Young People Say the American Dream Is Dead. The Antidote May Not Be What People Think.

Younger Americans are more pessimistic about the country than any generation before them. Their disillusionment may stem less from politics than from a growing sense of invisibility.

A Politico report recently revealed how Americans see our country and the American dream, and the results are bleak. A plurality of respondents believe that our nation’s best times are behind us. Forty-six percent of respondents agree that “The American dream no longer exists,” and those numbers are even higher for younger generations. Fifty-two percent are so dispirited by the state of our country that they say that “we need radical change” in order to “make life better in America.” Again, those numbers are higher for younger generations.

What’s going on? Why are so many of us, especially my generation and younger (I’m 34), in despair about the state of our nation—and, by extension, the state of our own lives? The report posits several explanations, from a struggling economy to a dearth of meaning in our lives to toxic polarization.

I think there’s truth to many of these explanations, but one key piece of the puzzle isn’t being discussed: fewer and fewer of us feel seen.

Feeling seen and acknowledged is a foundational human need, up there with food and water and shelter. In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey argues that the need to feel seen and listened to on a deep level is so acute that he equates the feeling of being listened to with breathing in “psychological air.” As a quote widely attributed to Covey goes, “The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.”

In Anatomy of the Soul, psychiatrist Curt Thompson says that the experience of being deeply seen is an essential aspect of the good life. He writes:

“The process of being known is the vessel in which our lives are kneaded and molded, lanced and sutured, confronted and comforted…[i]t is the communal container in which the information about the mind and relationships that we will explore in this book takes its shape and gives birth to the graces of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

But our modern society gives us fewer and fewer opportunities to be deeply known.

For one thing: as more and more of our entertainment and our lives becomes mediated through screens, we’ve started to lose the types of deep relationships that our ancestors took for granted. Writing in 1999, Robert Putnam documented how the rise of television had contributed to a society that bowled alone, because more and more of us were spending our evenings in front of the television set rather than going out and interacting with our neighbors. Since then the problem has gotten exponentially worse.

In Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy wrote that, “People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” He recounts Americans across economic and racial divides telling him that they felt like, “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”

To put numbers to this disturbing phenomenon, Murphy reports that: “In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.”

Americans today—especially young people—might have more casual friendships, especially because social media puts us in touch with hundreds of people every day. But those casual relationships don’t provide the “psychological air” that Covey describes. They don’t offer us the opportunity to be deeply seen, in all of our complexity and messiness, by another human being. Only close friendships do that, and close friendships are on the decline. A report by the Survey Center On American Life found that 12 percent of Americans reported having no close friends in 2021, up from 3 percent in 1990. An astounding 49 percent report having three or fewer close friends in 2021, up from 27 percent in 1990. Some of that increase is due to the pandemic, but some is also caused by societal shifts towards atomistic lives.

If the problem is that fewer and fewer of us feel seen, we might think that what I call “vulnerability culture” would provide an antidote. “Vulnerability culture” is the new trend of opening up, often on social media, about our worst mental or physical problems. Younger Americans especially are participating in “vulnerability culture” in ways that one would think would lead to us feeling seen. So why doesn’t it work?

For one thing, a lot of this “vulnerability culture” is mediated online. When Simone Biles dropped out of the 2020 Olympics in order to prioritize her mental health, she became the subject of glowing news articles and social media adoration. But most of this attention came online, from strangers. It came from people who only saw a tiny slice of Biles’ life, and whose lives in turn she saw only a tiny fraction of. This kind of adoration may sound like it should make us feel seen, but it rarely does because it’s so shallow.

This has been my own experience. For decades I struggled with intense depression and with the grueling after-effects of being abused as a child. When I opened up about my struggles, I got lots of validation and attention on social media. But none of it made any real difference, because it was from strangers.

Thompson talks about the importance of seeing someone seeing you. For example, a child with her loving mother: the mother sees the child, and the child is deeply and intimately aware of her mother seeing her. That kind of seeing can make a real difference to peoples’ mental health. It’s not the kind of thing that can be replicated via online attention and social media. Quantity cannot make up for quality.

There’s also a more pernicious aspect to “vulnerability culture.” Sometimes the focus is not only on seeing peoples’ despair; sometimes the focus is on keeping people in that state of despair. Misery loves company, after all. In 2022 Suzy Weiss reported on the phenomenon of “spoonie” culture, a frequently toxic subculture for young women who are sick. This subculture can help people with brutal diagnoses to feel seen and validated in their pain. But, as Weiss reports, there’s a dark side: the community seems set up to keep people sick. She quotes psychiatrist Mark Sullivan, who worries that the Internet has created “communities of grievance” in which patients can adopt “victim mentalities” for attention and validation.

Spoonie culture struggles to help people who are suffering to feel seen, because it can only see part of them. It can see their illness and their pain. But it has a harder time seeing their fortitude, their drive to get better, or even their humanity outside of their sickness. As Sophie Jacobson, who was active in the spoonie community at the time, told Weiss, ““Someone asked me recently, ‘Who are you outside of being sick?’ and my jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer that question.” Such communities struggle to offer their members the “psychological air” that Covey says that we all need.

If spoonie culture obsesses over our sickness, then the polar opposite would be the well-meaning (and generally older) people who deride the problems that young Americans face as simply stemming from entitlement and privilege; i.e. as being “first world problems.” To be clear, this mindset does come with some benefits. After I spent a year in Kenya seeing abject poverty up close, I decided that I was never going to complain about money again, even through the financial vagaries of being a freelance author. I’ve mostly kept to that decision, and it’s been good for me. Sometimes, when we get upset that our Netflix shorted out or that we don’t have money for a brand new phone, reminding ourselves that we’re suffering from first world problems can give us some perspective.

But as philosopher Alan Noble points out in You Are Not Your Own, the modern world comes with its own enormous challenges. We face obstacles that our ancestors didn’t. We might not deal with a high infant mortality rate or with wondering where our next meal is coming from, but we face existential problems of our own: a dearth of meaning, a lack of feeling of belonging, a culture that conflates our financial success with our worth as a human being. As Noble argues, these problems can cause profound pain: he suggests that they’re behind a huge part of the spike in mental illness among young people, as well as a driver of deaths of despair. If our goal is to be seen, then sweeping these problems under the rug or dismissing the angst that comes from them as stemming from privilege and entitlement is profoundly counterproductive.

So if much of our societal despair is caused by not feeling seen, what can we do about the problem?

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for our broken society to fix itself. Each of us, in our own lives, can take two powerful steps to be seen more fully and to experience the mental health benefits thereof.

First, we can consciously invest in deep offline relationships. We can log off of social media and rekindle old friendships. We can make the small sacrifices to invest in and grow relationships—missing an hour of sleep in order to listen to a family member who’s going through a hard time, making the courageous decision to open up to a casual friend about something deeper in our own lives.

These relationships cannot be built quickly, because intimacy takes time to cultivate. It requires a hundred small decisions, a thousand small investments. But these investments are worth the cost. As Thompson notes, being fully seen by another human being is essential to integrating our prefrontal cortex. Integrating our prefrontal cortex leads to a slew of benefits, including “Emotional balance,” “response flexibility” (essentially, the ability to respond calmly to a situation rather than react), a reduction in fear, and “living with a sense of vitality, expectation, and hope.”

The second step that we can take, if we are so inclined, is to cultivate a relationship with the divine.

This is not a popular recommendation in certain circles, but I think it’s one that deserves our serious consideration. If God does exist, then He is the one being in the entire universe who would know us with perfect clarity. He would know every hair on our heads, every thought that’s ever passed through our hearts—because He created us. And, He would love us infinitely (1 John 4:8). If part of our societal malaise is not being seen and known, what could be more healing than to be seen and known perfectly by God?

Indeed, Thompson says that helping his patients to feel known and loved by God has been essential to their healing. He tells the story of “Laura,” a composite of many patients he has seen over the years who struggle with intense depression. Part of how Thompson helped Laura was traditional psychotherapy, together with helping her to see and feel seen by other human beings. But Thompson stresses that a key part was reshaping her relationship with the divine: helping her to listen to and believe God’s “voice” when it told her: “’You are my daughter—one I love. I am so very pleased you are on the earth.’” Thompson says that this combination helped Laura to get to a place where her depression “no longer plagued her to any degree of serious consequence.”

Perhaps this combination of feeling deeply seen by other humans and also deeply seen by God can combat our societal malaise in the same way that it combatted Laura’s depression.

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