Discontent

Elevated stress is draining young Americans’ wallets as “doom spending” becomes their go-to coping mechanism.

According to a recent study from Intuit Credit Karma, 60% of Americans are feeling anxious about the state of the world, particularly over the cost of living and inflation. With these concerns taking a toll on mental health, 27% of Americans admit they’re “doom spending” — spending more money despite financial worries. This trend is especially popular among Gen Z (37%) and millennials (39%), with one in four sharing that spending helps them cope with anxiety, stress, and uncertainty.

What’s behind the current spike in this trend? Constant online negativity. More than half of Gen Z (53%) and millennials (49%) say the steady stream of bad news on social media drives them to spend more to relieve stress.

Nearly half (44%) of Americans reported feeling pessimistic about their financial future, and a substantial portion of young people are forgoing savings entirely. This has left many young adults seeing core financial goals, like paying off debt or saving to upgrade their living situation, as far out of reach.

For Christians, financial expert Art Rainer suggests that reprioritizing money is a key place to start:

So, where do we get it wrong? We’re putting our hope for security, our hope for a better future, a hope for a sense of satisfaction and contentment on money. And it gets us into a lot of financial trouble. We get into cycles of discontentment and dissatisfaction. And then of course, we continue to try to get more. And it just never works out. Money in and of itself is not a bad thing. We can use those things for God’s purpose and for His glory.

Sometimes journalism is useful for highlighting important trends in human behavior. Other times, however, journalistic coverage of a topic does more to inflate the popularity of an idea because its novelty is sure to attract attention.

According to Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, this is exactly what’s been happening surrounding the topic of polyamory. Hamid asked in a recent article:

Is it really popular? Or are people only saying it is. A self-fulfilling prophecy might be at work: Polyamory becomes more widespread because we think it’s already widespread. Norms around sexuality change because we think they’ve changed — even if they haven’t.

Hamid notes an uptick in interest of polyamory from Gen-Z users of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, and cites depictions of polyamory on streaming sites like Peacock and Max. But just as in regular relationships, fantasy is much easier to maintain than reality. “In this light, polyamory offers both license and a patina of legitimacy to the exploitative sexual desires of some men.”

He also notes that despite adherents’ insistence on the infinite nature of shared love, time management is also a salient issue:

As lived experience, polyamory is difficult and often unsustainable for most mere mortals. Having one partner requires planning. Having multiple partners requires even more, which is why accounts of “polycules” always seem to involve a lot of work, making shared Google calendars an essential tool in the arsenal of love.

Jealousy, like love, is a natural human emotion: If you love someone, how realistic is it that you will want to “share” that person with someone else?... It is no accident, then, that those who try polyamory often come away disillusioned. Only about 30 percent say they would do it again, with many citing as obstacles possessiveness and “difficult to navigate” emotional aspects.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Though offering some helpful insight, this is obviously the worldly viewpoint on sexual relationships. When preaching on sexual faithfulness in marriage we must add the spiritual consequences of adultery, including Hebrews 13:4, “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.”

In today’s digital age, entertainment is always at our fingertips. Whether it’s the endless scroll on TikTok or jumping from one YouTube video to another, the way we consume media has drastically changed in recent years. But is this content stream of entertainment really entertaining us? A new study finds that scrolling through videos online to cure your boredom can actually make you even more bored!

Researchers from the University of Toronto delved into the curious phenomenon where our attempts to avoid boredom by rapidly swiping through digital content might actually be making things worse. The findings reveal a counterintuitive outcome: the very behavior meant to stave off boredom — quickly moving through entertaining videos — ends up intensifying it.

Digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix have revolutionized how we consume media. With just a swipe or a click, we can skip over content that doesn’t immediately capture our interest. This behavior, known as “digital switching,” is when users switch between different videos or fast-forward through parts of a video in search of something more stimulating. At first glance, this seems like an efficient way to maximize enjoyment and avoid dull moments. However, research suggests that this behavior might be doing the opposite of what we intend.

You might wonder why switching between content would make you more bored. After all, if you’re skipping the “boring” parts, shouldn’t that make the overall experience better?

When you engage deeply with a video, your attention is focused, and you’re more likely to find the content meaningful. However, when you constantly switch, your attention is fragmented. This fragmented attention doesn’t allow you to become fully absorbed in what you’re watching, leading to a feedback loop where you’re constantly seeking something better but never fully satisfied and therefore more bored.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Not only does endlessly swiping from one video to another lead to wasting time and boredom, it can also open the door to the temptation to view inappropriate content for an emotional high.

As if online dating wasn’t hard enough, now users have to sift through profiles looking for increasingly expansive definitions of what it means to be in a committed relationship. Many people using dating apps are on them looking for “the one.” Increasingly, they’re running into profiles of people looking for a second, third, or fourth.

The monogamists say mainstream dating apps are being inundated with users who are in consensual open relationships, and they’d like them to go find their own app. Others say the apps are for people of all relationship styles and, as long as they’re up front about it, what’s the problem? The profiles clearly state: “ENM.” The letters stand for ethical nonmonogamy and more often than not, aren’t spelled out.

In late 2022, one dating app rolled out the ability for users to designate their “relationship type” at the top of their profile and whether they are monogamous or not, which the company says was a response to the needs of Gen Z.

“Gen Z is the most fluid generation in terms of their sexuality and identity, and they need their relationships—and their dating app as the meeting point—to support their openness to different types of connection,” a Hinge spokesman says.

A 2022 survey of more than 14,000 dating app users globally found that 16% of Americans have recently considered an ethical non-monogamous relationship. And around one-third of Americans describe their ideal relationship as something other than complete monogamy, according to a 2023 YouGov poll.

Theft—or "shrinkage" as the retail industry calls it—is a big problem for stores that use self-checkout kiosks. The machines have created a new kind of "partial shrink" where someone pays for most of their stuff, but skips a few items.

One study revealed that about 6.7% of orders had some items that went unscanned (including accidentally)—far higher than the typical 0.3% shrink rate for a fully-staffed checkout. It might not surprise you that in a survey of 5,000 shoppers, the majority admitted to accidentally bagging an item that didn't scan at the kiosk.

But something the survey revealed that might be surprising? Wealthier people were most likely of all to intentionally steal, they told surveyors. Of people who admitted to stealing, the biggest group was among the 18% of people with household incomes of more than $100,000. (When considering people with household incomes under $35,000, 14% said they'd purposely taken an item without scanning it.)

Terrence Schulman a lawyer of the Schulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Shopping and Hoarding said, “I want to admit that I don't know what the truth is, but I'll give you a few theories”:

I think that a lot of people who are higher-income and more well-to-do probably aren't quite as delighted to have all this self-service kind of stuff, like checkout or having to pump your own gas. I'm generalizing, but maybe for wealthier people, it's just another hassle — or it's kind of beneath them. So that's one possibility: that it's kind of like a silent protest. Like, why do I have to do this?

Another thought is that scanning a $10 item for a wealthy person, that's like a penny to them. So, there's already a different kind of attitude about money.

There might be even a subconscious kind of thought of: “Hey, if I got caught, if I ever did get in trouble, I have the resources — I could hire an attorney, or I could call somebody. I know how to make something happen.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Having wealth often leads a person to an attitude of superiority, privilege, and a sense of being “above the law.” But all of us need to guard against making excuses for unlawful or immoral behavior as though we deserve it.

About seven in ten respondents in a survey said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement: “Having more money would solve most of my problems.” Similar proportions of people in each income bracket felt that way, including those with salaries of $200,000 or more.

Exactly how much more money do we think we need to be happy? A survey from the financial-services company Empower put the question to about 2,000 people.

In the survey, most people said it would take a pretty significant pay bump to deliver contentment. The respondents, who had a median salary of $65,000 a year, said a median of $95,000 would make them happy and less stressed. The highest earners, with a median income of $250,000, gave a median response of $350,000.

Even very wealthy people think like this. A 2018 study asked millionaires to rate their happiness on a scale from one to ten and, if they didn’t say ten, predict how much money they would need to move one point higher. Slightly over half of those with a net worth of $10 million or more said their wealth would need to increase by at least 50%.

The American dream—the proposition that anyone who works hard can get ahead, regardless of their background—has slipped out of reach in the minds of many Americans.

Only 36% of voters in a recent survey said the American dream still holds true. This is substantially fewer than the 53% who said so in 2012 and 48% in 2016 in similar surveys. When a Wall Street Journal poll last year asked whether people who work hard were likely to get ahead in this country, some 68% said yes—nearly twice the share as in the new poll.

The survey offers the latest evidence that Americans across the political spectrum are feeling economically fragile and uncertain that the ladder to higher living standards remains sturdy, even amid many signs of economic and social progress.

Is a trip to Las Vegas becoming a thing of the past? A recent survey finds 4 in 10 gamblers have never actually set foot in a casino. A spokesperson for Online Betting Guide said, “Habits are changing all the time. Online gaming sites are becoming more and more popular, and in-person equivalents are evolving to meet the new needs.”

The results also show that 43% of gamblers feel an in-person casino has too many barriers to entry. Meanwhile, 32% just feel more confident behind their screen, with just 16% having more courage in the flesh. Another 22% fear they’ll look out of place in an actual betting parlor.

London (49%), Las Vegas (31%), and Paris (12%) are among the locations where respondents would most like to gamble in person. It also emerged that 83 percent feel the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people play.

Playing the lottery (53%), betting on sports (52%), and buying scratchers (41%) are the most common ways people indulge in a bit of gambling. However, 4 in 10 prefer games that require an element of skill, such as predicting sports scores or playing poker. Another 16% like to leave it to pure chance, playing games such as roulette.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?

Author and researcher Bruce Feiler crisscrossed the country, trying to understand the roots of shifting attitudes towards work. He collected 400 extensive life stories of Americans in all 50 states, interviewing everyone from CEOs and mom-and-pop proprietors to schoolteachers and line workers. Feiler concluded that “unprecedented numbers of Americans are walking away from their jobs, rethinking their routines and breaking away from traditional expectations.”

Fifty million Americans quit a job in the last year, and another third of the workforce is renegotiating where, when, and how they work. Three-quarters of Americans in a recent survey said that they plan to look for new work this year.

Feiler discovered a shift: “Today’s workers are increasingly rejecting the script that has long defined the American Dream. They rebuff the notion that each of us must follow a linear career—lock into a dream early, always climb higher, never stop until you reach the top."

His data shows that the average worker goes through a moment of disruption or reinvention every two and a half years—what he calls a “workquake.”

In the end, fewer Americans are searching merely for work these days; more are searching for work with meaning. Some still emphasize wealth and status, but others stress service, self-expression, or personal fulfillment.

Writing for The Atlantic, Michael Mechanic parsed the findings of the most recent study on the perennial “Does Money Buy Happiness?” question. Recent polling from The Wall Street Journal and the University of Chicago points to a steep decline over the past quarter century in the percentage of American adults who view patriotism, religion, parenting, and community involvement as “very important.” The only priority tested whose perceived importance grew during that period was money.

Researchers definitively found, [in their original 2010 study], that the quadrupling of a person’s income had an effect on well-being roughly equal to the mood boost of a weekend “and less than a third as large as the [negative] effect of a headache.”

The authors also explain that “the difference between the medians of happiness at household incomes of $15,000 and $250,000 is about five points on a 100-point scale.” That’s “almost nothing,” one researcher said. With such a small difference, in fact, one could argue that “there is no practical effect of income at all!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The origin of the proverb “money can’t buy happiness” has its origins as far back as 1750 in the writings of Rousseau. But even so, people still think that it can.

Three members of a local family set off on a long-term camping adventure, intent on living off the grid. Their endeavor took a fatal turn when their three decomposed bodies were discovered recently at a remote campsite.

Gunnison County Coroner Michael Barnes identified the deceased as Rebecca Vance, 42; her 14-year-old son whose name is undisclosed for privacy reasons, and Christine Vance, 41, all from Colorado Springs. Trevala Jara, a Vance stepsister, revealed they didn't disclose their destination before embarking on the journey. The family likely began camping in July 2022, and eventually succumbed to the elements during the harsh winter months.

Friends and family say that Rebecca Vance was motivated by an intense dissatisfaction with the direction of ongoing world and local events—including fallout from the pandemic—and sought an isolated life to shield her family from external influences. The Vances remained committed to their off-grid choice, despite attempts to dissuade them. “We tried to stop them,” said Jara. “But they wouldn’t listen.”

The Vances attempted to subsist on canned food and prepackaged items. After the bodies were discovered, exact causes of death were uncertain, but malnutrition and exposure in the high-altitude winter remain undeniable factors. Gunnison County Sheriff Adam Murdie highlighted the unusual nature of the incident. “This is not a typical occurrence anywhere, by any means,” said Murdie.

Living off the grid, a pursuit of self-sufficiency without public utilities, has gained attention, though experts suggest that for people it's not economically practical. This tragedy underscores the challenges of disconnecting from society, emphasizing the need for balance between safety, security, and self-sufficiency.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As followers of Christ, we are called to be a united family, supporting, and uplifting one another. Let us not retreat into isolation, but rather open our hearts to the blessings of fellowship and community.

A trio of Amazon delivery drivers are suing the e-commerce behemoth over poor working conditions. According to a 16-page suit in Denver District Court, the drivers allege that to keep pace with their expected delivery schedule they were required to urinate into bottles because the system gave them no time for adequate bathroom breaks. They claim the company is in violation of a Colorado law mandating employers provide paid rest breaks every four hours.

“Amazon operates this scheme through harsh work quotas and elaborate tracking and workplace surveillance technology,” reads the language of the suit. “[They] make it impossible for Amazon delivery drivers to fulfill basic human needs while on the job.”

Simone Griffin, a spokesperson for Amazon, offered a statement that appeared to contradict the claims in the lawsuit. Griffin said, “We want to make it clear that we encourage our Delivery Service Partners to support their drivers. That includes giving drivers the time they need for breaks in between stops, providing a list within the Amazon Delivery app of nearby restroom facilities and gas stations, and building in time on routes to use the restroom or take longer breaks.”

Ryan Schilling, one of the drivers behind the suit, said, “I fought for this country in Iraq, but I had an easier time going to the bathroom in a combat zone than I did while working for Amazon. I knew that if I tried to stop to go to a gas station, I'd get yelled at and maybe lose my job. What choice do Amazon drivers have?”

The workers are represented by Towards Justice and Public Justice and several other advocacy groups. On their behalf, Executive Director David Seligman said:

Workplace health and safety laws protect the right to reasonable bathroom access, but workers have suffered from underenforcement of those protections for decades. It's a moral abomination that in 2023, people working at one of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world have to bring a change of clothes to work in case they pee themselves.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Scripture warns rich employers about predatory practices toward their workers. He will hold all such accountable for their actions.

The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions—related to stress, sadness, anger, worry, and physical pain—hit a record high in (2021).

Gallup asks people in this survey to rate their lives on a scale from zero to 10, with zero meaning you’re living your worst possible life and 10 meaning you’re living your best. Sixteen years ago, only 1.6 percent of people worldwide rated their life as a zero. As of (2021), the share of people reporting the worst possible lives has more than quadrupled.

In the summer of 1846, a party of 89 emigrants headed west along the 2,170-mile-long Oregon Trail. Tired, hungry, and trailing behind schedule, they decided at Fort Bridger, Wyoming to travel to their final destination in California by shortcut. The “Hastings Cutoff” they chose was an alternative route that its namesake, Lansford Hastings, claimed would shave at least 300 miles off the journey. The party believed this detour could save more than a month’s time. They were wrong.

Hastings Cutoff turned out to be a waterless, wide-open stretch of the Great Salt Lake Desert, that Hastings himself had never traveled. He simply looked at a map of the route that settler John C. Fremont had taken in 1845 across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings then wrote a guidebook which said it would be quicker and easier than the standard trail. What Hastings didn’t realize was that Fremont almost died doing it.

By the time the Donner-Reed party finally reached the Sierra Nevada mountains, the shortcut had cost them weeks. Snow fell, trapping the travelers. This is when the most infamous (and deadly) part of their tale began. When members of the party began starving to death, survivors ate their remains to stay alive.

Shortcuts, supposedly easier ways of doing something, have often produced disastrous results. BLM Administrator Rob Sweeten said, “It’s obvious that [the emigrants] were in need of shorter routes to save time and money. Especially when you figure, they’re traveling 15 miles a day and facing challenges like changing weather and river conditions, and conflicts with Native Americans. Such difficulties often led to them attempting to find an easier route, shorter route. Though, in many cases, the new route turned out to be much harder.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Satan offered Jesus a disastrous shortcut that avoided the Cross (Matt. 4:1-10). We are also tempted in the same way to find the easy way to growth, status, or achievement. But God uses time, effort, and hardship in our lives to produce fully mature believers who are “conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29).

Author and blogger Chris Winfield shares his thoughts on gratitude:

“Why did this have to happen to me?” It didn’t matter if it was something big (my dog gets cancer, good friend dies) or something little (flight is delayed, spilled something on my shirt). I was in a constant state of “poor me.” This all started to change once I began writing a gratitude list every single day for the past 34+ months and it has changed my life profoundly. Here are the 4 most important things I’ve learned on my gratitude journey:

1. It’s Hard at First: My mentor told me to text him three things that I am grateful for every day. Sounds pretty easy right? Well, it wasn’t. When you’ve lived most of your life not focusing on gratitude, it’s not so simple to change that.

2. There Is Always Something to Be Grateful For: No matter what was going on in my life (business problems, I was sick, someone cut me off in traffic) there was always something that I could find to be grateful for (my health, my daughter’s smile, etc.).

3. Gratitude Grows the More You Use It: My gratitude lists started off very basic and I struggled to find things to be grateful for (especially on the really tough days). But once I consistently took action, it became easier and easier.

4. It Can Help Stop Negative Thought Patterns: According to the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, the average person has about 70,000 thoughts each day! There’s one big problem with this — the vast majority of these thoughts are negative. Gratitude can work to stop these negative thought patterns by replacing it with something positive.

Robert Samuel is a 46-year-old former mobile phone salesman who now gets paid to sit in line for others. If a client wants something but can’t stomach a long queue, they pay him thousands of dollars to do it for them. Samuel sits, standing, or sometimes sleeps, in lines: waiting for theater tickets, iPhone releases, limited edition hoodies, and more before either relinquishing his place to his customer or buying them tickets. This has been his work for nine years and before the pandemic, he was earning over $86,000 a year. The toughest gig was Hamilton where the inside of his tent frosted over.

He said, “You can get people to literally do everything for you. They can watch your kids, they can watch your pets. They can clean your home. They can pick you up from A to B, or bring you your food. So, this is just an extension of that. You can get people to do just about anything, within reason, as long as it’s legal and you want to pay.”

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) wanted to promote happiness and world peace. The brilliant business guru took over Zappos soon after it was founded. Under his leadership, he propelled it from a company on the verge of collapse to a successful online retail enterprise that sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009.

After the publication of his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, he became a workplace-happiness guru. Thousands of business leaders, government officials, and Wall Street analysts flocked to Zappos’s downtown Las Vegas headquarters each year to take tours of its fun-filled offices and learn from Mr. Hsieh.

When Hsieh stepped down as CEO of Zappos in August of 2020, he thought he could achieve world peace. He moved to Park City, Utah, and wanted to attract intellectuals and artists with outsize salaries to create a sort of utopia. The blueprint for this model town could then be applied to other cities across the world.

But behind his swift success, Mr. Hsieh had for years struggled privately with social anxiety, autism, and alcohol abuse. Five months before his death, he suffered a breakdown after abusing drugs, in particular a drug that some describe as “spiritual.” He had also developed a fascination with fire. He liked fooling around with it and performing magic tricks. Candles were sometimes perched dangerously on his bedspread, and Mr. Hsieh kept a small fire ring in his bedroom that shot flames into the air without any barrier. Sadly, he died at 46 in November 2020, from injuries sustained in a house fire that was ruled an accident by local authorities.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This tragic tale shows what happens when we work for “happiness” or “world peace” or making a difference in the world without first dealing with our own sin and brokenness.

The General Social Society is a gold standard poll that has been tracking Americans’ attitudes since 1972. In about three years (2018 to 2021), Americans’ happiness cratered. According to one journalist, “The graph looks like the heart rate has plunged and they’re paging everyone on the floor to revive the patient.”

For the first time since the survey began (50 years ago), more people say they’re “not too happy” than say they’re “very happy.”

The actual statistics look like this:

“Very happy”

2018 – 31%

2021 – 19%

“Not too happy”

2018 – 13%

2021 – 24%

During COVID-19, New York City residents started moving into the country. The 13,000-plus member Facebook group “Into the Unknown” unites people “who have decided or are considering to join the exodus from NYC to greener pastures.” But the grass has not been greener on the other side of the fence. According to one report, “City dwellers, who retreated to rural areas in the pandemic, now see drawbacks, from pests and social isolation to the difficulty of finding day care and health care.”

For instance, Tara Silberberg, 53, moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley and was knocked back by the feeling of alienation. Born in New York, in May 2020 Ms. Silberberg and her husband left the city and moved to the small rural town of Gallatin, New York. She told reporters, “I was not quite prepared for how lonely it was going to be, and I’m very social.” In the first year of her family’s Massachusetts sojourn, the 1930s gravity-fed water system broke “and nobody knew how to fix it and we didn’t have water for a year,” she recalled. “I understood that the country doesn’t mean it’s always picking daisies.”

No wonder, then, that many of these rural dwellers pulled up stakes once again and returned to the city—or are hoping to do so. But that may pose some new problems because New York’s real estate market is once again booming.

Paris. The Grand Canyon. The Great Barrier Reef. The Pyramids of Giza. According to a TV show a few years ago, these are four of the fifty things you must see before you die. Not only was this BBC show popular, but books with titles like that have been on best-seller lists ever since.

In fact, the show seems to have spawned an entire new genre. As well as things to see before death, there's a host of other things to add to the list: "100 things to Do Before You Die," which includes milking a cow; "100 Things to Eat Before You Die," such as crocodile. Dozens of books and websites urge you to complete their lists, offering albums to listen to, movies to watch, sensations to experience. And the lists go on.

That this genre has all been so successful reveals something sig­nificant about us. It highlights what has become a great concern for many. We want to experience the best of what's out there before it's too late. It's a first-world problem: for those of us who don't worry about putting a roof over our heads or food on the table, our greatest fear seems to be getting to the end of life and feeling we've not gotten our money's worth.

And it's all feeding into the ever-growing pathology, fear of miss­ing out (FOMO) an anxiety prevalent enough to be the subject of study by psychologists. We're increasingly desperate not to miss the best of what's out there and plagued by the fear that we might be. Life is short. The world is big. We only get one shot.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The perspective of the Bible is very different. Yes, the world is big. And, yes, this life is short. But this life is not all there is. For believers, this brief life on earth is only the entry way into an eternity filled with joy and fulfillment beyond what our hearts can imagine, “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).