The unhappiness of our culture and the path to abiding hope

The New York Times has named Taylor Swift one of America’s “greatest living songwriters.” American Idol recently had each of its singers perform from her songbook.

What is the secret to her abiding popularity?

Consider this anecdote: In her Times interview, she explained that she wrote her hit song “Love Story” at the age of seventeen after her parents wouldn’t let her date an older man. “I have this very strong opinion that when you’re young, you feel things on such an intense and detailed level,” she said.

According to Time, her ability to connect with the frustrations and sadness so many people feel makes them “feel seen.” If the latest research is to be believed, the audience for such empathy is only growing these days.

 “Unusually adrift and dissatisfied”

University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman recently documented “a sudden, sharp, and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population.” Journalist Derek Thompson cites Peltzman’s work and adds that the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction has fallen to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. Consumer sentiment has also fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the seventy-year history of the survey.

Here’s what these indexes have in common: they began to plunge in 2020 and have not recovered.

According to Thompson, the explanation is simple: “As a cultural-political force, the 2020 pandemic never ended.” He is calling the COVID-19 pandemic the “permademic.” He explains:

American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent, unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media [has] made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve.

The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers.

The yearning of our hearts for hope

It is hard for humans to live without hope: a sense that our lives are progressing along a trajectory that will make the future better than the present.

We go to school in the hope that we will learn and achieve in ways that will position us for careers of success and significance. We take jobs in the hope that the money we earn and the tasks we perform will give our lives meaning and security. We marry and begin families in the hope that we will forge homes of mutuality and joy.

But we somehow know that we are in ourselves insufficient to this yearning of our hearts, that we need the help of others if we are to grasp the hope we seek.

Consequently, for many centuries those who inhabited the Christendom of the West believed that their faith in God expressed through participation in the sacraments and traditions of the Catholic Church would ferry them forward and into eternity. Protestants refocused their hope on the Scriptures and their promise of personal salvation in this life and the next. For multiplied millions, secularism supplanted both with the confidence that unbridled human reason and scientific advances would open the way to a more utopian present.

A poster in a roadside café

Then came the pandemic.

For the first time in living memory, none of us was safe and all were at risk. A virus with no vaccine or cure could infect and kill us. We watched in horror as makeshift morgues were erected to house too many corpses to count. Nearly everyone lost someone they knew or knew someone who had experienced such loss.

My wife and I recently took a road trip, stopping at a café for breakfast. As we waited for a table, my attention was drawn to a laminated poster near the door depicting a smiling, bearded middle-aged man. According to the explanation beside the picture, this was the founder and owner of the restaurant, a man who loved his family, his employees, his customers, and his life. He died of COVID-19 in 2021 at the age of sixty-four.

Such posters could be posted in businesses and homes all across the land. Neither faith in God nor trust in secularism insulated millions from death. Those of us who survived learned that we are just as mortal as those we lost, our lives and futures just as frail as theirs.

“Sensing which choice will carry you forward”

But perhaps we have learned the wrong lesson from the pandemic. Rather than abandoning hope in a future that can be so easily taken from us, we can choose to refocus our hope in a different dimension altogether.

Rosie Sultan is the author of a beautiful and moving narrative of divorce, disease, and healing titled “The Art of Letting Go.” She tells of her divorce, life as a single mother, and her leukemia diagnosis. She employs the Boston Marathon as a metaphor for her journey, writing that marathon runners “let go of their doubt at mile twenty, their exhaustion at mile twenty-three, their need to look graceful as they cross the finish line. They hang on to their next step, and the one after that—but they let go of everything else.”

After watching this year’s race, she reports: “I walk home under the trees and think that the answer isn’t to hang on. It isn’t to let go. It’s the art of sensing which choice will carry you forward, step by quiet step.”

Let’s reframe her eloquent reflections within the encompassing grace of Jesus. We do not “hang on” to him—he is holding onto us and will never “let go” (John 10:28). When we consciously practice his abiding presence, he carries us through this day—the only day that exists—“step by quiet step.”

As we turn our thoughts to him, his Spirit fills our thoughts with peace (Philippians 4:6–7). As we spend our moments in glad gratitude for his manifold gifts, every moment becomes his gift to us (James 1:17). Even (and especially) in the hardest places and darkest days, we find that our Savior suffers with us, grieves with us, and sustains us with his unconquerable love (Romans 8:37).

And we find our hearts filled with hope, not just for a blessed future we cannot yet see, but with a joyful present we can embrace today.

The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich assured us, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Do you agree?

NOTE: For practical ways to experience the presence of Christ each day, please see my new website article here.

Quote for the day:

“If you have been reduced to God being your only hope, you are in a good place.” —Jim Laffoon

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Denison Forum