So I’m not alone in not feeling all that happy about just about everything nowadays, not surprising. Except I’ve felt this way for decades, only more intense lately, though, for most Americans this past year has seemed to have been a turn-around bitch.

There’s probably enough shit going on ‘out there’ to sadden anyone with half a heart (MAGA-hatters, not sure) and a semblance of sense/shame. Times have changed way-quickly in a short space with indications from a General Social Survey out this week there’s a trend to more ‘not-so-happy’ people than happy.

A deadly, mishandled virus will shift thinking:

The latest data on happiness from the General Social Survey is truly something else. Nothing remotely like it in the past five decades of polling. https://t.co/JZBj8H6KpR pic.twitter.com/CALnfzMV9h

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) January 28, 2022

Ingraham at The Why Axis this morning unlocked the survey results — not so care-free:

Since 1972, the survey has asked respondents the following question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”
Typically, the people who say they’re very happy outnumber the not-too-happy crowd by about three-to-one. Indeed those numbers have been fairly constant for half a century.

But in 2021 that all changed. The very-happies plummeted from 31-percent of the population in 2018 down to 19, while the not-too-happies surged by a nearly identical amount, from 13 to 24-percent.
The balance is made up by the pretty-happies at around 57-percent, who I omitted from the chart because their numbers didn’t change from 2018 to 2021.

For the first time in polling history, in other words, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy.
The obvious driver of this is the pandemic. In 2021 happiness took a major hit across the board — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy people — all reported a decline in the quality of their life.

Not surprising, I guess.

Of course, not discussed is the real root cause of a goodly portion of that unhappiness — not just sickness and death via COVID, but the horror of idiots making trying to live a dangerous game of chance.
In the name of self-righteous freedums:

??? https://t.co/R9NQ2Umh1O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 29, 2022

No wonder we’re so unhappy.– TMZ has the story on Palin’s antics.
However, the whole, entire GOP is now Palin.

As if an emphasis, also out this week was a survey on COVID illustrating the idiot divide (NYT):

It’s a remarkable disconnect between perception and reality. A majority of the boosted say they are worried about getting sick from Covid. In truth, riding in a car presents more danger to most of them than the virus does.

A majority of the unvaccinated, on the other hand, say they are not particularly worried.
The starkest, saddest way to understand the irrationality of this view is to listen to the regret of unvaccinated people who are desperately sick from Covid or who have watched relatives die from it.

“There’s nothing that matters more than our freedoms right now,” a California prosecutor said at an anti-vaccine rally in December.
She died of Covid this month.

Clay-pots of the West — dangerous morons:

So once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan, found here)