SPONSORED: This article is part of a series that seeks to elevate and define a progressive vision of “the good life,” developed by the Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with The American Prospect. You can read the whole series here.
For the last 85 years, Harvard has run a longitudinal study on human happiness. Researchers track thousands of participants, wealthy and poor, married and single, and ask them detailed questions about their lives every two years.
The study’s conclusion about what drives happiness is pretty simple. Your ability to put food on the table and keep a roof over your family’s head is obviously vital; but it is the strength of your relationships and your sense of belonging, not the size of your bank account or the prestige of your career, that is the clearest route to making you happy. Deep, meaningful relationships with other people, and a sense of connection to others, are the most important indicators. What people want is connection, positive companionship, purpose and power over their own lives.
This should come as no shock. By nature, humans are deeply solidaristic creatures. Some psychologists compare our need to be connected with others to our biological needs for food or water. Just like how hunger motivates us to seek out food, and thirst motivates us to seek out water, feelings of loneliness and disconnection motivate us to seek out higher purpose and connection. That’s why it feels so satisfying to attend a music concert, play on a sports team, or join a social or civic organization.
We want to be with other people. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. When social isolation becomes the norm and our culture and economy send signals that contributing to the common good is a sucker’s game, that unsurprisingly drives societal anxiety and breakdown. We do not want to be living on islands, and we rebel when the waters start surrounding us.
But a half-century of neoliberal economic and social order have placed Americans further away from connection and higher purpose than at any other time in our nation’s history. And the consequence is a nation whose citizens feel as if it’s falling apart at the seams.
Neoliberalism, the controlling ideology for most of Western democracy for the last 50 years, elevates the experience of the individual above the community. Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “there is no such thing as society; there are just individual men and women and there are families.” Neoliberalism holds that individuals should be self-reliant and resilient, and that lightly regulated and incentivized private markets will deliver the building blocks of happiness and fulfillment.
There are countless possibilities to help tilt the balance back toward connectivity and the common good.
Despite this promise, neoliberalism has delivered the opposite: a fragmented, atomistic, balkanized culture, and a dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all economy. Unregulated smartphone technology and social media addicts us in virtual worlds. The ascent and dominance of companies like Amazon and Google and Walmart has erased local economies and local identity. Lightly regulated markets have not delivered broad-based prosperity, but instead an economy of scarcity that pits workers and consumers against each other in a contest for the table scraps left over after the elites finish dining.
The ascent of individualism over communitarianism has left many Americans feeling alone and empty and in search of something more than just personal economic survival in a me-first world. People do not want to live in a world where all we do is surf social media, look out for ourselves, and forsake any obligations to each other. The sooner political leaders realize this, the better.
For my part, I have recently launched a national conversation with Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah to figure out what role public policy can play in helping Americans find more connectivity and easier access to higher purpose. Our goal is to find consensus around a set of ideas that both the left and right can agree on to help reverse our societal trend toward social isolation and our economic trend toward universally prioritizing profit and efficiency over the common good.
We’re in the early days, but we’ve had good early discussions and I can easily see a set of policies that both Republicans and Democrats can join in supporting to reverse the damaging impacts of decades of unbridled economic neoliberalism. For example, we know that healthy membership organizations—from churches to labor unions—are most often where people find companionship and higher purpose. Why can’t government work more purposefully to help these institutions grow their ability to reach more people?
Or what about the growing right-left consensus on social media regulation? TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram facilitate our withdrawal from one another, and there is an increasing belief that the government needs to step in and curtail the addictive technology that sucks us into our phones and away from much more fulfilling, in-person experiences. Finally, expanding public-service programs is a way to connect people—especially at a formative age—with the psychological high that comes from giving back to your community and putting the welfare of others first. It’s a targeted but powerful way to give more people access to the positive feeling of working for the common good.
There are countless possibilities to help tilt the balance back toward connectivity and the common good, and away from neoliberalism’s blind faith in individualism and market fundamentalism. But whatever direction we take, it is important for us to acknowledge that the current methods to measure the success of public policy are increasingly irrelevant. The unemployment rate is historically low, inflation is going down, and crime is decreasing. But because people are still disconnected from each other and have enormous trouble finding a life purpose other than accumulating material achievement, our rates of addiction, self-harm, and unhappiness are growing, not shrinking.
America’s seminal founding document, the Declaration of Independence, commands government to guarantee every citizen the right to pursue happiness. This right has been systematically undermined by neoliberalism’s canonization of the individual and devaluation of the common good. It’s time for policymakers to realize that if we don’t invest in policies that reconnect us to each other and build our sense of obligation to community, not just our own success, that inalienable right will just keep drifting further and further out of reach.
