Young Liberals Are Depressed Because Of Ubiquitous Political Pessimism

Stop telling people that everything is terrible and getting worse

Rates of depression have been spiking dramatically among all groups of young people, but especially liberals and especially girls. Very depressing (pun intended)! Across the board, there’s been a broad scale deterioration in the mental health of young people, no matter how you measure it. Now, I think much of the decline in mental health has to do with social media, but this is not the whole story, especially regarding why liberals in particular are getting so much more miserable. So why is this?

I suspect that Matt Yglesias is right. Liberals in recent years have begun to treat misery and predicting doom as a sign of personal virtue. Many young people buy into bogus prognostications about the end of the world from climate change. Few liberals are hopeful or optimistic about the future, especially when politics doesn’t turn out their way.

Every liberal woman I talked to on election day was frightened and depressed about the result of the election and the resulting state of the world. Many described wanting to vomit, others described, at their watch party, the atmosphere being “somber.” The election wasn’t just something they regarded as bad—it was an occasion for many days of misery and fear about the state of the country.

In liberal circles, being depressed about the world is seen as virtuous and heroic. Greta Thunberg, who confidently predicts that climate change will kill everyone (???!!!), is a darling of the modern left. If you talk about the world getting dramatically better over time, you’re accused of distracting from the very real issues. Some feminists were so depressed about the results of the recent election that they swore off all relationships with men. This is not something one who is optimistic about the direction of the country does!

Both Democrats and Republicans tend to think that things are terrible and getting worse. But Democrats treat this as some soul-crushing, all-encompassing reality, as if they live in Nazi Germany or the The Handmaid's Tale. Even among those less prone to hysteria, there’s a general sense of quite profound pessimism.

Years ago—and to some degree today—I followed a lot of people who did high school debate on social media, almost all of whom are extremely left wing. One event from a few years ago really stuck with me, representing, in a big way, why liberals are unhappy. During the day of the Chauvin conviction, I logged onto social media, wondering what people’s reactions would be. Before the sentencing, many people predicted he wouldn’t be sentenced because of the racism of the policing system.

Thus, after he was convicted, you’d think they’d be surprised and happy. When conservatives have big wins, they tend to celebrate. Yet almost every post was about how the Chauvin conviction shouldn’t distract us from the essential truth that the criminal justice system is racist and that radicals making a big deal of the trial was the only reason for conviction. They simply refused to accept the win—that the system had worked. They couldn’t accept the system was anything other than a grotesque horror that only occasionally brought justice when compelled to by intense external pressure.

This is a ubiquitous feature of left-wing politics, particularly among young liberals. The widespread belief is that everything is terrible and that reforms are just marginal tweaks. Some are even opposed to reforms that make things better on the grounds that this will distract from wholesale abolition of oppressive systems. Such people see banal, liberal, milquetoast reformers like Matt Yglesias as the enemy. It’s no wonder that such people are miserable: they think everything sucks. They agree with Taylor Lorenz’s diagnosis that “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”

They live in the most prosperous country at the most prosperous time in the history of the world, and yet they talk about how bad everything is in their country for normal people. They’re not even miserable about the seriously bad stuff like fish farming and wild animal suffering, but instead about (eyeroll) politics.

As both Haidt and Yglesias have noted, when a person is depressed, a common treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, where they’re taught not to catastrophize and to treat things as within their control. Yglesias gives the following example:

• Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”

• Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”

The advice given on the modern left is the exact opposite of CBT.

Suppose that a person was feeling depressed and lonely. They were sad that they didn’t have many friends. It would not be helpful if the dominant cultural attitude gwas:

HOPE OF FRIENDSHIP IS DOOMED. It is almost impossible to have friends. This is something outside of our control; we live in a late stage capitalist hellscape where friendship is almost impossible, and in the rare cases it happens, it occurs mostly by accident.

Then suppose that person made a friend and looked at statistics online which found that actually, lots of people have friends. Everyone around them agreed that being happy about that would be Very Problematic and they should Recognize The Ways That Structural Injustice Inhibits Friendship. After they made a friend, their acquaintances told them not to be happy about it because doing so would distract from the very real problem of friendlessness.

Suppose that in addition to this, for the first time in history, people were growing up on social media. A childhood largely dominated by playing was replaced with spending hundreds of hours on TikTok. For toxoplasma of rage reasons, the rhetoric on social media was depressive and divisive; people were constantly sharing misleading misinformation about the impossibility of making friends and how much everything sucked. It was constantly repeated that those inadequately pessimistic about the friendship crisis are privileged, and that this reflects their corrupt moral fiber.

Such a system seems almost perfectly designed to foster misery.

Yet this reflects the dominant norms in progressive spaces. People get suspicious if you’re optimistic about the state of the world as a result of anything other than Democratic policies. Young liberals are encouraged to find things problematic. As

Ozy Brennan

describes:

When I was a young social justice warrior, in the halcyon days of the 2010s, we were very concerned about which things were problematic. The tumblr Your Fave Is Problematic attained a level of fame entirely out of proportion to its meager number of posts, because it epitomized the mindset. Each post listed off a number of bad things a celebrity did, from raping people to making transphobic jokes to wearing tasteless costumes to putting a jewel on the middle of their forehead (“culturally appropriating the bindi”) to noticing that some gay men have lots of sexual partners.

By presenting a list of bad things, Your Fave is Problematic decontextualized people’s actions. Rape is much worse than putting a jewel in the middle of your forehead, even if you believe South Asians have trademarked the concept of forehead jewelry. But if you put them all in a list, they wound up all feeling the same. Assault is bad, putting misogynistic screeds in your rap songs is bad, being an older drag queen who doesn’t know “tranny” is a slur now is bad, wearing a kimono is bad. You lose the ability to distinguish between them.

And what were we supposed to do about all this information, exactly? Mostly just know it. As people would say, “it’s okay to like problematic things, as long as you acknowledge the ways that they’re problematic.”

In retrospect, this was a breathtakingly audacious sentiment. How were we supposed to respond? “Thank you for graciously granting your permission to like things, random stranger!” And it conveniently elided the fact that, usually, people weren’t disputing whether they had a right to like various things; they were disputing whether the purported bad things were actually bad.

…

And—as far as I’ve seen—it never goes the other way, except maybe for some conservative Christians who feel obliged to be grateful for how many souls something brought to Christ. Social conservatives don’t say “this book is dumb, but obviously I appreciate the happily married heterosexual couple in it, please don’t cancel me.” Anti-woke people don’t have to acknowledge how blindingly white a fantasy TV show’s cast is before they say it’s badly written. I have never had to pause before discussing a stupid article to say “I recognize that this venue quoted Scott Alexander and didn’t out him, but nevertheless they shouldn’t say that all cows are Nazis and only eating steak for dinner every night will prevent the bovine Holocaust.”

As Ozy notes, such a thing is ubiquitous in politics. One of the most common endorsements of voting for Harris was roughly “yes, Harris is an evil warmongering prosecutor who sits at the right-hand of the prince of darkness and might kill you, but Trump is an even more evil warmongering felonious rapist who sits at the right hand of Satan, a guy even worse than the prince of darkness, and he will definitely kill you. So Trump is worse than that demented ghoul Harris, but I totally understand why some of you can’t stand voting for the lesser of two evils.” Ozy furthers:

In 1991, Louisianans were faced with a choice between one of the most corrupt politicians in Louisianian history and the literal Grand Wizard of the KKK. This unfortunate situation resulted in many hilarious bumper stickers, such as “Vote For The Lizard, Not The Wizard” and “Vote For The Crook: It’s Important.” But these days, “Vote For The Lizard” feels like the approach people take to every election. “Our guy is awful, but the other guy is worse! Yay!”

While occasionally liberals express hope about politics—e.g. many were hopeful about Obama and Harris—this is far from universal. Many young people on the left regard Harris as “The Lizard, Not The Wizard,” and even among those who are hopeful about politics, they tend to be hopeless about the general state of the world. They regard a victory of their candidate as a brief respite from the generally hellish reality, where everything sucks!

If you say, without caveats, that things are pretty great and getting better, those on the left will immediately reach for 101 ways that things are actually very bad and you should be ashamed of thinking that. Doomerist politics—believing everything is problematic, viewing optimism as both morally suspect and irrational, and feeling limited control over circumstances—has spread beyond Tumblr and into the mainstream.

It’s no mystery why young liberals are depressed: they’re constantly being told from all the people around them that everything is terrible and getting worse and that the only appropriate attitude is sadness and pessimism.