Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

There have also been several meta-analyses (studies of studies). Twenge found that from 1938 to 2007, college students scored increasingly higher on the Depression scale of the MMPI, a common personality test.⁷³ That doesn’t necessarily mean that more of the students suffered from major depression, though, and the increase may have been inflated by the broader range of people who went to college over those decades. Moreover, other studies (some by Twenge herself) have found no change or even a decline in depression, especially for younger ages and cohorts and in later decades.⁷⁴ A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no. The authors explain, “Public perception of an ‘epidemic’ may arise from heightened awareness of a disorder that was long under-diagnosed by clinicians.”⁷⁵ And the title of the biggest meta-analysis to date, which looked at the prevalence of anxiety and depression between 1990 and 2010 in the entire world, did not leave readers in suspense: “Challenging the Myth of an ‘Epidemic’ of Common Mental Disorders.” The authors concluded, “When clear diagnostic criteria are applied, there is no evidence that the prevalence of common mental disorders is increasing.”⁷⁶

Depression is “comorbid” with anxiety, as epidemiologists morbidly call the correlation, which raises the question of whether the world has become more anxious. One answer was contained in the title of a long narrative poem published in 1947 by W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety. In the introduction to a recent reprint, the English scholar Alan Jacobs observed that “many cultural critics over the decades . . . have lauded Auden for his acuity in naming the era in which we live. But given the poem’s difficulty few of them have managed to figure out precisely why he thinks our age is characterized primarily by anxiety—or even whether he is really saying that at all.”⁷⁷ Whether he was saying that or not, Auden’s name for our era has stuck, and it provided the obvious title for a meta-analysis by Twenge which showed that scores on a standard anxiety test administered to children and college students between 1952 and 1993 rose by a full standard deviation.⁷⁸ Things that can’t go on forever don’t, and as best we can tell, the increase among college students leveled off after 1993.⁷⁹ Nor have other demographic sectors become more anxious. Longitudinal studies of high school students and of adults conducted from the 1970s through the first decades of the 21st century find no rise across the cohorts.⁸⁰ Though in some surveys people have reported more symptoms of distress, anxiety that crosses the line into pathology is not at epidemic levels, and has shown no global increase since 1990.⁸¹

Everything is amazing. Are we really so unhappy? Mostly we are not. Developed countries are actually pretty happy, a majority of all countries have gotten happier, and as long as countries get richer they should get happier still. The dire warnings about plagues of loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety don’t survive fact-checking. And though every generation has worried that the next one is in trouble, as younger generations go the Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape, happier and mentally healthier than their helicoptering parents.

Still, when it comes to happiness, many people are underachievers. Americans are laggards among their first-world peers, and their happiness has stagnated in the era sometimes called the American Century. The Baby Boomers, despite growing up in peace and prosperity, have proved to be a troubled generation, to the mystification of their parents, who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and (for many of my peers) the Holocaust. American women have become unhappier just as they have been making unprecedented gains in income, education, accomplishment, and autonomy, and in other developed countries where everyone has gotten happier, the women have been outpaced by the men. Anxiety and some depressive symptoms may have increased in the postwar decades, at least in some people. And none of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become.

Let me end this chapter with a reflection on these happiness shortfalls. For many commentators they are an occasion to second-guess modernity.⁸² Our unhappiness, they say, is payback for our worship of the individual and material wealth and for our acquiescence in the corrosion of family, tradition, religion, and community.