Why We Are Feeling Less Hopeful, and What to Do About It – Replies

Readers react to a column by David Brooks analyzing the gloominess trend in the United States.

To the Editor:

Re “More People in the World Are Feeling Hopeful (Except Us),” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 8):

Mr. Brooks ascribes hopelessness in the U.S. to the loss of traditional values and community. He has written many very insightful articles, but this piece is really off the mark. How can he say that America has been thriving economically and that “income inequality has gone down” in the last decade or so?

The level of inequality in America has reached epic proportions not seen in a century. A few hundred plutocrats hold more wealth than at least 200 million ordinary Americans. Donald Trump was elected because millions of Americans can’t afford health care, housing or a quality education and cannot get a decent-paying job.

The loss of community is directly related to our hypersteroidal capitalist economy in which good jobs have disappeared from whole sections of the country because the financial markets demand short-term profits at the expense of workers and their communities. And the Democrats have not done nearly enough to address these problems.

Furthermore, the deliberately addictive social media platforms — one of our “great” corporate inventions — rob people of genuine connections and damage teenage minds.

Mr. Brooks, the spiritual crisis and hopelessness are real, but this has occurred because of the unleashing of extreme greed and the complete corruption of our politics by Big Money going back to at least the 1980s.

Seth Mausner
San Francisco

To the Editor:

David Brooks attributes “very liberal” American students’ high levels of depression to their embrace of “autonomy and social freedom,” their hyper individualism, their “greed” and their worship of individual choice at the expense of “core commitments that precede choice — our love for family, neighborhood, nation and the truth.”

He does not mention factors like economic anxiety, climate change, environmental devastation, digital devices, social media, suppression of free speech or political despair in the face of nascent dictatorship.

I am a relatively happy 78-year-old very liberal man, but if I were a college student I’d be depressed, too.

Mr. Brooks’s analysis is disappointingly reductive in its omission of so many discouraging realities of current American life.

Stephen Kessler
Santa Cruz, Calif.
The writer is a columnist for The Santa Cruz Sentinel.

To the Editor:

David Brooks is right: People flourish where there’s not only prosperity but also “dense networks of relationships” and shared purpose. He’s also right that America and other industrialized societies have largely let material success crowd out the social and moral conditions that sustain a good life.

And while I agree with Mr. Brooks that culture is at the heart of the problem, I’m convinced that there’s still plenty that we can do to address these challenges through sound public policies.

Start by scaling “social prescribing” in primary care so clinicians connect lonely patients to community groups, arts, nature and volunteering. Launch a national service year to bring people together to solve problems. Reinvest in “third places” — libraries as one-stop hubs for learning, counseling, job help and civic life; parks, community kitchens and maker spaces that invite people to unite without having to spend money.

As the adage goes, politics is downstream from culture. Yet smart public policies can reshape culture by making connection the default of modern life. Both left and right care about the disconnection that Mr. Brooks describes. Let’s build the political will to start fixing it.

Kim Samuel
Toronto

To the Editor:

David Brooks focuses on the rise in hopefulness among poorer, more religious countries and the decline in richer, more secular countries like the United States and Western Europe. His reasoning is that “since the 1960s we have adopted values that are more secular, more individualistic and more oriented around self-expression.”

I agree with his analysis. However, he fails to point out the upside of the adoption of such values.

As a result of the trend “to emancipate the individual from the group,” previously repressed groups are freed from conformity to the norm. L.G.B.T.Q.+ individuals are certainly better off than they were in the 1960s. Religious minorities are freer to practice their religion as they choose. Indeed, “cat ladies” whose career goals are nontraditional are undoubtedly happier.

The real challenge is not to recreate the 1960s conformity but to create a society in which religious and cultural institutions provide a sense of community for all of us in all of our diversity.

David Silverstone
West Hartford, Conn.

To the Editor:

David Brooks encourages a focus on abstract notions of shared community that ignores the real economic and political conditions.

The United States has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality among developed nations. Globalization and deindustrialization have hollowed out previously cohesive communities. Economic mobility has stalled as one’s future success is highly correlated to what ZIP code one was born into. Meanwhile tech companies engineer our realities and are set to radically change our work lives with A.I. No amount of church attendance will fix these worries.

And why are young liberals more depressed than conservatives? Maybe they are aware enough to worry about their own and their children’s future in a world where government has failed to successfully address these problems. Perhaps young conservatives aren’t noticing those trends.

And besides, what kind of yardstick is “happiness”? In Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World,” the populace was given Soma so that they could feel “happy” while not noticing their oppression.

Mr. Brooks’s prescriptions for values and connection are hollow when disconnected from the societal context in which we live.

Diane Finn
Candler, N.C.
The writer is a semiretired social worker/psychotherapist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/opinion/americans-pessimism-hopefulness.html