Perhaps it is the greatest
marketing slogan of all time, writ larger than life in our Declaration, applied to an entire citizenry: "the pursuit of
happiness." Over generations of prosperity and growth, the American Dream has become an American Expectation—a version of happiness achieved by entitlement and equation: Two fat incomes plus a two-car garage plus two master-bathroom sinks plus two-point-something kids equals one happy family. To be sure, the recession has deferred some of the dream. Still, we imagine that in time we'll realize the formula for a satisfied adulthood once more. We'll land the job, catch the spouse, buy the house, have the kids. In short, we'll live the better life.
But a raft of reports on well-being, including the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center, suggest it's not better at all. We the people have grown continuously more depressed over the last half-century. A recent analysis of the World Database of Happiness, covering the years 1946 to 2006, found rising happiness levels in 19 of 26 countries around the world; the United States was not one of them. As Andrew Oswald, who studies the intersection of economics and happiness at the University of Warwick, in Britain, states, "The U.S.A. has, in aggregate, apparently become more miserable over the last quarter of a century."
Oswald and many other behavioral researchers say much of our discontent seems linked to the unrealistic expectations of the American Dream.
Increasingly, America deifies the nuclear family. It's the psychological and economic basis for this whole grand experiment in living. You get married, but social scientists have found that a poor marriage may be worse than staying single, and that the state of our unions—in the words of one massive new study—is "fragile and weak." You have children, but surveys have discovered more depression and unhappiness in adults with kids than in those without. You spend more hours at the office than almost any workforce in the world to pay for the big suburban house, but in exchange you suffer a commute that makes you miserable and a social isolation that puts more pressure on home life than even a McMansion can bear. In a 1966 essay in the Saturday Evening Post, Joan Didion pilloried those who had achieved the American Dream. "They had achieved the bigger house on the better street and the familiar accoutrements of a family on its way up," she wrote, and "they were paying the familiar price for it." That price seems to have risen in recent years, as if by inflation. And by investing so much well-being in our little slice of suburbia, to the exclusion of the greater community, the dream may be pushing families up the path to an increasingly elusive summit.
You Get Married
When I ask Jean Twenge about marriage and happiness, the psychology professor at San Diego State University tells me about her grandmother. She ran a farm, gave birth to seven children, and was married to her husband until he died, shortly after their 51st anniversary. It was a good marriage, by all accounts. "But she would have laughed in my face if I had asked her, 'Was he your best friend?'" Twenge says. "Now we expect our marriage partner to be our best friend and a great lover, a great parent and a soul mate, really-good-looking and have a great sense of humor. We have these expectations for marriage we can't possibly fulfill."
Americans cycle through relationships at exceptionally high rates. Though lower since the recession, divorce rates in the United States are still the highest in the West. And staying together is often no better. The percentage of Americans unhappy in their marriages is a full 10 points higher today than it was in polls 30-odd years ago, according to the latest annual "State of Our Unions" report on family life, a joint publication from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values. The report cites the 2008 National Survey of Family Growth, which found that when asked whether "marriage has not worked out for most people they know," 37 percent of people agreed. A child born to unmarried cohabitating parents in Sweden has a better chance of living with both parents at 16 than a kid born to married parents in the United States.
Of course, Sweden—which vies annually with Denmark for the prize of "happiest country" in the World Values Survey—has a bounty of social policies that reduce the pressures of parenting, homeownership, health care, and neither an indigenous equivalent to Carrie Bradshaw nor a tradition of hundred-thousand-dollar weddings to fetishize the joining of two souls. "Here we look to that incredible emotional rush when you've just fallen in love, which we know physiologically doesn't stay that way—it can't," says sociologist Linda Waite, who studies marriage at the University of Chicago.
