in most of the Nordic states. Europe has never featured the intense competition for congregants/parishioners that is a regular feature of the culture wars in the US. A lot of the culture war is focused on which butts sit in which pews putting what dollars into which offering plate on a Sunday morning. That kind of competition just never happened in Europe, because again, most religious reformers immigrated to America and the American frontier. So there were never really many big tent revivals, nor were there European televangelism celebrities, etc. The mega-church phenomenon never took off because the Catholics already had cathedrals and the Protestants are mostly boring Lutherans with established churches of their own.
E.g in France it's not like there's an intense competition to get people to convert from Catholicism to 'evangelical' faiths, the Catholicism is so well established in France that the idea of a French Mega-church pushing typical evangelical culture war bullshit is laughable. Largely where Protestantism is rising in France, it is doing so due to immigration. Evangelism is starting to make inroads in France-- but where it does so, it is very much tied to the rise of extreme far right politics like the French National Assembly. And again the big problem for them is that the overwhelming main competition is the Catholic Church.
A big part of this is that primarily American denominations that form the core of Religious Right cultural warfare never have been able to establish much of a foothold in Europe, such as the Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, etc. Most established European Protestant churches never subscribed to American Christian Fundamentalism as embodied in those denominations. "Christian Fundamentalism" is very much a uniquely American phenomena, a movement that started roughly in the 1910s and rolled ever forward into the modern culture war morass.
I think a lot of American Christians are just not at all familiar with how very different the practice of Christian faith is in Europe, where Fundamentalism never took root in the first place. Many Christian Europeans moving to the US are extremely shocked and appalled by Evangelism and the core tenants of American Christian fundamentalism, from Scandinavian Lutherans, to English Anglicans, to Greek Orthodox, etc. Evangelicals want to project this idea that there is some kind of unified Christian traditionalism, but this is kind of a hoax only possible because most US evangelicals never actually travel to Europe for long enough to become familiar with European faith practices. They're always tourists and never exchange students or foreign hires.
So yeah, back to the original topic-- for these reasons Europeans are less nominally religious than Americans, because religious identity is not central to their political identity. And as a result they are less affected by what the original article is mainly about, the social/spiritual discontent and malaise. That's not to say Europeans don't have discontent, but Swedes, Dutch, Germans, etc. have less of those deaths of despair, less of the loneliness epidemic, less partisan divide and isolation, etc. etc. etc. In general less despair. Which should be a pretty good sign that the unique specifics of American spiritual practice and cultural warfare are a big part of this spiritual sickness.
A wise protestant minister in Holland who dealt with outcasts and street junkies in his great work (rest in peace, dominee Visser) used to say that poverty can be understood three-fold: poor in the balance of your bank account; poor in your social life; and poor spiritually. In my experience having at least 2 out of 3 works quite well.
Yes, this: “…the solution isn’t more stuff, it’s policies that don’t actively punish the people trying to live out the primary cultural script…” and that we have reached a point that we have less time AND we can’t afford the things we could just a few years ago. Example: In other countries, say Europe: you see people of all ages out enjoying apperitivo hour. In Vietnam out laughing and eating together. Throwing block parties. Now in the U.S. just about any outing is a luxury. We’ve maintained the bullshit American Dream while simultaneously making it so even people who have it, don’t have it. So we’re lonely and broke and working our asses off to the exclusion of everything that makes life fun. And, here’s the kicker, it’s all by design.
Cool, wonder if you considered the spiritual/religious aspect? Seems like much of the god-business in the US is led by rich guys who preach that rich guys like themselves and their rich sponsors are rich because they're chosen by God. Sort of like going full half-circle from Jesus who glorified the materially poor, spiritually rich. Much like the caste system of Hinduism -or worse, because there, you're cleaning toilets for the rich because you were a bad person in your past life, expiate your crime you skinny former evil poor; in the US, you're cleaning toilets for the rich because you are a bad person now, expiate your crime you fat lazy poor loser.
Wouldn't that be the voice in the head of many believers who follow those sects that glorify the earthly rich as chosen by divine providence?
What make people happy is the following
1. Family
2. Faith
3. Community
Americans have abandon those things and instead embraced government, social media and materialism.
That is why they are unhappy.
I however am very happy
The United States is a massive country, the third largest nation in the world. Within its borders are large urban concentrations, rural farms, and everything in between. In my view, the main conflict in the US right now is actually regional- the US political system through giving all states regardless of size equal representation in the Senate, which is then reflected in the electoral college, subtly advantage rural states with fewer population. Rural communities are inherently more individualistic and libertarian than urban communities- the economy of scale from government support simply does not exist in the countryside, and rural communities are too population-sparse for any form of top-down social controls to be both necessary and practical (i.e. loitering laws, jaywalking). This would explain much of the US's historic bias towards individualism and self-motivation, as well as the unhappiness often concentrated in poor working-class urban Americans.
In fact, the American Dream is quite easily attainable today, but only in certain parts of the country. In the Midwest, a standard three bedroom detached house can easily be purchased for $100k, often in a neighborhood not pillaged by investment properties. This is not the case in expensive coastal cities, especially in the West such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, where the same three bedroom detached housing can go upwards of $3 million. You could live like a king in Iowa or Michigan on $1 million, while that is barely enough to even afford a place to live in downtown L.A. (the flip side being that Iowa and Michigan has much less high-paying jobs, hence the American "yuppie" strategy of temporarily moving to a high cost of living city to generate a large amount of capital, then moving to a lower cost of living area to retire).
This reads as though you are suggesting that cultural differences are divorced entirely from class realities. In a country where wealth inequity is so significant and capitalism rampant, the culture of socialising is increasingly impacted in an unequal manner. It’s not only about access to social spaces or environments; but it’s also the right to claim access to these things.
Dear Chris Arnade,
Your thoughts are so very interesting and so very well expressed, like ones I have just read about Americans being Unhappy and also a visit to now decrepit England. Even if you are unable to walk much more, I hope you keep expressing your thoughts about the world. Thank you!
Chris, You’ve nailed an important distinction between the cultures of Europe and America, childcare. But there is another one that also gets into the meritocracy to your point, and that’s education and the cost restrictions for those who are able to and demonstrate academic success. The work and government subsidies associated with those two dynamics in the workforce are enormous! after just finishing a 35 career in Tk-12 education system , I can’t tell you the number of employees that have left or stagnated in the system simply because of childcare or healthcare or educational benefits is immense. The impact to the economy and the ability of people to move freely between jobs given those factors cannot be underestimated. Imagine our most brightest and able minded coming immediately back to the workforce if their childcare was affordable, and their family healthcare transferable between jobs, you might see the shifts we need so desperately of things like movement back to small town, rural america, or heaven forbid mothers staying home with their newborns, because healthcare was affordable…. The impacts are imaginable
The USA has by far the largest percentage of poor people among the Western Democracies. The reasons for this include American governments at all levels spending insufficient monies for a just society on education, health care, and social issues, compared to other Western countries. There is also a lot of racism in the US, which causes friction among different communities. The governments in the US, in my view, need to invoke better laws to fight racism.
Here in Canada, we have good education, health care, and social systems. Racial, sexual, and religious etc. discrimination is illegal, which makes for a generally happier society. In my city, there are whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, First Nations peoples (Native Americans in the US) etc., and there is generally mutual respect and understanding among all citizens, at a level that the US can only dream of.
I agree with a lot of what you say. The irony of happiness by materialism is the materialism is what makes you unhappy. I think the issue is that American life is one where you live in perpetual defense. You are in a constant state of “red alert”. My thoughts here: https://open.substack.com/pub/charleswu/p/the-exhaustion-of-a-life-of-perpetual?r=y241&utm_medium=ios
Hope you're feeling better. Have you visited a Boot Barn yet? There are a few scattered in Jersey—nice shop. Keep up the good writes.
But what are the policies that could help? Short of a religious revival it’s unclear
It is also beyond myself to offer the ‘correct’ solution to the dissatisfaction many Americans hold. Though I wonder if an opt out or alternative choice could aid in the happiness metrics.
It’s hard to imagine the 350m Americans would all be game for the largely single choice hustle/work cultural narrative. A zealous Christian may prefer to live out his humbly allotted days on a farm with a big family and ‘accomplish’ nothing. While the atheist SF transhumanist wants nothing more than to build the sci fi ASI future.
And of course a more common middle ground person who’d like to work a meaningful vocation, make enough money to support a family, and have a town/community of people.
I don’t imagine the US government decreeing West Virginia an anarchist or religious opt out state, or Mass a cafe-on-every-corner socialized European styled state, or even CA as a pure techno-progressive state. But I think people would be happier if they could pick a team amongst options (and still be in the US).
1. Get better.
2. re: "So the solution isn’t more stuff, it’s policies that don’t actively punish the people trying to live out the primary cultural script we’ve given them, or we need a change in the script, and I’ve got no idea how to make that happen, or even if we should. "
Michael Magoon has a plan for that.
see: https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/policies-to-promote-material-progress
and most especially the link on that page:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/policies-to-promote-upward-mobility
I am not an American and don't live in the USA. It is therefore hard for me to judge how effective Magoon's proposals are/would be. But it's a vast amount of work he has been doing for years, so there is that.
The first part of your walk, from Clifton to Belleville, will in no way prepare you for what you are going to encounter in the entire rest of the walk. Be careful in that traffic!
I think your prognosis fails your own criterion, namely you are evincing a single issue cause/solution, that somehow this is all about materialist culture / loss of community, a social perception problem due to some kind of spiritual hollowness with the modern lifestyle.
I grant you that's possibly some of it-- but then also want to point out this loss of community is not because we are all mindlessly lost to the life of the consumer.
So let's get to brass tacks-- churches used to be the center of a lot of American community. Today there are fewer churches than ever. Why? Well, there is the growth of the great religious 'none;' many Americans left the church, or are now born into families where their parents never went to church. That is largely a problem of the political weaponization of the church for culture-war issues. And that weaponization is two fold-- one, there are the people who leave because they are not on the same side as their church in the culture war. But the flip side of that is also the non-denominational mega-churches at the forefront of weaponizing the church in the first place. They are the ones who have hoovered up what remains of the congregations of the smaller mainline protestant churches that are disappearing the fastest. The mega-church is the church on consumerist steroids, leveraging the culture wars to outcompete the more local houses of worship by offering lattes on the way into church service, a full service community center that replaces the municipal community center (as their members loudly complain about tax money 'wasted' on public parks and libraries). These mega-churches are actively displacing former centers of community, while enforcing cult-like ideological orthodoxy for their members. The culture wars propagate this corrosion of community-- the mega-church evangelicals would rather tithe to their church than pay taxes for a library where God forbid some drag-queen might read to some children.
But the sense of material well being is not wrong either. You elude to a suburban house with a pool. Who but Gen X and the Boomers can afford a suburban house with a pool? There is a generational comparison to be made; the Millenial generation, Gen Z, soon Gen Alpha are in fact generations that are materially worse off than their parents generation.
Personal example: the most successful member of my mother's generation of the family was my uncle. He was/is (he's semi-retired) a plumber. My uncle owned a big suburban house. He owned a motorboat for fishing, a snowmobile, even a Harley Davidson. He had a cabin on a lake up north for family vacations.
On paper, I am more materially successful than my uncle, at least I earn more than he did on an inflation adjusted basis. I have a college degree in engineering and work a white collar job at a respectable company; I have worked for several Fortune 500 companies, in fact. But I can't afford to buy my own home, because housing prices are crazy, and I spent most of my 20's and 30s paying off student debt. Much less can I afford an array of recreational vehicles-- no motorboat, snowmobile, or motorcycle for me. And a cabin on a lake for summer vacations and hunting season? That's a pipe dream. And fuck me if I could get two weeks of summer vacation in the first place. So on paper I am materially better off, but in tangible things, I materially less successful than my uncle was at his age, both in physical stuff and in lifestyle.
Maybe I should have been a plumber, you might say! But I have cousins who did become plumbers in the trade, and they are just as screwed as I am. We might be on paper better off than our parents generation, by some metric-- but we are not getting to live the lifestyle our parent's generation lived, which we watched them have growing up.
Some of that is very much self-sufficiency; we have less economic autonomy than our parents had. Americans used to be able to move halfway across the country for better job prospects. People used to have the liberty to quit jobs working for bosses they hated, because getting a new job was easy enough and not damaging to a career. Who has that kind of job security anymore? No one.
We have side hustles now, driving Ubers or Etsy stores, etc. just trying to afford the rent (!) and pay our bills.
Am I worse off than someone living in subsistence poverty in rural China? No. But neither am I happy that 'success' today doesn't translate to the lifestyle that I watched the adults around me when I was growing up have.
Church activity fell off even sooner in Europe, and they did not experience the politicization and mega-church phenomena to which you ascribe the decline in America.
There are other parts of your comment I don't understand. Why can't people move across the country for a new job anymore? I hire a dozen or more engineers every year. Most of them moved hundreds of miles, if not thousands. I also don't understand student debt, especially for an engineer. I have a son-in-law who grew up in poverty or near it, but who worked his way through a bachelor's degree without any debt, and without any family help. So it is possible if you're frugal and don't choose an expensive school. You mention you have worked for several companies, and then say people don't have the liberty to change jobs.
My engineers have plenty of toys. A cabin on a lake, if they didn't inherit one, is more of a late-stage capstone for them than a way of life as a young family. But then it's there for their grandkids.
I think the real issue driving misery is liberalism, including a social welfare state. Which Europe pioneered before America, just as it lost its religion. Liberalism atomizes society. It forces women into the workforce, which stresses the family and doesn't actually earn more net money after childcare and job expenses.
As for the other lifestyle stuff: the invisible truth is generational wealth.
As an engineer, I work with a lot of coworkers with various forms of generational wealth. Maybe their parents helped them pay off their student debt. Or they got a massive cash influx in the form of help with a down payment on a first home. Or maybe their folks didn't pay all of their student debt, but they went to an extremely expensive top-tier university (MIT, CalTech). Parents or grandparents gift them with a car as a gift. They get recreational vehicles as gifts because their dads bought a new toy and now they get dad's old toy. Etc. etc. etc. This is generational wealth transfer, and this is more about how wealthy your parents were/are.
There is much more of this in Engineering, because Engineering is such a gatekept field of study and industry. 'Weed out' courses in college have been mostly shown to gatekeep college graduation rates in Engineering to men, who are more tolerant to receiving Cs and Ds before graduating, whereas women who get the same grades are more likely to drop the major. Not to mention so much other cultural gatekeeping practices. I once had a coworker explain to me that the company I was working at (which was at the time one of the many companies getting merged up in the great aerospace mergers of the 2000s and 2010s) used to check an applicant's political registration and only hire registered Republicans before they got sued for that practice (and eventually bought up by successively larger parties).
But there's also this underbelly of people who are effectively perpetual contractors once they graduate from an ABET school. Almost always engineers of color, especially if they were foreign born. If you look up the official figures, you'll see that most engineers of color get stuck in this contracting cycle where they are rarely retained as direct hires. Engineering has a very pronounced 'last hired, first fired' phenomena, where 'brain drain' becomes an excuse to use seniority as the metric by which layoffs are decided, and the people with most seniority tend to be whites hired straight out of college.
So yeah, there are disproportionate numbers of engineers with generational wealth enjoying great lifestyles.
But also there's a moving of the goalposts here-- if I were to compare my current lifestyle as an engineer not to my uncle the plumber's lifestyle in the 80's and 90's, but to the lifestyle of engineers of similar seniority at the companies I've worked in the same timeframe? That is even more of a radical lifestyle downgrade. Senior engineers I worked with at the start of my career had lifestyles that far surpassed my Uncle's humble cabin up north and recreational vehicle collection. Houses that are today multi-millionaire homes, not just recreational vehicles but luxury vehicles (and the recreational toys). Globe-trotting vacations ("Oh, you've never been to Germany for Octoberfest! You gotta go!") And a lot of them had elaborate benefit packages I'll never see to boot. I knew an Electrical Engineer who had basically three months of vacation a year because they were trying to convince him not to retire early and they couldn't find someone with his level of expertise in EMC to hire.
So yeah, comparing lifestyles across generations even within the same industry/career path, Millenials, Gen Z, Generation Alpha-- we're all getting boned. Especially if we don't come from families with generational wealth transfer.
As for mobility: here's a paper from the Fed:
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2025/eb_25-19
Anecdotally-- as an engineer since my career crossed the ten year mark more or less every week I hear from a recruiter trying to convince me to move somewhere for a job. Like half of these don't even match my current pay. and like all of them are to move to some middle of nowhere place I'd never want to live in the first place; Iowa, for example, Alabama. Kansas City. etc. etc. etc. To get a job someplace I'd actually like to live, other than where I currently live (which I like!) would require me to chase hiring managers in those locations, where I would need to both (a) get higher compensation, to compensate for the higher cost of living, (b) convince them I am a safer hire than someone more local, that basically I'm not going to move back home after 6 months or a year. During the great recession I learned my lesson, moving from a high cost of living area to semi-rural Midwest with a pay cut because the cost of living was 'lower,' and that's a mistake i won't make again.
Then also I have a family. So then that's gainful employment opportunities for another adult in an entirely different career field; I need to find housing in a decent school district, etc. So sure, maybe you see a lot of single guys move, you see maybe some guys with stay-at-home wives too (there's that generational wealth again). But moving a two-income household across the country is way complicated, and incredibly complicated with a housing crises. So yeah, it is more difficult to move to better opportunities-- not that there are great opportunities out there right now. The only industry that's booming right now is AI data centers. Manufacturing jobs have declined every month since Trump took office this time around, because surprise surprise, tariffs and trade wars are not great for industries with global supply chains.
Community in Europe was never as centralized around church life in the first place. Europe has always been less religious from the start; America has an especial history of being particularly religious, starting with Europe's religious fringe moving to the American colonies (literally-- the Pilgrims, the Puritans, Quakers, etc.) Europe shipped it's most religious to the US and especially the US frontier until European migration fell off after the Great Wars. But also social life and infrastructure was never as church centric. Part of that is that due to exporting it's religious fringe to the US over the colonial/antebellum/Reconstruction periods,
Europe is much more religiously homogenous in most European nations; many European nations are Catholic by extremely large margins, for example, or Eastern Orthodox. Where they are Protestant they are specifically not fractured along denominational lines, they are largely uniformly a very similar denomination, for example Anglican in Britain, or classically Lutheran in most of the Nordic states. Europe has never featured the intense competition for congregants/parishioners that is a regular feature of the culture wars in the US. A lot of the culture war is focused on which butts sit in which pews putting what dollars into which offering plate on a Sunday morning. That kind of competition just never happened in Europe, because again, most religious reformers immigrated to America and the American frontier. So there were never really many big tent revivals, nor were there European televangelism celebrities, etc. The mega-church phenomenon never took off because the Catholics already had cathedrals and the Protestants are mostly boring Lutherans with established churches of their own.
E.g in France it's not like there's an intense competition to get people to convert from Catholicism to 'evangelical' faiths, the Catholicism is so well established in France that the idea of a French Mega-church pushing typical evangelical culture war bullshit is laughable. Largely where Protestantism is rising in France, it is doing so due to immigration. Evangelism is starting to make inroads in France-- but where it does so, it is very much tied to the rise of extreme far right politics like the French National Assembly. And again the big problem for them is that the overwhelming main competition is the Catholic Church.
A big part of this is that primarily American denominations that form the core of Religious Right cultural warfare never have been able to establish much of a foothold in Europe, such as the Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, etc. Most established European Protestant churches never subscribed to American Christian Fundamentalism as embodied in those denominations. "Christian Fundamentalism" is very much a uniquely American phenomena, a movement that started roughly in the 1910s and rolled ever forward into the modern culture war morass.
I think a lot of American Christians are just not at all familiar with how very different the practice of Christian faith is in Europe, where Fundamentalism never took root in the first place. Many Christian Europeans moving to the US are extremely shocked and appalled by Evangelism and the core tenants of American Christian fundamentalism, from Scandinavian Lutherans, to English Anglicans, to Greek Orthodox, etc. Evangelicals want to project this idea that there is some kind of unified Christian traditionalism, but this is kind of a hoax only possible because most US evangelicals never actually travel to Europe for long enough to become familiar with European faith practices. They're always tourists and never exchange students or foreign hires.
So yeah, back to the original topic-- for these reasons Europeans are less nominally religious than Americans, because religious identity is not central to their political identity. And as a result they are less affected by what the original article is mainly about, the social/spiritual discontent and malaise. That's not to say Europeans don't have discontent, but Swedes, Dutch, Germans, etc. have less of those deaths of despair, less of the loneliness epidemic, less partisan divide and isolation, etc. etc. etc. In general less despair. Which should be a pretty good sign that the unique specifics of American spiritual practice and cultural warfare are a big part of this spiritual sickness.
A wise protestant minister in Holland who dealt with outcasts and street junkies in his great work (rest in peace, dominee Visser) used to say that poverty can be understood three-fold: poor in the balance of your bank account; poor in your social life; and poor spiritually. In my experience having at least 2 out of 3 works quite well.