We Need to Make America Grateful Again

We live in the most materially prosperous era in human history. Over the past half-century, child mortality has fallen by two-thirds in the United States, medical advances have made lives longer and more comfortable, education rates have soared, and material comforts like air-conditioning, plumbing and internet access abound. Although our country faces many challenges, the progress of the past decades has ushered in conveniences and opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.
Yet we are anxious, restless and often enraged. Why?
It's not only about our circumstances. It is about how we perceive our lives. Although technology has elevated our standard of living, it has created a warped lens of comparison. Americans' many anxieties — about the state of our democracy, among other pressing worries — are increasingly born out of envy. Rarely has envy been so easily provoked, profitably spread or deeply embedded in daily life. This collective envy runs the risk of cutting the threads that hold our democratic system and civil society together.
In his 'Divine Comedy,' Dante Alighieri described envy not just as a personal sin but also as a societal toxin. In 'Purgatorio' the envious are punished by having their eyes sewn shut — blinded to their own blessings, tormented by the success of others, which they can still hear about. That poem was written more than seven centuries ago. Today our punishment is the inverse: Our eyes are forced open, flooded with curated illusions of friends and strangers alike on social media. We scroll through images of other people's vacations, seemingly perfect families, luxury homes and effortless success, and we start to feel that we're falling behind, even if we are objectively thriving. There is a strong argument that social media can provide access to important information and a sense of community. However, the consequences of this technology and the slow drip of dopamine it administers present massive dangers to the well-being of our society.
Social media didn't invent envy, but it industrialized it. It turned comparison into a business model. The average teenager spends almost five hours per day on platforms whose algorithms are finely tuned to monetize discontent. We have handed over the emotional development of an entire generation to corporations with an incentive to keep them scrolling and feeling less and less content.
Into this fragile emotional landscape stepped Donald Trump. His genius was not policy but narrative. He told millions of Americans what they already felt: You are losing. Someone else is winning. And it is not your fault. Others are to blame. He named villains — immigrants, China, coastal elites. He successfully rebranded envy as righteous anger. His political project was never about making America great again. It was about explaining why other people seemed to be doing better.
Ironically, essentially no one is taking advantage of America. The United States built the postwar order and wrote the rules of the global game. Our government designed the trade agreements and a financial system that benefited Americans. That's why the U.S. gross domestic product is almost 60 percent larger than that of its nearest rival, China. American companies have historically dominated in science, technology, aerospace and defense. They lead the way in banking and capital markets, media and entertainment, biotech and pharmaceuticals, professional services and higher education.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

CBS News

31 minutes ago

• CBS News

Former Detroit home of Rosa Parks in line for historic district designation

A proposal is pending for the former Detroit home of Civil Rights Movement activists Rosa and Raymond Parks to be named a local historic district. The Detroit City Council Planning and Economic Development Standing Committee will hold a public hearing to consider the proposal. The designation is intended to honor the flat in the 3200 block of Virginia Park Street where Civil Rights activists Rosa and Raymond Parks lived for 27 years. "Their activism in Detroit helped shape the Civil Rights Movement," the Detroit Historic Designation Advisory Board said on its social media post. A public hearing, which is part of the designation process, will begin at 10:35 a.m. June 26 at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center on Woodward Avenue. Detroit's local historic districts are meant to be associated with people or events that are a significant part of Detroit's history, or have artistic or historical significance. Once a local historic district is established for a site, any exterior alterations to the building must go through the Historic District Commission. Rosa Parks, who was already active in the Civil Rights Movement, became known for her refusal to follow the Jim Crow-era laws in Montgomery, Alabama. Specifically, she refused to give up her seat on a bus and move to the back of the vehicle on Dec. 1, 1955. Her arrest in that incident helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott. After the boycott, Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Hampton, Virginia, and then settled in Detroit. He died in 1977. She died in 2005.

Bloomberg

38 minutes ago

• Bloomberg

Bloomberg Surveillance: Israel, Markets, Supply Chains

Watch Tom and Paul LIVE every day on YouTube: Bloomberg Surveillance hosted by Tom Keene & Paul Sweeney June 20th, 2025 Featuring: 1) Dan Williams, Bloomberg News reporter, on President Donald Trump signaling he would give diplomacy a chance before deciding whether to strike Iran, dialing back on recent comments that suggested military action could be imminent. 2) David Katz, President and CIO of Matrix Asset Advisors, on why he is hopeful there will be some clarity in the current conflict in the upcoming months. After that, however, we will then return to the week to week and month to month uncertainties with Tariff and the current tax and spending bill that's making its way through congress. 3) Alisa Rusanoff, CEO at Eltech, on what risks lender are currently facing in the shipping space. 4) Lisa Mateo joins with the latest headlines in newspapers across the US, including a WSJ story on how side hustles nowadays are more about necessity than a passion. Plus, a Bloomberg report about Capital One's New JFK Lounge Makes a Play for Premium Travelers

Fox News

40 minutes ago

• Fox News

Chuck Todd claims Biden's team set him up on purpose to fail at debate

Chuck Todd says he'll never be able to shake the belief that former President Joe Biden's team purposefully set him up to fail against Donald Trump during last summer's campaign-altering presidential debate. During the latest episode of "The Chuck Toddcast," the ex-NBC anchor told The Atlantic's Mark Leibovich that he's sure that Biden's inner circle scheduled the first presidential debate last year in June so that the former president would look bad and the party would ditch him in time to run his replacement. "Look, I will go to my grave believing that the debate was intentional for that," the host said. Biden's disastrous performance in last summer's presidential debate is widely seen as the death knell for the former president's re-election campaign. Less than a month after the spectacle, where Biden looked weak and cognitively challenged, he announced his withdrawal from the campaign and endorsed then-Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the nominee. Biden's cognitive decline has been under more scrutiny in recent months as CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson's newly published book, "Original Sin", alleged that members of Biden's White House engaged in a cover-up of the president's condition. In the clip flagged by The Daily Caller, Leibovich prompted Todd's declaration by bringing up a previous conversation they had about some members of Biden's inner circle using the debate as an opportunity to punch through the cover-up and show the world that Biden was unfit for office. The journalist mentioned "the idea that there were actually people within the White House, within the Biden campaign who thought it would be a good thing to create some kind of daylight for the world to see what they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis." Todd followed up by saying that no matter what Biden's former senior adviser Anita Dunn and campaign co-chair Jen O'Malley Dillon say, he thinks they were trying to expose his frailties. "Anita Dunn and Jen O'Malley Dillon will deny it till they're blue in the face, and if I were in their shoes and I did it, I'd deny it until I was blue in my face, OK?" Todd said. "Of course, you'd deny that," Leibovich agreed. Todd added, "It's like whoever the hell helped Reagan delay the hostage release, OK? It's never going to be admitted. It's too convenient," referring to the January 1981 release of American hostages held by Iran, after Jimmy Carter had already lost his re-election effort to Reagan. Going back to the alleged plot to expose Biden, Todd continued, "There was no other reason. This idea, 'Well, we needed to shake up the race.' In late June? Who shakes up a race in late June?" "They knew when the nomination was going to be and they knew they needed to deal with this with an opportunity to make a change if it was necessary," Todd added. "I will always believe this." Reps for the former president did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital's request for comment.