Chelsea Follett: Joining the podcast today is Dr. Clay Routledge, a leading expert in existential psychology. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, WIRED, Forbes and more. He is the co-editor of Profectus, a magazine on human progress and flourishing, and the vice president of research and director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, which has a new project called the Progress Pulse Initiative, which we’ll be discussing today, and also recently came out with something called Visions of the Future that we’ll be getting into. But first, Clay, how are you?
Clay Routledge: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. How are you doing, Chelsea?
Chelsea Follett: All right. Thanks for asking. So, let’s start with Progress Pulse. This sets out to explore a fundamental question about the future. Do Americans believe humans will make significant progress on big societal and global challenges in the coming decades, making life better for future generations? Or do they think we will fail to make progress making life worse for future generations? Tell me about this project and what you found.
Clay Routledge: So, I’ll lead with the top finding, which is, we talk about division polarization in this country. And we often think about it along political lines, but what we find is that, a big division is Americans seem to be pretty evenly split between those who look to the future and see hope and promise and progress and advancement for future generations, about half see that. And the other half look and see decline and have a more pessimistic outlook and think that life will be worse for future generations. So, Americans are roughly evenly split along those lines. We can get to other things, other data points on that. But stepping back a little bit, the driver of this project is a broader project that I just refer to as the psychology of progress.
Clay Routledge: As someone in this human progress space, there’s a lot of interest around what are the economic policies, what are the technological and scientific drivers of progress, maybe even, what are the institutional forces and things like that. All that very important, critical of course. But one thing that I noticed when I started following the different thinkers in this space is, there wasn’t a lot of talk about what’s going on inside individual humans, like their minds, their brains. So, what is the psychological component of progress, which obviously connects to those other things because institutions shape a lot of how we think, how we think shapes those institutions and so forth. So, since I’m a psychologist, I was like, “Oh, that’s something I can contribute,” because I love this space. I think it’s great that there’s so much growing interest around human progress. So I was like, oh maybe that’s where I can have a role to play is bringing in the individual psychological components of progress.
Clay Routledge: So that’s the basic idea of the psychology of progress and a lot of projects we’re doing around that. It’s just recognition that, of course when you think about individual traits, we think about curiosity, openness, creativity, but also the things that make people persist, like resilience, motivation. And then teams, how do you lead teams? How do you cultivate talent, help people reach their potential? How do you manage conflict at the cultural level, even if you think of progress as being driven by perhaps a small group of people who are the innovators, who are the people that are really thinking creatively, first of all, they have to be discovered and supported. And second of all, a lot of times there’s teams behind them. There’s a bunch of people behind them. And critically, cultures matter, societies matter. People elect leaders to enact visions of how to govern our society, what to prioritize, what direction to take. And that, of course, matters. The leaders pursue certain policies or agendas based in part on what the public thinks. The media plays a significant role in creating or promoting a certain vibe and attitude in the public of what’s possible, which can inspire us or depress us.
Clay Routledge: So I think all these things, psychology matters. That’s a long way of getting to the Progress Pulse idea. So, we came up with this notion of, in addition to studying these more individual traits, it’s good to get a sense of what does the public think about progress. And so we recently launched this project that’ll be roughly every month we’ll be doing a national survey of around 2000 US adults, a nationally representative survey in partnership with the Harris Poll. And we’ll just be asking every month Americans a couple questions. And we started the very first one, which is the one we’re talking about today. We started with a very simple question of like, when you look to the future, do you see progress or do you see decline? And that gets back to, people are pretty evenly divided on that and the adult American public.
Chelsea Follett: So, a sentiment on that is fairly split, but you did find some differences among groups. You found that the youngest Americans are actually the most pessimistic about the future, especially young women. While older Americans are the most optimistic. What do you think might be some of the factors behind that?
Clay Routledge: Yeah. It’s a great question. So in a previous survey where we were looking at the concept, the related concept of hope, we found that self-reported mental health was the strongest predictor of people’s attitudes about the future. And young people report worse mental health. So that seemed to account for a lot of the reasons they were more pessimistic, which makes sense. If you’re depressed, if you’re anxious, part of those pathologies or part of those internal experiences are looking around and seeing the bad things, fixating on what’s going wrong instead of what’s going right. And so it seems to be characteristic of those conditions. But it also just goes with this broader attitude that young people seem to have, not just depression and anxiety about their own situation, but just this sort of a passive outward looking towards the world and feeling helpless or a lack of agency that they can make a difference in the world.
Clay Routledge: And so I think there’s a lot of that going on. It’s weird because like, it’s not that long ago that you might ask somebody, like, young people versus old people, who sees the future as bright, and they would guess young people, because obviously they have a longer life on this planet ahead of them, most of them. And also we tend to stereotype young people as being naive optimists or having youthful energy and all of that. And not that that doesn’t exist, of course you can still find that, but on average, what we’re finding is inconsistent with that view of young people which is they’re actually more pessimistic. Now, on the other side, you might say, well, older people have the advantage of wisdom experience, they can look back and say, “Yeah. We thought this was… You think now’s bad” We had world wars, we had the threat of nuclear Armageddon and the arms race with the Soviet Union. We made it through that temporary setbacks, progress kept going. And so they have that perspective that maybe young people don’t have. So it could be, it’s not just the vulnerabilities that younger generations have, but it could also be the strengths that older generations have that make them a little bit more able to see a bigger, to have more perspective about a bright future.
Chelsea Follett: So, maybe there’s a lesson there about the importance of historical perspective. And it was especially young women who seem to have a darker view of the future. Now, I know many people associate young women in the United States with the Democratic Party since they’re more likely to identify with that political party. But your polling actually revealed that Democrats were more optimistic on average than Republicans, with independents split down the middle. And these findings were released prior to the November election. So, one wonders, well, if this polling was conducted during a democratic presidential administration, is this just a result of people tending to feel more pessimistic when their political team is out of power and more optimistic when their political team is in power? Or what do you think explains this trend that seems to go against the other trends that you identified?
Clay Routledge: Yeah. No. Those are great points. I definitely think there’s something to what you’re saying because there are certainly other types of polling that show that like, when your team’s in power, you tend to have a more positive attitude. What’s interesting about how that intersects with gender, as you pointed out, is if you look just at women, like you said, who tend to lean more democratic, if you look just at women, they represent the biggest difference. It’s young women who are the most pessimistic and women over 65 who are the most optimistic, even more optimistic or more hopeful than men. Like, there’s some variability among men. Young men are less optimistic than older men, but the gap is much, much smaller. That the action is within women. And so, part of what’s going on with the Democrats being more optimistic is democratic women, older democratic women are polling those numbers up and democratic men too.
Clay Routledge: But it’s like, it’s really what’s making the… Here’s another way of saying it. Democrats would, in this survey, which like you said was done a month or so before the election, Democrats would probably look even more optimistic if it wasn’t for the young women among them that are really the main pessimists out there about the future. And again, part of it, connecting it back to the mental health thing, it tracks with younger women are more likely to report anxiety and depression. Internalizing problems that really give you sort of a dark view. And I don’t have data on this, but there’s a lot of messaging in academia, in cultural media, that young women consume, or even on social media, that’s pretty pessimistic, that promotes a sort of doom outlook about their lives in the future.
Clay Routledge: And so I don’t know if young women are also consuming more of that type of media, whereas again, the older women are like, “Oh, you don’t know. You don’t understand all the progress. You don’t appreciate all the progress we’ve made. What life used to be, like the barriers women used to have when we were young.” And so again, they might be more wise or have more appreciation for progress. But yeah. In the report, I couldn’t… You start to break things down three or four ways and the sample sizes get pretty pretty small. But one thing I will say that’s not in there explicitly, I don’t think, is that if you look at it another way, if you look within political party and look at age, you can clearly see that the biggest age gap, the biggest age difference is among Democrats.
Clay Routledge: So, it’s like young Democrat are way more pessimistic than older democrats. And I remember again using, because I was a professor for a long time is why I keep picking on academia, but I remember when I was a professor, you would hear old professors talk about this kind of stuff where it’s like, it seemed like there was a difference between the liberals back in the day. And again, some of this might’ve been just their own bias. But there was a more of a openness, a tolerance, a sort of belief in change and progress compared to the young progressives on campus, even the young faculty like professors that had more of this, like, the sky’s falling attitude. So I think there’s something interesting going on there. Whereas it seems like in general, the Republicans there was just more stability. And there was a bit of a generational difference, but there was just more stability. And like you said, that at that time the Democrats were in power or had the presidency. So, maybe we need to repeat the survey in the coming months and see how that changes. But I suspect that the political thing might change somewhat, but the generational thing seems stable and consistent with lots of other research suggesting that young people are just, on the whole, more pessimistic about the future.
Chelsea Follett: That’s very interesting. Do we have data showing that this anxiety that’s often talked about with young people that has actually increased over time? And is that just self-reported or are there objective metrics such as suicide rates that show an actual increase in mental distress among young people?
Clay Routledge: Yeah. So, this is hotly debated. So, certainly at the self-report level, yes, young people today are saying they’re more anxious and depressed than older people. There are some more objective outcomes, whether it’s hospitalizations, suicide attempts and related things that other people reporting and related things that you could say also are consistent with that. But even still, you have some experts that are saying, well, part of the hospitalization thing might have something to do with better reporting. I mean, the statistics of this are hotly debated between people who think this is a real problem, young people are a lot less mentally well today than they were in previous generations versus people who think maybe there’s something going on. But a lot of this might be reporting bias and cultural changes. So, it might be that on the self-report side, young people today see normal, this is one of the things I’ve written about a little bit, are more likely to interpret normal psychological distress that’s not at all pathological, it’s just part of being a human being, more likely to characterize that as being in the language of mental health.
Clay Routledge: And so I think there’s definitely evidence consistent with that, what sometimes you refer to as the the pathologization of normal psychology or there’s an idea called concept creep, which is similar, which is we’re expanding these terms to mean things that they didn’t originally mean. So I think that’s definitely part of the story. In addition to that, there seems to be some evidence that young people are consuming a lot of media that is using mental health language in this way, that’s encouraging that kind of thinking. It’s like, oh, you mean… So for instance, people… I can’t remember the exact percentage, but it’s not small. A fairly high percentage of people self-diagnose. So they say, “I have depression.” They didn’t get a clinical assessment. They say, “I have depression.” And when you ask, “Well, how do you know that?” They said, well, they got online and they looked at something. And the more people, there is some research that, the more people use the internet to inform them about mental health, the less accurate their knowledge is.
Clay Routledge: So, all this stuff is going on that makes it further, it makes it more difficult, I should say, to know to what extent this is a real issue versus to what extent there are these changes in both our reporting and how we talk about and think about these issues that makes it seem like young people are more distressed today than they were in the past, when really they’re actually experiencing relatively similar levels of distress. I don’t know if that made any sense at all.
Chelsea Follett: No. That did. So, it seems like some of it may be a hypochondria, but regardless there is some evidence that young people may have a darker view of the world. This gets into that Visions of the Future initiative that I mentioned in the introduction. Could you tell us about that?
Clay Routledge: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And one thing I’ll add too to that last point, even if it’s just the case, best case scenario, even if it’s just the case, that what’s really going on here is people are pretty much the same, young people are pretty much the same psychologically today as they were in previous decades. They’re just using the language of mental health more. Even if that’s true, it’s a problem because there’s also research that, when people start to think of themselves as mentally unwell, they put themselves on the path to being mentally unwell. So as one example, if you think of yourself as someone that suffers from an anxiety disorder, you might say, “Well, I should avoid my anxiety triggers.” Or you might use that as an excuse to cultivate an environment in which you are trying to prevent an anxiety attack.
Clay Routledge: Well, that makes you more likely to develop anxiety because what you should be doing is moving forward and exposing yourself to the things that make you uncomfortable and working through it, which is in fact what would happen if you went to a good clinical psychologist and they were trying to help you work through these fears. And so, by self diagnosing, by using the language of mental illness and then by taking that as a way to be like, “Well, I should avoid certain things,” it’s a recipe for becoming more anxious. So, that’s just to say, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What we found in the Visions of the Future report, which I think is a really cool project, if anyone’s interested in it, they can look just on our website, humanflourishinglab.org, under research. There’s a project called Exploring American Visions of the Future. And what I like about this is normally we do these surveys like we just talked about, where we go out and we ask the public, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And so it’s like self-reported attitudes. In this project, we partnered with a team, with a firm, a London-based firm called Discover AI. And they have a team of experts who go out and try to figure out the vibe, what’s going on? How are people talking about things, and particularly online? And then they have their own machine learning platform that allows them to go and pull from all these different websites.
Clay Routledge: And so what we did on this project was like, where are the media outlets that young people are reading? Where are the online spaces where they’re talking? Where they’re commenting on posts, where they’re directly engaging with each other, where they’re posting things themselves. And then you can use those tools to be like, “Okay. Here’s the kind of topics we’re interested in that all involve thinking about the future.” So you can think about things like technology, artificial intelligence, medical advancements, climate change, just anything that relates to how they might think about culture wars, the American dream. So, we came up with a list, a general list of topics that young people might be talking about. And they were like, “Okay. What are they saying? Give us… ” So this is kind of a qualitative assessment that’s pulling from these different sources to get a sense of, what’s the vibe? What are young people doing? So it’s really, really cool. It’s a very graphics-driven report because it’s almost like what you would do. In fact, this is what Discover AI does most of the time. It’s almost like you would do if you were a marketing firm or a brand looking to see what young people think about different styles or aesthetics or their attitudes about certain products or something like that.
Clay Routledge: So it’s like, we did that, but instead of looking at products, we looked at visions of the future. And what we found, there’s a lot of interesting things in there and detailed things about specific topics, like climate change or even entertainment. People watch shows like Fallout or some of these other futuristic dystopian shows, like what are they into? What are they talking about? Are they just fun? Or do they think this is what’s going to happen in the future? Anyway, so there’s a bunch of interesting content in there for anyone who’s interested, but basically what we tried to do after going through these themes and characterizing the conversations around them, is we tried to map to some extent the volume of these conversations, like, are they positive? Do they lean more positive or lean more negative? And what we found though, there’s certainly bright spots. There’s certainly places where young people seem excited about the future, like around advancements in health. Like there’s all sorts of technological and medical advances that make them excited, that they might have healthier lives in the future than previous generations. But on the whole, they’re more pessimistic. Which is consistent with our survey reports.
Clay Routledge: They’re more pessimistic. They’re more worried about what the dangers of artificial intelligence or the dangers of climate change. They’re more likely to think that the American dream has been lost. They’re worried about how polarization and culture wars. So, it was kind of a nice compliment to some of the more direct survey work we do, which is, instead of just asking people what they think, let’s just see how these conversations unfold. One other quick thing I’ll say about that I think is especially cool is like, if you think about the attitudes that we have and share with other people, they’re very social. Young people get together and they talk. They can bring each other up, they can bring each other down. We say this sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, someone’s being a buzzkill,” or “I’m in an environment that’s not good for my well-being,” or whatever. So, I think it’s another nice way of thinking about this is not just individual reporting, but in the spaces where people, and in this case, especially young people, in the spaces that they’re gathering, what’s the mood? And it’s more negative, it’s darker than it is brighter, unfortunately.
Clay Routledge: But that also gives us opportunities for work and we focus, for those of us who believe there’s good reason to believe in progress and to have a brighter vision of the future, that gives us some opportunities, some places to target. So like, “Okay. People think this. Well, let’s go in and see what they’re saying. Maybe they’re wrong.” I mean, a lot of times, as you know, in your work, a lot of people just have inaccurate understanding of progress. They think the world’s gotten worse on certain objective measures in which it’s gotten better. So that gives us an opportunity to see where perhaps can we go into and try to persuade people or influence these conversations in a more positive and constructive direction. So that’s why I’m really excited about that project and what it can potentially help us with.
Chelsea Follett: It’s true that people seem to have many different misapprehensions about material progress. Many people don’t realize the extent of the global decline in extreme poverty, for example. But as an existential psychologist, your work focuses not so much on material progress, but emotional and mental well-being. And many people speak about how today, despite our having so much material progress, many people believe that there is a crisis of meaning. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that. But before you answer whether you think there’s a crisis of meaning, could you elucidate the difference between meaning and happiness? Because I’m not sure that’s clear necessarily to most people.
Clay Routledge: Well, traditionally in psychology, happiness falls under the category of emotion. Like, to feel happy is an emotional state, it’s a mood. So you might say at the emotional level, in the moment you feel good or bad, and if you tend to feel good with a certain duration of time over the period of a day, you might say, “I’m happy.” And if that’s day to day to day, you might say, “I’m a happy person.” So you can also think of it as a personality characteristic that’s based on your general emotional proclivity towards positive mood. Now, when we think about meaning, and to be clear, I should say there are philosophers and psychologists and other people that talk about happiness in a different way, in a richer way. But that’s generally how I think about happiness. It’s just that it’s mainly an emotion. When we talk about meaning, we’re adding in some other cognitive and motivational dimensions.
Clay Routledge: So what meaning really is is as humans, we’re smart. We have the ability to self-reflect. We turn in words, we think about who we are, who we want to be, what our place in the world is. We ask these existential questions that other organisms presumably don’t ask because they lack the cognitive sophistication to step outside of themselves and reflect on their sense of self, their self-consciousness. So when we ask these kinds of questions, we want answers. We’re also a species that likes closure. We like to answer the questions that we ask. And so, when we ask these questions about why am I here, what purpose to it, what’s my function, what am I supposed to be doing? It turns out if you feel like you do have some purpose, if you feel like you’re playing a significant role in the world, that you’re adding value in some way, you have a greater sense of, I mean, you feel like your life is full of meaning. And that tends to be associated with happiness. And it’s bi-directional. So research shows that when you’re in a good mood, it’s easier for you to see how your life’s meaningful.
Clay Routledge: This gets back to the mental health and attitude thing we were saying. If you just have a good mood you tend to see the positive more than the negative. When you focus on the positive more, it’s easier to build the case that, “Oh yeah. I’m doing things. Things are going well. My life is meaningful.” But it doesn’t mean that meaning and happiness is synonymous because they’re correlated. For instance, you can come up with examples in which they would be uncorrelated. So think about something that you really value that you do that’s actually stressful and unpleasant. Those of us who are parents can easily come up with some examples of that. It’s not like being a parent is fulfilling, it’s rewarding. A lot of times it is fun and we have fun with our kids, but sometimes it’s difficult. We have to be bad guys. It’s stressful. We’re responsible for these humans. But it turns out that parents report the highest levels of meaning when they’re doing things with their kids, and sometimes those things aren’t fun. But you know you’re important, that you have an important role to play.
Clay Routledge: And so it’s that sense of significance that often goes hand in hand with good feelings but doesn’t necessarily have to. You don’t have to be a parent to realize this. If you pursued any kind of personal ambition, a career where you’ve had to do something that’s very very difficult, very very stressful, that you think is very important, if you’ve done any kind of volunteer work or even people who work in difficult jobs, medicine, police, you have to see some tough stuff. They might be going through a really bad day while simultaneously feeling extremely meaningful. So, happiness and meaning don’t have to be coupled. But that’s just to say they often are. And like I said, it goes the other direction too. When you feel meaningful you subsequently tend to be happier. Meaning fuels happiness. Because even if you’re doing, and this can speak to the emotional complexity of the human experience. Say you’re doing something really stressful and difficult or even physically unpleasant. Say you’re training for a marathon or something. It’s a personal goal that you want to see yourself make progress on, and you’re exercising discipline, you’re making progress towards that goal which feels good, it makes you have a sense of agency, it helps give you a sense of meaning, but it’s unpleasant. You’re getting up at 4:00 AM before work, running in the cold, and it’s horrible. It’s physically uncomfortable.
Clay Routledge: So in the moment you might be, “This sucks,” but you might be like, “Yeah. I’m doing this. I’m proud of myself.” And subsequently you’re going to be happier. Because the rest of the day you’re going to be like, “That was very unpleasant in the moment, but I’m glad I did it.” In fact if you got lazy and pushed the alarm away and didn’t get up, the rest of the day you might be in a bad mood even though you had the momentary relief of not having to do that. So that’s to say that when we judge our emotional lives we’re not just organisms, a living stream of consciousness in the moment, we’re looking over time, even time just across the day and we’re saying, “Oh, I had a good day. I’m happy because I was agentic. I did the things I was supposed to do. I took my responsibilities seriously. And as a result I’m a meaningful member of my family of my community even though some of that stuff was no fun. And thus as a result I’m happier.” So, that’s how I see those concepts as related, connected, but not necessarily synonymous.
Chelsea Follett: It reminds me of that famous JFK speech about going to the moon and not because it is easy but because it is hard. It does seem like there is a facet of human psychology where we crave challenging endeavors. And as we’ve all this material progress, living standards have gone up, some people say that the fact that life has become easier and less challenging has contributed to what they call a crisis of meaning in the modern world. What are your thoughts on this? Do we have a crisis of meaning?
Clay Routledge: It depends on when you ask me. I’ve certainly in the past been somebody who’s expressed that concern. Looking at some of the data that people who have that concern point to declining religion, declining fertility rates, declining marriage rates. If you think about a lot of the social structures, cultural structures, and institutions, that have long shepherded humans together towards projects that make us feel transcendent, that make us feel like we’re a meaningful part of a family and a community and you see those things declining, then it stands to reason that there’s some existential vulnerabilities here. Like how are people finding meaning if they don’t have faith, if they don’t have family, if they don’t have these things. So I think there’s some… And then you look at young people’s, some of the stuff we already talked about, which correlates with Meaning, depression, anxiety.
Clay Routledge: Anxiety and meaning, they’re highly related because Meaning is a buffer, is a protector, it’s an anxiety buffer. When your life feels meaningful you’re just more robust against hardship. You’re just more likely to feel confident, to feel like you can persevere, and to see a bigger picture. Like, “Right now this is difficult and I’m worried, I’m anxious, but I have a reason to be here. I have a purpose and I can push through.” That really Meaning is very protective. So it’s possible that maybe part of the rising rates of anxiety, if those rates are real, are related to decreased meaning. So that’s what people who say that’s meaning crisis. On the other hand, the reason I say it depends on when you ask me. There’s also other evidence that shouldn’t be ignored, that on the whole, people generally see their lives as meaningful and are pretty good at detecting meaning.
Clay Routledge: It’s like one of our main quests in life is to find and preserve meaning. And just because traditional sources of meaning are declining perhaps people are creating new sources of meaning that we’re not doing a good job capturing. They’re creating new… So there’s a lot of negativity around social media, for instance. And people are like, “Oh, social media is causing all these problems. We’re gonna, in the next few weeks, be releasing a report at the university or at the human flourishing lab on a concept called digital flourishing.” And so we’re surveying, we’re looking at people, Americans, and the ways in which they’re fulfilled by their technological experiences online. And it seems like, just to give you a hint of that, it seems like the majority of Americans are digitally flourishing and that’s strongly related to their mental and social health. And it’s not to say that there aren’t people suffering from a meaning crisis. The other problem is how big of a problem is something before we call it a crisis. And one of the things that a lot of people criticize fairly is that we see everything as a crisis. So maybe there are existential vulnerabilities that are emerging.
Clay Routledge: I’m going to try to find a middle ground here. Maybe there are unique existential challenges that are emerging in a highly affluent abundant secular world with rapid technological change in which the traditional structures that have binded us are loosening and there’s a lot of dynamism, there’s a lot of movement, there’s a lot of things going on that we think of as good for economic growth, for exploration of new ideas for creativity, but that are also make us feel unsettled and leave us a little bit anxious about, because we don’t have stability or things they’re not the way they used to be. And so as a result, there are some existential vulnerabilities perhaps for some people more than others but then at the same time that creates opportunities. And we do know that humans are innovative, they’re creative, we’re problem solvers, and so I tend to be more, like, if I go back and forth on this it’s because I don’t totally know the answer, but I tend to be a little bit more bullish on the idea that we’re existential entrepreneurs, we create new sources of meaning or we return…
Clay Routledge: And we haven’t talked about nostalgia yet, but I do a lot of work in the psychology of nostalgia. And a lot of times what’s going on there, is we’re not just trying to go to the past and repeat what we did before but we’re pulling ideas. And so you do see a lot of conversations around family right now and people saying, well, families used to eat dinner together, families used to do this, or people used to do this. And so, I think the healthy response to that is not to say, “Well, we’re just going to go back,” but it’s to say, “There’s wisdom in the past. There’s ideas in the past that persisted for a reason, perhaps. And there’s ways to make them applicable to today even if they’re not identical, even if they’re not the same, that we can pull from them and we can create, we can combine and we can do new things.” So from that perspective, given all the intellectual assets we have as a species, I’m more confident that even as we struggle through transitions that might make some existential vulnerabilities, we’ll come out of it okay, people will find meaning. But that’s not to overlook or to dismiss the real struggles that some people are having finding their place in the world and dealing with a changing society.
Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. I think that we probably don’t have a lot of data. Maybe you probably know more about this than I do. But we probably don’t have a lot of data about how people in the distant past, how meaningful they felt their lives were. That kind of survey data did not exist. It may be related to this pop psychology idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at a time when most people were barely scraping by finding meaning in their lives was not something that received as much attention, perhaps. One way to try to figure out whether affluent societies in particular have a crisis of meaning might be if we can’t look at what our ancestors were feeling, because we don’t have that data, would be to look at impoverished countries today. Do people who have a much lower standard of living report anxiety? Do they report that they are having an existential crisis of meaning or do they not think about that kind of thing as much? What do you know about this topic?
Clay Routledge: So, from the last time I looked into this, which wasn’t that long ago, the research was that, in poorer countries people do report higher meaning than in richer countries. Part of that is mediated by higher levels of religiosity as well. And even though not all of it is mediated by that, that represents a good part of the story. In addition to that, and even though they report lower happy, this gets to that, speaks to that point about happiness is not the same as meaning, because I think in rich western countries people are happier, but in poorer countries people report lower happiness but higher meaning. And part of that might be it’s easier for them to detect meaning because they can really see how they matter. If it’s a daily grind for survival and they can really see how much people depend on them and they’re in very close communities, perhaps, it’s easier for that person who’s looking for food and water and shelter or that’s a more difficult challenge to see how they matter, whereas maybe in the modern affluent world you have a lot more people that are like, “I’m sitting in this cubicle typing on a keyboard.” It’s not that you’re not doing something important, it’s just it’s not as direct, you know, as directly sourcing food and shelter.
Clay Routledge: I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, I don’t know if that’s the explanation, but I do know that at least the last time I looked at the literature on this, in poor countries people report higher meaning. That being said, within rich countries, poor people report lower meaning than higher income people, I believe. So there’s a cultural story there too, and this might relate to, again, I don’t know for sure, but this might relate to some of the tensions you have or fixations you have on income inequality and these kinds of issues because within us, and also the failure to appreciate progress, as you pointed out, people don’t do a great job of like taking a global perspective on progress and focusing on how, wow, literacy rates are improving, especially for girls in poor parts of the world.
Clay Routledge: It’s hard for them to fixate on that when they’re on social media saying, “Oh look, people have… ” Like, “Look at these rich people and how their lives they’re presenting at least. How they have these wonderful lives, where they’re doing all these amazing things.” So, in our modern technologically advanced wealthy world, we might just be dealing with a whole different set of cultural issues that separate us from other parts of the world where there’s a sort of irony, like the privilege of having this technology and being able to be on Instagram looking at these things, makes it more difficult to really see the meaning in your own life because you’re doing these kinds of unhealthy social comparisons. Again, there I’m kind of being speculative, I don’t know. But you’re right to point out that it’s a good way to look at some of this stuff is to look cross-culturally and look at societies that we would say they’re actually living closer to where we would have lived in the past when we weren’t able to survey our own population. And it does seem like, at least in the last research I saw, there are higher reports of meaning tied to perhaps a greater religiosity, as well as a greater sense of social connection.
Chelsea Follett: Those two possibilities, the religiosity and the social connection, make more sense to me than the possibility you mentioned that it is the nature of work in poor societies that maybe increases the sense of meaning. Because when I imagine someone whose children are always on the verge of starvation, who is barely able to provide for them, that to me sounds horrific and like it would actually not contribute to a sense of meaning. Whereas if you are working at a desk typing away all day and you’re an insurance salesman or something like that, maybe your job is not as viscerally connected to what you’re doing with your hands. It makes me think of Marx’s idea of the alienation of labor, I guess, what you propose there. But you’re able to provide for your children at a much higher level. And seeing the joy on your child’s face when they are at a dance recital after you paid for those dance lessons, or they are at bush gardens, or some experience that you were able to provide for them, thanks to your hard work, it would seem to me that that would contribute to a sense that you are useful and a sense of meaning. So I’m actually surprised by that. That seems counterintuitive to me.
Chelsea Follett: But what you were saying about the decline of traditional sources of meaning, such as family, and we have seen lower rates of family formation, organized religion, those make more intuitive a sense to me. And that gets into what you were talking about regarding possible solutions, maybe drawing inspiration from some aspects of the past. And so I want to ask you about your book, Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live A More Meaningful Life. And at Human Progress, my team and I are obviously very hesitant about certain forms of nostalgia, there is a real danger of romanticizing the past, too much romanticizing poverty in particular. But in this book, you talk about some of the positive aspects of nostalgia. So, sell me on nostalgia.
Clay Routledge: Yeah. Okay. First, I want to respond, if it’s okay.
Chelsea Follett: Absolutely.
Clay Routledge: I want to respond real quickly to your last point about the providing for your kids. I actually think you’re 100% right. And what I was saying is a possibility, a possible explanation, I don’t think is inconsistent with what you said. And the reason is because you proposed a very healthy and positive view of why work is meaningful, which I totally agree with, and I’ve written about this a lot actually, is tha, t a lot of the cultural messaging we hear now is, I don’t like my job, it’s not meaningful, or I can’t… Because people are focusing on, they’re trying to avoid the unpleasant or the difficult parts of work. A better way to reframe that is, even when your work is not fun, or even when it’s boring, or whatever the case may be, if you frame it as, “But I’m contributing to my… I’m doing something, and I’m supporting a family,” the people who are able to do that, do find more meaning in their work. So I don’t think the problem is inherently that poor people find their work more meaningful, like people in impoverished societies find their work more meaningful. The point is that, meaning ultimately is about matter, being able to detect how much you matter.
Clay Routledge: And in the society is what I’m suggesting, again, I’m just suggesting or speculating, it’s easier to see how you matter, because it’s like, if I don’t do this, we’re out of luck. My family desperately needs me. Helps explain why, for instance, in times before, sometimes people actually report higher meaning, it’s something unpleasant, something horrible, but they’re like, “I’m doing something really important here,” which is different from saying, “I’m liking what I do.” But I think you’re right, like, the challenge in the Western world with… You see the anti-work movement, you see the UBI movement, you see these sorts of things, I think they’re misunderstanding why work is important to meaning. And it’s true that people who are employed have higher meaning than people who are unemployed. So first of all, work is associated with meaning. But where work can be meaningful is not just in the thing you’re doing being personally stimulating, which is great, it’s good. You want to find work that fits your characteristics, your qualities, your interests, your skills, but really the people who are going to feel the most meaningful, and this ties to things like the fertility decline, is when they see how what they’re doing matters to others.
Clay Routledge: And there’s been experimental research on this, in organizational psychology. In a workforce, on a team, if people are thinking about how their work contributes to the betterment of society or to other people, they find that work more meaningful, and they get a greater sense of meaning themselves than their colleagues who are doing the same work, but don’t connect it to that contribution to society. So that’s all to say is, I think you’re 100% right about that. The problem is how we talk about work in our culture, and this movement of work is not meaningful. If I don’t like it, or if it’s boring, or whatever the case, if it’s hard, or whatever, I think what’s really important is that sense of, “No. I’m doing something to take care,” like you said, to get the rewards of how my children benefit from that. It’s that transcendent component of like, this is not just about me. This is about how I contribute. So I hope that makes sense.
Chelsea Follett: It does.
Clay Routledge: Yeah. On to the nostalgia book. So, it’s been a goal of mine, with not very high success, I don’t think, to convince the people in the progress movement that nostalgia is a force for progress, that it’s largely a force for progress. There are dark sides of nostalgia, but they’re far outweighed by the positives of nostalgia. So, here’s an example. People will say, Well, it’s like you pointed out, people romanticize the past. And you see this on the left and the right. Oftentimes people associate this with conservatives. But we can go through a long list of ways that people on the left have this view of the past, of people just lived in harmony with nature and we didn’t need material things and life was great. Like a Disney movie or something. Or maybe we even talked to animals, or something like that. Which of course, if you study history at all, it was way more violent, and difficult, and perilous than that. So yes. That kind of historical romanticization of the past exists. But for most people, most of the time, that’s not how they’re using nostalgia, including some of the most nostalgic people I’ve met, who are very active in the progress movement, but have nearly zero self-awareness of their nostalgia.
Clay Routledge: So let me ask you, how many times have you heard at some event, or talk, or people in this space, a nostalgia of? We used to be a country that built things. We used to not have all these regulations. We used to just be able to build a bridge in weeks, instead of going through all these regulations. Americans were proud. Or we went to the moon. Even within the progress movement of the people that are the most skeptical about nostalgia, a lot of their own inspiration that drives them is pulled from their past, or a historical past, when they felt like, we had world’s fairs. We did this. We did that. We had visionaries. We weren’t so afraid of building. We didn’t have this passive pessimism, or whatever. The point being that, I don’t think it’s the case for most of the time that nostalgia is making people see the past as better. I think what’s happening is that the people are getting the causal direction wrong.
Clay Routledge: People are seeing the present as bad, or see problems in the present, and that’s making them become nostalgic, to find inspiration. Nostalgia isn’t making them see the present as bad. The people seeing the present as bad is making them nostalgic, and the progress people are doing the same thing. They’re saying, things aren’t great right now. There’s too much negativity. There’s too much romantic attitudes around socialism.
Clay Routledge: There’s too many barriers to building, and creating, and entrepreneurship, and I think they’re doing the same thing a lot of people are doing, which is saying, “Okay. Well, where can I find the ideas and the inspirations of how to do things differently, and to pull from that, to take it away from progress entirely.” Think about an artist, a filmmaker, a musician, and they’re saying, “I want to do something new. I really want to change the game up, and do something really creative that’s never been done before.” What did they do? What did I like listening to when I was young? What made me passionate about this project? Who is my favorite filmmaker? Who’s my favorite musician? What can I pull from the touches on my culture, on my people, where I’m from, and then how can I make it new? And so, a lot of times, that’s really what nostalgia is. It’s not running to the past to try to repeat it, it’s pulling that kind of inspiration, because you’re recognizing we only can go forward, we don’t have time machines, and I want to change the future in a positive way, and the past might have some clues.
Clay Routledge: That’s not to say that there aren’t people that don’t, on the extremes, that don’t say, “We should just go back to the way things were.” I just don’t think there’s as many of those people as we think, and if somebody says they are, within five minutes, you can disabuse them of that by saying, “Okay. You think the past was better? Are you prepared to give up the technological and medical innovations that might… Like, if you get diagnosed with cancer today, you want the treatment from 1950, or the treatment today?” “Do you want your daughter to have the opportunity she had in 1950, or the opportunity she has today?” And then they change their tune. So, anyway, that’s my pitch. And I’m prepared to litigate it with data, but I’ve been giving talks and stuff around nostalgia, showing experimental research, showing personality research. For instance, the people who are the most dispositionally prone to nostalgia also tend to be the most open-minded. It’s not that people who are nostalgic are more closed-minded, they’re actually more open-minded. They’re more creative. And so I think there’s a lot of false ideas around nostalgia that aren’t empirically substantiated, and then there’s a little bit of stuff where nostalgia is, you know, where there are some research that, here are the kind of ways that nostalgia can be bad. But they’re far outnumbered by all the positives.
Chelsea Follett: That’s very interesting. I’ll admit that I am a bit of a nostalgia skeptic, but when you put it that way as a form of historical perspective, identifying the positive in the past, but also being able to see the past for what it was, I think that probably can be very helpful, and maybe that relates to what you were saying earlier about older people who have still a memory of what life was like in the past tend to be more optimistic about the future, which is actually surprising to me because we do have this stereotype of younger people as more optimistic inherently, which is sadly no longer the case.
Clay Routledge: Yeah. No. I think that’s true. And another way to think about nostalgia in that way is, so we’ve been talking about historical nostalgia. A lot of times people are doing what we call personal nostalgia, which is they’re not saying life was better in the 1950s or the 1800s or pre-industrialization. They’re not even doing that exercise. They’re doing something more intimate, which is the nostalgia is like, “I’ve studied the most,” which is they’re looking to their own past. And so, just to use myself as an example, I can look back to college and be like, “Oh, this was an exciting time,” all sorts of opportunities and figuring out what I want to do with my life and uncertainty and the the adventure of that, feeling free in a lot of ways. Now, I don’t actually want to go back to, like, I don’t want to be like, “It was a stressful time too,” but I’m not focusing on the stressful parts of it. I’m focusing on the positive parts of it, which we tend to do.
Clay Routledge: It’s a concept in psychology called fading affect bias, which is good for our psychological well-being, that negative experiences tend to fade, their impact tends to fade faster than positive experiences. So it’s easier to look back to the past through those tinted glasses, as you know. But that’s not necessarily bad because what we’re doing is we’re saying, I’m not saying I want to be a college student again. What I’m saying is, “Oh, when I do that, it makes me feel younger now.” Like, oh, make me a little bit more bold and confident that like, “Oh, I did some stuff before. Why can’t I try a new hobby now? Why can’t I… ” So nostalgia has this effect, this energizing, youthfulness effect as well. You know this phrase, “Youth is wasted on the young”? It’s like through nostalgia. It’s not wasted on the young, because I can capture a youthful spirit.
Clay Routledge: And in fact, we did some research years ago on this, and what we found is, around the age of 40, depending on the study, some studies, it was 38. Some studies, it was 41 or 42. But around that time period, you start to find a statistically significant effect in which nostalgia makes people feel younger than their biological age. So, this is a concept called subjective age. And it matters because the age you feel is often how you act. You could be young and act old. You could be like, “I can’t do anything.” Or you could be old and act young, be like, “I can try new things. I can be energized. I can go out in the world and do things.” And so the more nostalgic people are, the more they feel… The lower the subjective age. Again, around 40, that starts to happen. I don’t know why then. The only thing I can think of is that’s the age where you actually, as someone who’s 48, in your 40s is when you actually start to feel, where the vision declines, you start to have more aches, you recover slower from the gym or from a night out drinking or whatever the case may be. And so maybe you’re more aware of, “Oh, I’m getting older,” and then you can really tap into that youthful energy.
Clay Routledge: And a lot of the time, I just bring up that example, because a lot of the times, our nostalgia isn’t some historical analysis, it’s a very personal relationship we have with their own paths in which we’re constantly moving forward. The world is changing. We have decisions to make. We have to figure out where to prioritize our time, what we care about the most, and nostalgia helps direct us. It reminds us of what experiences we cherish, where we found the most meaning in our life, and that helps us make decisions. And I think a lot of times, that’s where the action is in nostalgia. It’s not in these grand historical analysis, it’s in the more personal day-to-day. But that pushes this forward nostalgic people. They’re more confident. They’re more motivated to pursue their goals. They’re more trusting of others. They’re more willing to help others. They donate more to charity. And again, I think it’s because we’re pulling from our bank of meaningful memories, that energizes us and motivates us.
Chelsea Follett: Well, that’s interesting. Obviously, many of these memories are probably with loved ones. I saw in a writing of yours that younger generations, though, are more likely to report nostalgic memories where they were alone. Perhaps that relates to this broader trends of traditional sources of meaning, such as family, organized religion, community shrinking. Do you think that there is anything to this critique that we’re becoming more atomized and lonely? And if so, is this a problem caused by modern society and wealth? What are your thoughts on that?
Clay Routledge: Yeah. That’s another one of those. It depends on the day you ask me. It is true on… From one data point is… And this is something we’ll be releasing in this upcoming report on digital flourishing I mentioned. It is true that we find, and others find, that young people report feeling less socially connected than older people. And again, in some ways, that’s sort of counterintuitive, because we tend to think of young people as being around their peers a lot, doing a lot of things, having more time to hang out with others. But at the same time, as you get older, perhaps you have more opportunities to cultivate, not just opportunities for interacting with others, but those deep bonds. And loneliness is an interesting thing because it’s not just, loneliness isn’t just, “I’m hanging out with people,” loneliness is like, “I have these deeper meaningful relationships.” So somebody can feel lonely and be surrounded by other people. They can move to a city, start a new job, have lots of colleagues, have lots of neighbors, but not really have any deep relationship and feel deeply alone. Or somebody can live out in the frontier, not see a lot of people, but the small group they do see, be deeply interdependent with. They depend on each other for survival and for getting the work down or whatever, and they have very, very close bonds.
Clay Routledge: So it’s not as simple as, are you around people or not. And so, young people might be around people. That’s true, they might be around their peers a lot, but the question is, do they feel more disconnected? And the data seems to suggest, yes. But at the same time, there’s this recent paper that came out that was showing that the relationship between age and loneliness is actually more kind of U-shaped, which is young people and old people report the highest levels of loneliness, and then loneliness dips in mid-life, which seems like a plausible explanation is that… We just talked about the young stuff, but on the old side, it might be that they are experiencing physical decline, retirement, loss of loved ones, to becoming widows or whatever, or physical mobility is a challenge. It’s hard to get out and do things. And so you might have older people feeling lonely for different reasons that young people feel lonely, whereas in mid-life people tend to be surrounded by families, colleagues, coworkers and things like that.
Clay Routledge: But also as far as the trends, young people, they are less likely to marry, or they’re waiting longer to marry, which maybe contributes to feeling of loneliness. The remote work things and interesting… We have these new trends of, people are maybe alone more. And at least from what I understand, I’m a remote worker, and what I understand, and I love it, it’s actually allowed me to have better relationships. I’ve been able to move closer to family, for instance. But one of the things I think I’ve seen in the research is that maybe for people in middle age or people a little bit older who have already built professional networks and already have those relationships, it’s easier to transition to remote work and not feel lonely, because it’s like “I already know these people.” So staying in touch with them online through Zoom meetings or whatever. Yeah. I’d like to see them in person and go out and have a drink or whatever, but it’s like I already built that bond.
Clay Routledge: But for young people coming up, expect-fully the kids who maybe were… The schools were shut down during COVID, and so they were doing remote learning, and then in high school, in college, they did a lot of online courses in college. And they’re starting these jobs, and it could be that we’re having more people, young people, that just don’t have as many opportunities, perhaps, to build those relationships, the foundations that would then allow them to work remote or whatever and still have good connections. Again, I don’t know. This is all speculation. Or of course, there’s the possibility we talked about with the mental health thing, that they’re actually not any more socially disconnected than other generations are in the past. They just think they are, because we’re all telling them they are. We’re all worried about this. And it’s almost as if you ask the question like, “Are you lonely?” Like, “Well, I didn’t really think about it before, but maybe I am.”
Clay Routledge: As a psychologist who does a lot of this research, it does make me wonder sometimes, are we asking people too much how they feel. Kind of planting the seed that they should feel a certain way. But yeah. These are definitely… I’m not trying to belittle that issue. There obviously are people struggling with social disconnection, marriage rates are lower, a lot of people do report not having any friends or not having any close friends. These are some concrete things you can ask people. And more people are saying they don’t have anyone they could depend on. And so I do think those are legitimate worrying trends that warrant some… I’m not one of these people that necessarily blame technology or social media, anything like that. I think technology can actually be very positive for us. It can help people find community and meet new people and plan social events, so I don’t think it’s the technology. But I think we should really focus on ways to use the technology to enhance social connection if people are, in fact, more socially disconnected or more lonely. The question to me is, how can we leverage all the advances we’ve made in technology to help them find each other, to help people find each other and build communities?
Chelsea Follett: That gets to an important point. So many people do blame technology for this alleged rise in loneliness or feeling the social disconnection, or even the loss of meaning. But you mentioned that you have a project on digital flourishing specifically that finds a bit of a more positive story. So we usually try to end this podcast on a positive note. Can you tell me a little bit about your findings there? Or maybe give us a preview.
Clay Routledge: Yeah. So, what we find is the vast majority of Americans, close to 80%, report to be digitally flourishing on most of the dimensions of flourishing that we measure. So, we look at different ways in which people flourish in their digital lives, from things like, “Do I feel able to present who I truly am online?” So this kind of authentic self-disclosure to online communities. “Do I feel connected? Do I feel like I’m building communities?” Civil discourse. Civil participation. “Do I feel like I know how to share my ideas in a way that’s respectful?” So we ask people questions about these things. And what we find is that, most people feel like they can do these things and are doing these things. And there is variability, of course, but what we find is the people who are doing these things, the people who are digitally flourishing, are more likely to be flourishing more broadly. So if they feel like their online life is good, they feel like their offline life is good, their mental… So the more… And we kind of zero, we did across all age groups, we zero in on Gen Z too, because these are the people that are digital natives, spend a lot of time online more than other generations, and they’re the people, as we’ve talked about throughout this podcast, that lots of people are worried about, their mental health and social health.
Clay Routledge: So that seems especially important to recognize that this generation, a lot of their lives are mediated by computers. I’m not one of the people that think that we should take computers… Take these things. To me, the answer is that, if people are having struggles with these technologies, not that we should prevent them from using them, but it’s like, do them well. Make them strengths, things that can enhance their lives. And there’s good news there. It looks like a lot of people are using these technologies in ways that help them flourish, not just online, but in their lives more broadly. So, the report is positive. Most of the attention in the public discourse around this is all the bad things. And so what I hope this report does when we release it is it highlight… It’s not dismissing those concerns. We’re not trying to say, “Oh, everyone’s wrong,” if they think it’s bad. We’re trying to say there’s a bigger picture. And the bigger picture involves lots of positive sides to our technological lives.
Clay Routledge: And we’re hoping we can highlight that as a way to give a more accurate picture, but also to offer ways in which we can think about, “Well, what can we… ” Here’s another way of saying it. People will often focus on how social media is harming young women’s self-esteem or something like that. Well, there’s a lot of young women on social media that are rocking it. They’re building brands, they’re finding connections, they’re networking for their professions, they’re sharing photos with loved ones. They’re using it in all sorts of healthy ways. Well, instead of just focusing on what’s going wrong, why don’t we see what those people are doing as inspiration? What can we learn from the people who are using these technologies in ways that actually are enhancing their lives? And that’s what we’re trying to highlight, and that can help other people, who maybe are struggling, learn the lessons of how to do it in a healthier way.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much, Clay. On that note, I think we’ll end. Please check out his work. Go to the Archbridge Institute’s website, where you can find information about everything we’ve discussed. Check out Profectus. Check out his book. Thank you once again. This is good. Fascinating.
Clay Routledge: Thanks so much. Yeah. It’s been a great conversation. I appreciate it.