0:00 Why are liberal women so unhappy? At
0:02 first, I thought it was a meme or a
0:03 random survey or two that conservatives
0:05 were clucking about. But when I looked
0:07 into it, I saw study after study seeming
0:10 to confirm it. Now, I'm not out here to
0:12 criticize or own the libs or anything
0:14 like that. You can find that all over
0:16 YouTube. Instead, I've researched why
0:18 this highly educated and often
0:19 successful group of people continually
0:22 say they're unhappier than any other
0:23 demographic. I'm Ken Laort and this is
0:25 Elephants in Rooms where I look at some
0:27 issues that can be uncomfortable but in
0:29 looking at them fairly there are always
0:31 lessons that we can learn from them.
0:33 Sometimes about society, sometimes about
0:35 ourselves. Here we'll take a serious
0:36 look at the statistics and studies and
0:38 see what's going on. I'll first answer
0:40 the question, is it true? Are liberal
0:42 women actually the most unhappy group in
0:44 America? Then we'll look at some
0:46 caveats, why the numbers might not
0:48 exactly reflect reality. And finally,
0:50 I'll get into the reason why liberal
0:52 women might be so unhappy. So, is it
0:54 true conservatives might have fun
0:55 mocking unhappy libs? But do nonpartisan
0:58 studies actually bear this out? The
1:00 answer, they really do. The General
1:03 Social Survey is one of the longest
1:04 running snapshots of American attitudes.
1:07 It's considered a gold standard for
1:08 tracking American happiness, and it's
1:10 been asking Americans about their
1:12 happiness levels for over a half
1:14 century. If you chart the results by
1:16 political ideology, conservatives
1:18 consistently rate themselves happier
1:20 than liberals. That's true for men and
1:22 women alike year after year. And women
1:24 on the whole have been reporting lower
1:26 happiness than men since at least the
1:28 1970s. Both of those observations
1:31 overlap and it puts liberal women right
1:33 at the bottom of the happiness scale.
1:35 And the gap isn't small either. By 2022,
1:38 conservatives were about 10 to 15
1:40 percentage points more likely to say
1:42 they're very happy than liberals. And
1:44 the American Family Survey shows the
1:45 same thing. Its findings suggest that
1:47 conservative women are nearly twice as
1:49 likely as liberal women to feel quote
1:52 completely satisfied with their lives,
1:54 31% versus 15%. That's a pretty wide
1:58 gap, and it's based on a national
2:00 representative sample. So, it's not as
2:01 though they've just pulled a a small
2:03 selected online group or something. Now,
2:05 the surveys don't prove that a person's
2:06 ideology determines her life
2:08 satisfaction, but there's a definite
2:10 correlation. But that's just
2:12 self-reported happiness levels. When we
2:14 talk about mental health, things get
2:16 even uglier. The Pew Research Center,
2:18 another respected mainstream
2:20 organization, asked women if a doctor
2:22 had ever diagnosed them with a mental
2:24 health condition. Among white women aged
2:26 18 to 29, 56% of liberals said yes, over
2:30 double the rate of conservative women
2:32 who came in at 27%. And it's not just
2:34 young women. The same Pew data shows
2:36 that liberal women in their 30s and 40s
2:38 also report significantly more mental
2:41 health diagnoses than conservatives in
2:43 the same age group. We also have
2:44 long-term data from the monitoring the
2:46 future study which has been tracking
2:48 adolescent mental health since the
2:49 1970s. From 2005 to 2018, depressive
2:54 symptoms shot up for everyone, but the
2:56 spike was steepest for liberal girls.
2:58 Their average depression score went from
3:00 a 2.02 02 to 2.75 on a 0 to4 scale. A
3:05 sharper rise than conservative girls.
3:07 That's not just feeling a little down.
3:09 It's clinical level depression creeping
3:11 into the picture. And the trending
3:12 didn't just rise. It accelerated after
3:14 2010, right about the time social media
3:17 became commonplace. Overall, the data
3:19 tell a brutal story. If you're a liberal
3:21 woman under 30, they consistently report
3:23 lower happiness levels, higher rates of
3:26 diagnosed mental health conditions, and
3:28 more symptoms of depression than pretty
3:30 much any other major demographic group
3:32 in the country. Now, look, anytime I do
3:34 a data heavy episode, there's always a
3:36 chance I could screw something up. If
3:37 that happens, let me know about it and
3:39 I'll pin it in the correction below.
3:40 Okay, so this leads us to the next
3:42 logical question. If all of this is
3:44 true, is it actually being liberal that
3:46 makes these women unhappy? Or are we
3:48 just seeing who's more willing to admit
3:49 they're struggling? Let's talk about
3:51 some caveats. How much of this is real
3:53 and how much of it is just in the
3:55 reporting? One major complication is
3:56 that self-reported data can be
3:58 deceptive. Liberal women, especially
4:00 those in urban settings, they might be
4:02 more open to therapy or just more
4:04 forthcoming about mental health
4:05 struggles. In many liberal and highly
4:07 educated circles, therapy is not just
4:09 accepted. For many, it's like it's a
4:11 part of their lifestyle. Just that can
4:13 inflate diagnosis rates. I mean, if you
4:15 never seek professional help, you can't
4:17 be officially labeled with depression or
4:19 anxiety. One recent study found that
4:21 college-educated liberals were nearly
4:23 twice as likely to say that they'd seen
4:25 a therapist in the past years compared
4:27 to conservatives with similar education
4:29 levels. It's tricky to know what the
4:30 chicken and what the egg is here. I
4:32 mean, if you're going to therapy
4:33 regularly, maybe there's a problem, but
4:36 you're also much more likely to walk out
4:37 with some type of a diagnosis, even if
4:39 it's mild anxiety or situational
4:41 depression. And there's another twist
4:43 that's hard to quantify, but it's real.
4:45 Liberal culture encourages
4:47 vulnerability. In fact, among younger
4:49 liberal women, there's almost a social
4:51 currency to talking openly about their
4:53 mental health struggles. Therapy is
4:55 important, but it is not a flex. Stop
4:58 bragging about it. I'm doing the work.
5:02 I'm unpacking my tr I don't need you to
5:04 unpack. I need you to change.
5:08 You see it all over the media. anxiety
5:09 checklists, depression memes, Tik Toks
5:12 about trauma responses. Conservative
5:13 culture leans a bit more towards
5:15 stoicism, putting your head down,
5:17 powering through, and keeping your
5:18 personal struggles personal. Now, that
5:20 doesn't mean that conservative women are
5:21 secretly just as unhappy, but it does
5:23 mean the gap in reported mental health
5:25 might be exaggerated. If one group
5:27 treats emotional pain like a confession
5:29 booth and the other treats it like a
5:31 private battle, you can end up with data
5:33 that might look more dramatic than what
5:34 it actually is. And finally, we need to
5:36 remember that correlation doesn't
5:38 necessarily mean causation. The data
5:40 doesn't actually prove that being
5:42 liberal causes unhappiness. It could
5:44 easily work the other way around. Maybe
5:46 people who already feel more anxious,
5:48 isolated, or powerless are naturally
5:50 drawn to progressive politics, which
5:52 tends to emphasize injustice,
5:54 inequality, or systemic problems.
5:56 Studies aren't great at answering
5:57 questions like that. So, there's always
5:58 a bit of wiggle room in the answers. So,
6:00 let's get to the heart of the question,
6:02 though. Understanding more reasons why.
6:04 Is it something about liberal politics
6:06 itself that makes some people miserable?
6:08 Or is there a bigger cultural, personal,
6:10 and psychological patterns going on?
6:12 When you sift through the research, five
6:14 big explanations jump out. And none of
6:16 them are as simple as liberalism causes
6:18 depression. Reason number one, marriage
6:21 and family. Whether someone is married
6:23 is one of the strongest happiness
6:24 predictors in decades of social science
6:26 research, and it shows up everywhere
6:28 from the General Social Survey to the
6:30 American Family Survey. And
6:31 conservatives are far more likely to be
6:33 married than liberals. Among women aged
6:35 18 to 55, 56% of conservatives are
6:39 married compared to just 37% of
6:41 liberals. That's a 20 point gap. Now,
6:43 you can argue that marriage doesn't make
6:45 people happy. Maybe happy people are
6:47 more likely to get married. But even
6:48 when controlling for income, education,
6:50 and other variables, the marriage effect
6:52 still shows up. And it's not just
6:54 marriage. Family life in general seems
6:56 to play a role. Conservative women tend
6:59 to have more children and they tend to
7:00 have them earlier, while liberal women
7:02 tend to delay marriage and kids or skip
7:04 it entirely. Marriage frequently
7:05 includes emotional support, shared
7:07 resources, and a sense of stability. And
7:10 that may be harder to replicate if
7:11 you're going it alone. I'm not saying
7:13 that singleness is bad necessarily, but
7:15 in terms of self-reported happiness, the
7:17 data says traditional family structures
7:20 are linked to greater life satisfaction.
7:22 Okay. Reason number two, social media.
7:25 If you could design a technology to
7:27 wreck teen girls mental health, it would
7:29 look like Instagram. That's essentially
7:31 what Jonathan hate found when he dug
7:32 into the data from monitoring the
7:34 future. A massive fedally funded study
7:36 that tracks adolescent well-being. After
7:38 2010, depression scores for liberal
7:41 girls skyrocketed. And hate tied that
7:43 directly to the rise of smartphones and
7:45 social media. These platforms didn't
7:46 just become a tool for connection. They
7:48 became a stage for constant comparison,
7:50 moral posturing, public self diagnosis.
7:53 And who are the heaviest users? Liberal
7:55 girls. Data confirms they spend more
7:57 their time on social media than their
7:59 conservative peers. And they're more
8:01 likely to say social media makes them
8:03 feel worse about themselves. And it's
8:04 not just the endless beauty filters and
8:06 influencer envy, although that's part of
8:08 it. It's also the way liberal culture
8:10 encourages kind of a public
8:12 vulnerability performance. If you're a
8:14 young liberal woman online, talking
8:16 about your anxiety, your trauma, or your
8:18 existential dread isn't just allowed,
8:20 it's rewarded. It's both catnip for the
8:23 algorithm and poison for your mental
8:25 health. And doom scrolling is an issue
8:27 as well. Each headline or viral post, it
8:30 feels like another drop in a bucket of
8:31 bad news, especially when that news is
8:34 about politics, which is reason number
8:36 three, the political climate. The Jim
8:38 study showed that liberal teens mental
8:40 health tanked after the 2016 election, a
8:43 lot more than that of conservative
8:44 teens. It's not a coincidence. If you
8:46 believe the world is on fire and that
8:48 it's your personal moral duty to fix it,
8:50 you're carrying a constant low-grade
8:52 sense of doom. Conservatives worry about
8:55 that, too. But they tend to frame
8:56 problems differently as temporary
8:58 challenges or even personal
8:59 responsibilities. It's a small shift in
9:01 mindset, but it has real mental health
9:03 effects. It's not about whether one side
9:05 is right or wrong politically. It's
9:08 about how it feels to live inside each
9:10 worldview. For many liberal women,
9:12 especially the younger ones, when your
9:14 identity is rooted in a sense of crisis,
9:16 you're going to feel more anxious, more
9:18 hopeless, and more exhausted. Hey, if
9:20 you're liking this, now's a good time to
9:21 remember to subscribe. Okay, so reason
9:24 number four, the LGBT factor. Okay, so
9:27 this part's uncomfortable to talk about,
9:28 but we can't ignore it. According to
9:30 Gallup, 38% of liberal women under the
9:33 age of 30 identify as LGBT. For
9:35 conservatives, that number is just 5%.
9:38 Now, this is self-identification, which
9:40 is higher than self-reported actual
9:42 sexual behavior, and that may be another
9:44 video, but it still matters because LGBT
9:47 people across virtually every major
9:49 study report higher rates of depression,
9:52 anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, too.
9:54 Studies consistently show that feeling
9:56 like your identity is consistently under
9:57 scrutiny correlates with more anxiety
10:00 and lower well-being. And finally,
10:01 reason number five, more self analysis.
10:04 There's a possibility that therapy
10:06 culture itself may actually be part of
10:08 the problem. If you spent any time in
10:09 progressive space, online or off, you
10:12 know that selfanalysis is a big thing.
10:14 Journaling, trauma unpacking, inner
10:16 child work, attachment therapy, self-
10:18 diagnosing, and constantly revisiting
10:20 every bad thing that ever happened to
10:22 you. I mean, I live in Northern
10:23 California and I see it. It's a thing.
10:25 Now, there's a good side to taking care
10:27 of your mental health, of course, but
10:29 there's a point where too much
10:30 introspection can go bad when you put
10:32 your negative thoughts on a loop. The
10:34 more you dig into your own sadness, the
10:36 sadder you can get. Conservatives who
10:38 tend to focus more on external goals
10:40 like career, family, and whatnot, they
10:42 tend to spend less time worrying about
10:44 their internal emotional states, and
10:46 they seem to be happier. Again, I don't
10:47 want to say that therapy is bad, but
10:49 there's a fine line between constructive
10:51 self-awareness and a downward spiral of
10:54 self-critique. Now, of course, none of
10:55 this proves that being liberal causes
10:57 depression. Life is messier than that.
10:59 But when you add up less marriage, more
11:01 social media, a catastrophizing
11:03 worldview, and a lot of self analysis,
11:06 you can get a clear picture of why
11:07 liberal women on average feel more
11:10 stressed, anxious, and unhappy. Like
11:12 good mysteries, there's not one simple
11:14 answer. The same holds true for this
11:16 mystery. How did Kevin Spacy have 30
11:19 people accuse him of serious misconduct
11:22 over several trials, yet he had zero
11:24 convictions? Did he get off because he's
11:26 rich and famous, or was he a victim of
11:28 cancel culture and greed? It's a
11:30 thought-provoking story, and it's one of
11:32 my favorites. Look, I love researching
11:34 and sharing this information. If you
11:35 found it a worthwhile trip, come back
11:37 and do it again. Take care.
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