Righteous Stuff
A discussion of why mental health seems so intertwined with political beliefs.
Derek Thompson recently interviewed Greg Lukianoff for an episode of his podcast, Plain English. The show centered around the evidence that conservatives tend to be more satisfied with their lives than progressives and report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of anxiety and depression. Thompson has written about this phenomenon and adjacent topics previously, and continues to be fascinated with discovering the forces behind it.
The second is, as long-time listeners know, I don't like to label myself, but I occasionally think of myself as a progressive, and one responsibility of adhering to that label is the responsibility of self-criticism. If the cost of any ideology is that it makes its adherents depressed, that is a pretty serious side effect worth listing on the box.
Opinion columnist for The New York Times, Ross Douthat, wrote a piece about the correlation between happiness and political leanings recently. I read the comments attached to the column's post on Bluesky. I think I went through about 70 of them, all exclusively negative. Many people just called Douthat names. Others doubted the claims that the columnist was making. Douthat wasn't making up the data, though. There's plenty of empirical evidence out there to support the central hypothesis of a correlation between political/sociocultural leanings and mental health. Douthat was providing his own interpretive understanding of causal relationship, but that didn't seem to be what most of the commenters were attacking.
As Thompson suggests, there should probably be a greater effort to understand the troubling data, particularly among people who may consider themselves to be progressive.
