Everything Is F*cked(67)

7. For data on religiosity and suicide, see Kanita Dervic, MD, et al., “Religious Affiliation and Suicide Attempt,” American Journal of Psychiatry 161, no. 12 (2004): 2303–8. For data on religiosity and depression, see Sasan Vasegh et al. “Religious and Spiritual Factors in Depression,” Depression Research and Treatment, published online September 18, 2012, doi: 10.1155/2012/298056.

8. Studies done in more than 132 countries show that the wealthier a country becomes, the more its population struggles with feelings of meaning and purpose. See Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, “Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in Life than Residents of Wealthy Nations,” Psychological Science 25, no. 2 (2014): 422–30.

9. Pessimism is widespread in the wealthy, developed world. When the public opinion data company YouGov surveyed people in seventeen countries in 2015 on whether they believed the world was getting better, worse, or staying the same, fewer than 10 percent of people in the richest countries believed it was getting better. In the United States, only 6 percent said it was getting better. In Australia and France, that figure was only 3 percent. See Max Roser, “Good News: The World Is Getting Better. Bad News: You Were Wrong About How Things Have Changed,” World Economic Forum, August 15, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/good-news-the-world-is-getting-better-bad-news-you-were-wrong-about-how-things-have-changed.

10. The books I refer to are Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018). I needle the authors a bit here, but these are two excellent and important books.

11. This “corner to corner” phrase is a riff on Andrew Sullivan’s excellent piece on this same topic. See Andrew Sullivan, “The World Is Better Than Ever. Why Are We Miserable?” Intelligencer, March 9, 2018.

12. Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Rise of Education,” published online at OurWorldInData.org, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education.

13. For an exhaustive treatment of the historical reduction in violence, Pinker’s book is indispensable. See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

14. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 214–32.

15. Ibid., pp. 199–213.

16. “Internet Users in the World by Regions, June 30, 2018,” pie chart, InternetWorldStats.com, https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

17. Diana Beltekian and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Extreme Poverty Is Falling: How Is Poverty Changing for Higher Poverty Lines?” March 5, 2018, Our WorldInData.org, https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines.

18. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp. 249–67.

19. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 53–61.

20. Ibid., pp. 79–96.

21. Vaccinations are probably the single greatest advancement of human well-being in the past one hundred years. One study found that the WHO’s global vaccination campaign in the 1980s likely prevented more than twenty million cases of dangerous diseases worldwide and saved $1.53 trillion in health care costs. The only diseases ever eradicated entirely were eradicated due to vaccines. This is part of why the antivaccination movement is so infuriating. See Walter A. Orenstein and Rafi Ahmed, “Simply Put: Vaccinations Save Lives,” PNAS 114, no. 16 (2017): 4031–33.

22. G. L. Klerman and M. M. Weissman, “Increasing Rates of Depression,” Journal of the American Medical Association 261 (1989): 2229–35. See also J. M. Twenge, “Time Period and Birth Cohort Differences in Depressive Symptoms in the U.S., 1982–2013,” Social Indicators Research 121 (2015): 437–54.

23. Myrna M. Weissman, PhD, Priya Wickramaratne, PhD, Steven Greenwald, MA, et al., “The Changing Rates of Major Depression,” JAMA Psychiatry 268, no. 21 (1992): 3098–105.

24. C. M. Herbst, “‘Paradoxical’ Decline? Another Look at the Relative Reduction in Female Happiness,” Journal of Economic Psychology 32 (2011): 773–88.

25. S. Cohen and D. Janicki-Deverts, “Who’s Stressed? Distributions of Psychological Stress in the United States in Probability Samples from 1983, 2006, and 2009,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 42 (2012): 1320–34.

26. For a harrowing and impassioned analysis of the opioid crisis ripping through North America, see Andrew Sullivan, “The Poison We Pick,” New York Magazine, February 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html.

27. “New Cigna Study Reveals Loneliness at Epidemic Levels in America,” Cigna’s Loneliness Index, May 1, 2018, https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8294451-cigna-us-loneliness-survey/.

28. The Edelman Trust Index finds a continued decline in social trust across most of the developed world. See “The 2018 World Trust Barometer: World Report,” https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2018-10/2018_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report_FEB.pdf.

29. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 3 (2006): 353–75.

30. Wealthier countries, on average, have higher suicide rates than poorer countries. Data can be found from the World Health Organization, “Suicide Rates Data by Country,” http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDEASDR?lang=en. Suicide is also more prevalent in wealthier neighborhoods compared with poorer neighborhoods. See Josh Sanburn, “Why Suicides Are More Common in Richer Neighborhoods,” Time, November 8, 2012, http://business.time.com/2012/11/08/why-suicides-are-more-common-in-richer-neighborhoods/.