I've directly experienced this in my own life. Moved during the pandemic to be near family, and coincidentally that is a much more religious and conservative community. Many people I am around daily are much more unplugged from online discussion and much more directly involved in face to face lives. There is a subset who are more "online" and tend to be more stressed/anxious.
As with any question like this, you have to ask, are religious people happier or do happier people choose religion? A person who is unhappy might be so because they are questioning why things are the way they are. They are not happy to believe, so to speak. You can't make them happy by making them religious.
I've lived most of my life in countries that are much more secular than the US (and briefly in the US). In majority secular places I think I observe a reversal, although I don't know about teens, just in general. It's like being outside the social norm is the issue.
Most major religions have been around for a thousand or more years. Given evolutionary pressures, it's clear that they must have gotten a few things during that time or they wouldn't be here.
While people like to dump on religions and argue about them for many reasons, it's kind of foolish to assume that they're horrible or incapable of helping people.
Hem, sorry, no. Religious teens might SAY they are happy but they are not, and anyone who know some religious community have witnessed that very well. Aside religion is one of the ancient form of propaganda, so do not protect young, corrupt them.
At various point in time many christians believers became "basic christians" rejecting all communities/church calling them for what effectively they are: PR agencies with big or less big financial and influential power. In other world toxic and oppressive environments. I've no doubt many part of them are genuine people, but that's is the mean, the org, and the psychological substance.
Religious people of all ages, in all countries, are more likely to be happier than the non-religious. Conservatives are also happier than progressives. It’s a widely understood and reported phenomena that has been discussed repeatedly in major publications for years.
I suspect a decent amount of this is selection bias on the internet. Also I don’t know if anger is an opposite to happiness. Maybe you can be happy a lot and angry a lot.
But I also wonder if the original study isn’t selection bias too. Would a “secular person” be happier if they didn’t give up religion even if they felt moved too?
I made that observation with real life people I was member of a while ago. And from reading actual conservative journal that used to ne a print. If anything, on the internet they looked calmer.
I guess that in real life they were more open about what they really thought.
And how do you know that? I imagine someone could come to that conclusion by doing something like generalizing from 10 minutes of AM talk radio or direct mail flyers, but kind of thing won't shed any light on the day to day experience of actual conservative people.
And the GP is right. I listened to an Ezra Klein (a progressive) podcast about teen mental health, and the expert noted that phenomena the GP refers to: teen mental health is better for kids from conservative families than kids from liberal families. One of the theories they put out is maybe conservative families put more limits on smartphone/social media use, while liberal families did not and eagerly embraced the new thing, resulting in their kids getting more unmitigated exposure to psychologically damaging technology.
That was my observation of conservatives around, the content of conservative journals I have read. I grew up in basically conservative environment. You know, the peer group where you end up being genuinely surprised when you find out atheist kids are not constantly sleeping around and are not constantly desperate for meaning. Looking back, I do not think we were morally or behaviorally superior, but we were definitely taught that we are.
Folks here are bleeding over from the post on community being a contributing factor. Ezra Klein has pointed at device access, but I'd like to take Ezra's theory one step further: hope.
Conservatives culturally live in a mind castle of sorts. Very few things actually shake them because their core set of beliefs, by their very virtue, do not really shift at all. Political conservatives also believe heavily in incremental progress. They don't actually care if they get all of what they want now. Even if they don't obtain it they'll obtain the ultimate prize for having contributed and that's all that really matters to them.
Liberals on the other hand, and non-believers, are subject to science which by its very nature is often contradictory in the short term to ascertain longer term truths. Living year to year in that reality can leave your beliefs shook in one way or another. Liberalism is also not nearly as homogenous as conservativism when it comes to core beliefs; in fact, things change all the time and sometimes at a pace too fast for even liberals to keep up with. To liberals the future isn't filled with hope. Our planks have to do with equality, climate change, distribution of resources, and a variety of topics that are huge. Doubly so, were impatient and don't have a somewhat cynical view of incrementalism because the stakes are here and now on Earth, not in some after life.
Thus the jokes about "I stand with `$CURRENTTHING`".
>and sometimes at a pace too fast for even liberals to keep up with
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of this: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid.[1] What a miserable way to live.
[1] I would add that even more important is to denounce/shun when the latest thing to embrace/avoid isn't being embraced/avoided
Right here on HN, I've been seeing over and over that climate change is going to wreck everything physically, that AI is going to wreck everything politically, and that everything is wrecked politically. (Hard to argue with the last one.) And so we see discussion of deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide, and how they are "deaths of despair". We've talked about this a whole bunch of times over the last few years.
Now imagine believing that there was Someone there - not just the impersonal universe. And that Someone knew who you were, and cared about you, and wanted to be in relationship with you instead of just at a distance. And that Someone was in control of what happened, and could be trusted with the future.
Yeah, you don't believe it. You think it's brain-dead. You think it's against all the evidence. But can't you see that, if you did believe it, it would change everything about how you viewed the world, and your place in it, and your situation? Can't you see how you wouldn't be in despair any more, even in the same circumstances?
That's why religious teens are happier than their secular peers.
(And, as spamizbad pointed out, the community aspects help too.)
I completely understand why someone would want to believe in that, what I don't understand is how they're capable of doing so given the complete lack of any contact with that "Someone". My parents wanted me to be Catholic like them though I told them I didn't believe in it when I was seven years old because god never appeared to me or answered a prayer or anything. I tried to believe for around a decade, but it never happened. I'd still like to, but I don't think it'll happen at this point.
The best method seems to be holy texts from so long ago that the origins are hazy at best. It’s one reason it’s hard to believe that Mormonism took off so well; Joseph Smith’s personal foibles are still well recorded.
For baseline Christianity (not Mormonism), there are a number of works giving a defense of the holy texts as being historically accurate. "Evidence That Demands A Verdict" by Josh McDowell was a good one, but it is almost certainly out of date by now. "Cold Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace is a more recent one, but is far less comprehensive.
From a philosophical perspective, "He Is There And He Is Not Silent" by Francis Schaeffer is solid. It's simple, but very deep.
Joseph Smith never claimed to be perfect, and notably said he was not, but that "there is no error in the revelations." I have learned for myself that the Book of Mormon is true (and amazing), and so can anyone who wants to test it for themselves. (More at my web site--in profile, nothing for sale, no stylistic ambition.)
I basically agree with this and it totally makes sense to me why religious teens are happier than secular teens,
But one weird realization I’ve had is that i’m sort of devoutly atheistic. Like you might think as an atheist I wouldn’t care about say converting to Judaism to get married and yet I wouldn’t. Partly out of respect for Judiasm! I think I wonder, what is the implication of this.
Should I try to be more religious? Is happiness the ultimate goal over I dunno, some sense of being true to myself? Does it even work for people who don’t truly believe?
I flagged it and am not an atheist or depressed, I just don't see any discussion of worth coming from this thread and the general trend in the comments are that of splitting the community that is HN into the same us vs them bullshit that has infested most of the internet.
> I just don't see any discussion of worth coming from this thread
I can see that as a justified reason. There are just some topics HN can't do well because they tap into prejudices that are common and strongly held here.
The post I responded too was complete garbage and against those supposed prejudices of HN. This thread represents both sides in the same light so far and neither side comes across as happy. Happy people generally do not attack the beliefs of others.
the reason I post it is because I want to see the talent of HN dive around the data. I suspect there is a bias some where. Perhaps the conservative religious are coming from wealthier families so perhaps a inequality issue. Perhaps an issue of internet use akin to Haidt's thesis but I'm skeptical of Haidt as I am with anyone who sort of enters the pop culture sphere of dialogue. He might note of a problem but there may be other reasons for the problem etc. We can't ever dive into that further because such discussions get flagged before even taking off. HN beyond reddit and others I feel have a better intellect to consider such data.
That title alone is almost certain to result in a pissing match and virtue signalling regardless of where you post it, anyone actually interested in deeper discussion is probably going to skip the thread. Find a well done study that is more about exploring the idea than the conclusion and you might get better results. But measuring happiness is not really possible, it is subjective and personal and often heavily influenced by community; I have done everything my community represents as happiness so clearly I am happy. Are you? The bulk of life is not happy fun times so is anyone actually happy? or when we say we are happy are we just saying that the desire to give up is infrequent and fleeting?
I only go with the title of the article. So far there have been some good comments. I'm not here to be part of the discussion. Only give the reason why I posted and also why I did not change the title.
Accurate. If there is a correlation, that does not mean there is causation. Propose a theory and a mechanism. If not, then the rest is statistical noise and anecdotes.
As a deeply liberal-secular person I find this research very interesting and I don’t really combat it, I think trying to find more community and meaning in life is definetly a path towards happiness ala Victor Frankl, and one big precept of a more existential approach to life is that it in fact does make you less happy. Like one dispute I have with a very spiritual associate of mine, is that I think there’s virtue in trying to sit with it all and accept that there are no answers.
At its root I wonder - is there a halfway point between I have all the answers and will try to remake the world into that image, and staring into the abyss.
I mean, part of becoming an adult is accepting the fact that it’s not all happiness all the time.
The Church didn't even pay up in most cases, e.g. in Ireland. When they couldn't use lawfare to silence victims or keep cases going so long the victims died (like the victims of the Magdalene laundries), the state ended up footing most of the bill, over a billion in the case of Ireland.
