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Comment by yannyu | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the article you cited or are you just evaluating the snapshot of numbers?

> WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty-four percent of Americans say they are “very satisfied” with the way things are going in their personal life, the lowest by two percentage points in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001. This also marks the continuation of a decline in personal satisfaction since January 2020, when the measure peaked at 65%.

> Record-Low 44% of Americans Are 'Very Satisfied' With Their Personal Life

And then to link to your own blog post as though that were a supporting citation is strange to say the least.

It's a lot of "just stop being depressed" energy.

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My blog post is a more detailed expression of a sentence that starts with "my personal experience". I think that's fine.

And of course I read the article. That's why my sentence explicitly says "satisfied or very satisfied" whereas the text you quote only selects the "very satisfied". One can imagine that if I had only linked without reading I could not possibly have guessed 81% correctly either.

I'm not saying "just stop being depressed". I'm questioning that any significant portion of the population is depressed. I think that's valid.

I can only speak anecdotally from what I have seen in TikTok videos and TikTok comments, and yes, a significant portion of people in society are very depressed, and drinking/smoking/screwing their way through it, putting on a Joker smile.

I think certain populations have this effect, yes. As an example, teen suicides have genuinely risen in the US in the post-smartphone/post-social-media era. So I think the evidence (suicides are not subject to measurement error as much) is pretty strong that certain populations (all teenagers, for instance) are encountering unhappiness to a great degree.

But TikTok is renowned for having an algorithmically tailored feed that is specifically engagement maximizing. While there are some selection effects in the people one encounters in normal life, surely one must concede that an algorithmically tailored feed maximizing engagement cannot possibly be anything but highly selected.

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