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Depressed. Angry. Unmarried. Why?
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Why are liberal women so unhappy? At
first, I thought it was a meme or a
random survey or two that conservatives
were clucking about. But when I looked
into it, I saw study after study seeming
to confirm it. Now, I'm not out here to
criticize or own the libs or anything
like that. You can find that all over
YouTube. Instead, I've researched why
this highly educated and often
successful group of people continually
say they're unhappier than any other
demographic. I'm Ken Laort and this is
Elephants in Rooms where I look at some
issues that can be uncomfortable but in
looking at them fairly there are always
lessons that we can learn from them.
Sometimes about society, sometimes about
ourselves. Here we'll take a serious
look at the statistics and studies and
see what's going on. I'll first answer
the question, is it true? Are liberal
women actually the most unhappy group in
America? Then we'll look at some
caveats, why the numbers might not
exactly reflect reality. And finally,
I'll get into the reason why liberal
women might be so unhappy. So, is it
true conservatives might have fun
mocking unhappy libs? But do nonpartisan
studies actually bear this out? The
answer, they really do. The General
Social Survey is one of the longest
running snapshots of American attitudes.
It's considered a gold standard for
tracking American happiness, and it's
been asking Americans about their
happiness levels for over a half
century. If you chart the results by
political ideology, conservatives
consistently rate themselves happier
than liberals. That's true for men and
women alike year after year. And women
on the whole have been reporting lower
happiness than men since at least the
1970s. Both of those observations
overlap and it puts liberal women right
at the bottom of the happiness scale.
And the gap isn't small either. By 2022,
conservatives were about 10 to 15
percentage points more likely to say
they're very happy than liberals. And
the American Family Survey shows the
same thing. Its findings suggest that
conservative women are nearly twice as
likely as liberal women to feel quote
completely satisfied with their lives,
31% versus 15%. That's a pretty wide
gap, and it's based on a national
representative sample. So, it's not as
though they've just pulled a a small
selected online group or something. Now,
the surveys don't prove that a person's
ideology determines her life
satisfaction, but there's a definite
correlation. But that's just
self-reported happiness levels. When we
talk about mental health, things get
even uglier. The Pew Research Center,
another respected mainstream
organization, asked women if a doctor
had ever diagnosed them with a mental
health condition. Among white women aged
18 to 29, 56% of liberals said yes, over
double the rate of conservative women
who came in at 27%. And it's not just
young women. The same Pew data shows
that liberal women in their 30s and 40s
also report significantly more mental
health diagnoses than conservatives in
the same age group. We also have
long-term data from the monitoring the
future study which has been tracking
adolescent mental health since the
1970s. From 2005 to 2018, depressive
symptoms shot up for everyone, but the
spike was steepest for liberal girls.
Their average depression score went from
a 2.02 02 to 2.75 on a 0 to4 scale. A
sharper rise than conservative girls.
That's not just feeling a little down.
It's clinical level depression creeping
into the picture. And the trending
didn't just rise. It accelerated after
2010, right about the time social media
became commonplace. Overall, the data
tell a brutal story. If you're a liberal
woman under 30, they consistently report
lower happiness levels, higher rates of
diagnosed mental health conditions, and
more symptoms of depression than pretty
much any other major demographic group
in the country. Now, look, anytime I do
a data heavy episode, there's always a
chance I could screw something up. If
that happens, let me know about it and
I'll pin it in the correction below.
Okay, so this leads us to the next
logical question. If all of this is
true, is it actually being liberal that
makes these women unhappy? Or are we
just seeing who's more willing to admit
they're struggling? Let's talk about
some caveats. How much of this is real
and how much of it is just in the
reporting? One major complication is
that self-reported data can be
deceptive. Liberal women, especially
those in urban settings, they might be
more open to therapy or just more
forthcoming about mental health
struggles. In many liberal and highly
educated circles, therapy is not just
accepted. For many, it's like it's a
part of their lifestyle. Just that can
inflate diagnosis rates. I mean, if you
never seek professional help, you can't
be officially labeled with depression or
anxiety. One recent study found that
college-educated liberals were nearly
twice as likely to say that they'd seen
a therapist in the past years compared
to conservatives with similar education
levels. It's tricky to know what the
chicken and what the egg is here. I
mean, if you're going to therapy
regularly, maybe there's a problem, but
you're also much more likely to walk out
with some type of a diagnosis, even if
it's mild anxiety or situational
depression. And there's another twist
that's hard to quantify, but it's real.
Liberal culture encourages
vulnerability. In fact, among younger
liberal women, there's almost a social
currency to talking openly about their
mental health struggles. Therapy is
important, but it is not a flex. Stop
bragging about it. I'm doing the work.
I'm unpacking my tr I don't need you to
unpack. I need you to change.
You see it all over the media. anxiety
checklists, depression memes, Tik Toks
about trauma responses. Conservative
culture leans a bit more towards
stoicism, putting your head down,
powering through, and keeping your
personal struggles personal. Now, that
doesn't mean that conservative women are
secretly just as unhappy, but it does
mean the gap in reported mental health
might be exaggerated. If one group
treats emotional pain like a confession
booth and the other treats it like a
private battle, you can end up with data
that might look more dramatic than what
it actually is. And finally, we need to
remember that correlation doesn't
necessarily mean causation. The data
doesn't actually prove that being
liberal causes unhappiness. It could
easily work the other way around. Maybe
people who already feel more anxious,
isolated, or powerless are naturally
drawn to progressive politics, which
tends to emphasize injustice,
inequality, or systemic problems.
Studies aren't great at answering
questions like that. So, there's always
a bit of wiggle room in the answers. So,
let's get to the heart of the question,
though. Understanding more reasons why.
Is it something about liberal politics
itself that makes some people miserable?
Or is there a bigger cultural, personal,
and psychological patterns going on?
When you sift through the research, five
big explanations jump out. And none of
them are as simple as liberalism causes
depression. Reason number one, marriage
and family. Whether someone is married
is one of the strongest happiness
predictors in decades of social science
research, and it shows up everywhere
from the General Social Survey to the
American Family Survey. And
conservatives are far more likely to be
married than liberals. Among women aged
18 to 55, 56% of conservatives are
married compared to just 37% of
liberals. That's a 20 point gap. Now,
you can argue that marriage doesn't make
people happy. Maybe happy people are
more likely to get married. But even
when controlling for income, education,
and other variables, the marriage effect
still shows up. And it's not just
marriage. Family life in general seems
to play a role. Conservative women tend
to have more children and they tend to
have them earlier, while liberal women
tend to delay marriage and kids or skip
it entirely. Marriage frequently
includes emotional support, shared
resources, and a sense of stability. And
that may be harder to replicate if
you're going it alone. I'm not saying
that singleness is bad necessarily, but
in terms of self-reported happiness, the
data says traditional family structures
are linked to greater life satisfaction.
Okay. Reason number two, social media.
If you could design a technology to
wreck teen girls mental health, it would
look like Instagram. That's essentially
what Jonathan hate found when he dug
into the data from monitoring the
future. A massive fedally funded study
that tracks adolescent well-being. After
2010, depression scores for liberal
girls skyrocketed. And hate tied that
directly to the rise of smartphones and
social media. These platforms didn't
just become a tool for connection. They
became a stage for constant comparison,
moral posturing, public self diagnosis.
And who are the heaviest users? Liberal
girls. Data confirms they spend more
their time on social media than their
conservative peers. And they're more
likely to say social media makes them
feel worse about themselves. And it's
not just the endless beauty filters and
influencer envy, although that's part of
it. It's also the way liberal culture
encourages kind of a public
vulnerability performance. If you're a
young liberal woman online, talking
about your anxiety, your trauma, or your
existential dread isn't just allowed,
it's rewarded. It's both catnip for the
algorithm and poison for your mental
health. And doom scrolling is an issue
as well. Each headline or viral post, it
feels like another drop in a bucket of
bad news, especially when that news is
about politics, which is reason number
three, the political climate. The Jim
study showed that liberal teens mental
health tanked after the 2016 election, a
lot more than that of conservative
teens. It's not a coincidence. If you
believe the world is on fire and that
it's your personal moral duty to fix it,
you're carrying a constant low-grade
sense of doom. Conservatives worry about
that, too. But they tend to frame
problems differently as temporary
challenges or even personal
responsibilities. It's a small shift in
mindset, but it has real mental health
effects. It's not about whether one side
is right or wrong politically. It's
about how it feels to live inside each
worldview. For many liberal women,
especially the younger ones, when your
identity is rooted in a sense of crisis,
you're going to feel more anxious, more
hopeless, and more exhausted. Hey, if
you're liking this, now's a good time to
remember to subscribe. Okay, so reason
number four, the LGBT factor. Okay, so
this part's uncomfortable to talk about,
but we can't ignore it. According to
Gallup, 38% of liberal women under the
age of 30 identify as LGBT. For
conservatives, that number is just 5%.
Now, this is self-identification, which
is higher than self-reported actual
sexual behavior, and that may be another
video, but it still matters because LGBT
people across virtually every major
study report higher rates of depression,
anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, too.
Studies consistently show that feeling
like your identity is consistently under
scrutiny correlates with more anxiety
and lower well-being. And finally,
reason number five, more self analysis.
There's a possibility that therapy
culture itself may actually be part of
the problem. If you spent any time in
progressive space, online or off, you
know that selfanalysis is a big thing.
Journaling, trauma unpacking, inner
child work, attachment therapy, self-
diagnosing, and constantly revisiting
every bad thing that ever happened to
you. I mean, I live in Northern
California and I see it. It's a thing.
Now, there's a good side to taking care
of your mental health, of course, but
there's a point where too much
introspection can go bad when you put
your negative thoughts on a loop. The
more you dig into your own sadness, the
sadder you can get. Conservatives who
tend to focus more on external goals
like career, family, and whatnot, they
tend to spend less time worrying about
their internal emotional states, and
they seem to be happier. Again, I don't
want to say that therapy is bad, but
there's a fine line between constructive
self-awareness and a downward spiral of
self-critique. Now, of course, none of
this proves that being liberal causes
depression. Life is messier than that.
But when you add up less marriage, more
social media, a catastrophizing
worldview, and a lot of self analysis,
you can get a clear picture of why
liberal women on average feel more
stressed, anxious, and unhappy. Like
good mysteries, there's not one simple
answer. The same holds true for this
mystery. How did Kevin Spacy have 30
people accuse him of serious misconduct
over several trials, yet he had zero
convictions? Did he get off because he's
rich and famous, or was he a victim of
cancel culture and greed? It's a
thought-provoking story, and it's one of
my favorites. Look, I love researching
and sharing this information. If you
found it a worthwhile trip, come back
and do it again. Take care.
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