The Perception Gap That Makes America Unnecessarily Unhappy

Over the last few years, I’ve read the latest World Happiness Report. The 2025 report was published last week in conjunction with World Happiness Day. Having read and digested the new edition, one thing jumped out at me: Americans are clearly a lot less happy than we could be. We know the United States performs relatively poorly in the rankings (24th this year). But it’s worth taking a closer look at why — because it’s probably a solvable problem.

We’re not 24th because we are bad people or have bad values. It’s certainly not because we lack money for life’s essentials — we are the richest country in the history of the world. And it’s not even because we fundamentally fail the standard happiness test of prioritizing relationships and finding purpose through helping others. 

It’s because of our mindset. There is a significant gap in the perception between how we actually are and how we think everyone else is, a gap in our perception between what we actually do and what we think everyone else does, a gap in our perception between what we value in life and what we think our society truly values. The problem isn’t us. And the problem isn’t everyone else. The problem is our collective misconception of everyone else. 

The report conclusively demonstrates the strong  correlation between caring for others, helping others, doing things — volunteering, donating — that give you a sense of meaning and purpose with individual and societal happiness. However, according to the report, what also matters just as much is your perception of how others will treat you.¹ Expecting kindness from others is a stronger predictor of happiness than major actual or expected harms.² This is where we fall short. 

The report uses the example of a lost wallet and asks respondents if they think the wallet is likely to be returned by a stranger, a neighbor or a police officer. The report also then asks respondents whether they donated, volunteered or helped a stranger recently. 

The United States has a meaningful disparity. The report shows that we are truly a generous people. We ranked 12th for donations, 15th for volunteering and 12th for helping strangers. And yet when asked if we expect someone to return our lost wallet, we’re 17th in expecting a neighbor to do it, 52nd in expecting a stranger to do it and 25th in expecting a police officer (therefore our own government) to do it. We expect less of others than we do of ourselves. That’s a problem. 

It’s not that most Americans need to develop inherently different values. It’s that we keep publicly prioritizing and reinforcing society’s most negative elements, which makes us think everyone else is pretty screwed up.³ And that, in turn, produces broad based lower well being and life satisfaction.

What we think will happen may not determine what actually will happen, but it certainly shapes how we feel about it. And that shapes our happiness.

I am at my unhappiest when I obsess about potential conflict with someone. I play it out in my head constantly. When the moment of truth arrives, it’s almost never that bad. Whoever I’m dreading conflict with is almost always at least a little better than I expected (not always, but often). And yet the constant rumination leading up to it still made me utterly miserable, every single time. If expecting the worst in people makes me unhappy, then expecting the best in them (even with the occasional disappointment) would make me happier.⁴ But I need to be able to actually believe that. Our culture makes that very difficult. 

Take social media. Most western industrialized countries (15 out of 19, according to the report) were a lot happier from 2005-2010 than they are today. What has changed the most since 2010? The explosion of social media. 

We now spend exponentially more time alone (which itself breeds unhappiness) staring at a device and engaging on a platform that brings out the worst in people and is governed by legal and economic incentives that encourage the social media companies to push the most toxic content possible. As a result, we constantly are exposed to everyone’s anger, insecurities, anxieties, jealousies, even hatred. Of course that makes us think others are not going to return our wallet. 

Or, we’re told by social media to prioritize the wrong things. Maseratis and private jets and blinding bling don’t make people happy in a sustainable way. But to look at Instagram (and, in many ways, at popular culture in general), you’d think that’s all that matters. So we focus on what we don’t have (and don’t even really need most of the time) to our own detriment. And even when we do manage to get it, we typically feel far less happy than we expected. 

Or take our political system. We are unique among democracies in that we decide most of our elections in party primaries rather than in competitions between candidates from different parties. A recent New York Times study showed that in the 2024 elections, just 8% of Congressional elections were decided by 5 points or less and just 7% of state legislative elections were decided by 5 points or less. 

That means that whoever wins the party primary is extremely likely to win the general election. And because primary turnout is extremely low (10-15% for most elections, sometimes even less) and because those voters are the most ideological, the extremes typically win elections. Then they bring an angry, zero sum, overly moralistic mentality (true for both sides) to government in order to keep appealing to the handful of ideologues who will vote in their next primary. Nothing gets done. Problems don’t get solved. Trust in government (and in institutions across the board) plummets. The degradation in social trust drives more extremism. Which then produces even worse politicians, more cynicism and lower turnout. And the cycle goes on. It doesn’t have to — because it’s not who we are. It’s just a representation of the extremes. 

When I say we’re better than that, it’s not just a turn of phrase. We actually, literally are. We are a generous country. We give more money to charity than almost anyone else according to the World Giving Index. We volunteer our time. We help strangers. We are good.⁵ 

But we are told to believe the opposite. We are told that everyone else is out to get us.⁶ We are told — by both sides of the political spectrum — that anyone who holds different views than we do is automatically bad. And all of that massively  — and completely unnecessarily — decreases our feelings of happiness, satisfaction and well being.

So maybe the answer is in part the stuff I always call for in this substack like mobile voting to move politics to the middle and repealing Section 230, which currently protects and incentivizes social media platforms to only push the most toxic content. But maybe it’s also about eliminating the gap between perception and reality. For example:

• What if we used public forums (like subway or bus ads or billboards) to promote the actual good deeds done by others? We should actively, consistently show the good in people — good that is already actually happening. We should show that most people are alike in wanting to do good, in believing in a greater good. We don’t even have to create the mentality. It already exists. We just have to show that it’s far more prevalent than we realize. 

• What if we made volunteering and helping others easier and more convenient (for example, I really don’t mind giving blood but the significant effort required to do so where I live means it almost never happens)? Norm cascades help determine things like why people avoid an empty restaurant or why a top prospect suddenly falls in the draft and no one really understands why. But they also show that the more we visibly see others doing good, the more we’ll want to do it too and the better motives we’ll ascribe to everyone else. And that increases our happiness. 

• What if we did a better job linking the good deeds we do and the specific, tangible impact it has in helping others? The report is clear that when people see the actual benefit of a good deed, it makes them a lot happier. We typically tell people to do good for the sake of morality or altruism. They should do it because it makes them feel good about themselves (that ultimately is why we choose to do good) and we should do everything we can to maximize those feelings. 

• What if we require national service to graduate from high school or college, but rather than sending everyone to the military⁷ (we simply don’t need that many people), we require that everyone do something tangible in their community like volunteering at a nursing home or picking up trash in a park or tutoring kids? The point here isn’t whatever benefit is produced by the free labor itself. It’s to show people that happiness comes from purpose and meaning. It comes from fulfillment. It comes from helping others. We can use actual, real world experience to counter false narratives championed by social media and by our political leaders who convey a false picture of humanity to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of everyone else.

• What if we had a curriculum in schools about how we identify and prioritize what can make us truly happy? From taking care of our physical and mental health⁸ to learning better internet habits to learning how to deal with anxiety to sharing meals with others⁹ to prioritizing real life friendships over online connections¹⁰ to seeing and feeling the benefit of helping others through service, we could teach kids — at an early age — to ignore at least some of what they see on Instagram or Tik Tok, to ignore the hatred spewed by their political leaders in the cynical pursuit of primary voters, and instead adopt a mentality of both giving freely and receiving freely?¹¹

Now, eliminating the cognitive dissonance between who we are and who we think everyone else is won’t automatically lead to endless bliss and ecstasy.¹² There are still major problems — from the cost of housing to affordable health care to the easy availability of assault weapons to the opioid epidemic to countless others — to solve. But a change in our mindset about the intentions of others (and a major increase in turnout facilitated by technology) can finally allow our elected officials to start working together again, compromise, and find consensus to actually solve these problems. 

There’s so much we can do — without much cost — to narrow the gap between who we are and how we feel, between what we do and what we think. There’s so much we can do to make ourselves happier and to set ourselves on a far more productive course. 

Our low ranking in the 2025 World Happiness Report is alarming, although sadly not anything new. But a deeper dive into the data shows that all is not lost. The underlying ingredients for success and happiness are all there. The substance is good. The optics and narrative are bad. We can change that. 

1. This is why failure to communicate is the death knell of any relationship.

2. The Stanford Communities Project has found that young people experience diminished connection when they perceive their peers as less empathic than their peers self-report.

3. At least everyone we don’t know. 

4. Obviously there are always going to be individual people you can’t expect much from and if at all possible, you should cut them out of your lives.

5. The thing we don’t do at a high rate is vote. Giving politicians the cover and courage to move back to the middle, work together and get things done could help reverse the cycle of distrust and failure that defines our government today and could start to promote a worldview not based on zero sum mentalities and Hobbesian theories of life solely being short, brutish and nasty with every man for himself — theories that make people miserable. 

6. And yes, many of the countries at the top of the list are far more homogenous making it easier for them to trust and accept each other’s intentions. Our greatest strength — our diversity, our ability to attract the world’s best and brightest, our focus on change and innovation — also makes it easier to demonize people we’ve never met. 

7. It’s noteworthy that Israel ranks highest in the quality of social connections and has mandatory military service. So not only does service teach you to prioritize fulfillment and purpose, it also helps you form close relationships with people you can count on. 

8. In fact, the report found: “…individuals embedded in strong social networks are more likely to seek help for mental health issues, which, in turn, lowers the chances of harmful behaviour. At the community level, social capital fosters life expectancy, longevity, and public health, and reduces all-cause mortality. Community social capital is linked to lower death rates, including from heart disease, and to lower mortality from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and suicide. Furthermore, collective efficacy, i.e., perception of mutual trust and willingness to help each other, has been associated with positive societal outcomes including reduced rates of assaults,homicide, premature mortality, and asthma.”

9. The report demonstrates an incredibly strong correlation between eating with others and individual life satisfaction and positive affect and yet the US ranks 69th in sharing meals with others.

10. The report does a good job establishing that the less time people spend with others, the unhappier they are. We may think that remote work is great because it cuts down on commuting time and offers more flexibility but there’s a good chance it’s causing a lot more harm than good. 

11. The report shows that people with a low expectation of both have significantly lower wellbeing)

12. No matter how much you have in terms of wealth, relationships, meaning, health or anything else, life is never just all fun all the time. We adapt to our conditions and that becomes the new baseline and then we struggle with whatever is at hand, no matter how trivial it might seem to someone else. You can’t avoid suffering. You can just learn how to deal with it better.