The latest issue of Psychology Today (March/April 2011, not yet available online) features a story about unhappiness and the American Dream. One researcher of economics and happiness says, “The U.S.A. has, in aggregate, apparently become more miserable over the last quarter of a century.” The basic premise is this: we have gained what the American Dream promised, families, home ownership, levels of luxury, and yet we are more unhappy than ever. Why is this the case?

The article goes on to cite a number of problems: having more public activities moved inside the home and limited contact with the broader communities (with home churches, homeschooling, and working from home cited as examples); an overemphasis on children who end up dominating the lives of their parents; moving to the suburbs; and we unrealistically dream of fulfillment that is said to come with marriage, having children, and growing older.

I’ll quickly tackle the suburbs issue here. The bulk of this section cites the 2000 book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, a classic New Urbanist text. In short, the New Urbanists argue that suburban neighborhoods emphasize individualism and simply bigger homes, not community, leading to an impoverished public realm. Through the redesign of neighborhoods, such as including porches on the front of houses, moving garages to back alleys, and having a coherent sense of architecture across buildings, community life can be encouraged. The author of this article suggests there is a “disconnect between ‘suburban expectation…and the blighted reality of sprawl.”

This is not a new argument about the suburbs: indeed, critics were saying similar things back in the 1920s and 1950s during the early waves of American suburbanization. This article also trades in typical arguments: “And those parents who live in a cul-de-sac just a highway exit or two from a strip mall might be the first to admit they’re experiencing an American dream that may be less Norman Rockwell than Revolutionary Road.” One question could be raised about this section on suburbs: is it the suburbs themselves that are causing the problem (the actual physical design and layout) or the expectations that come with them? Since the early 1900s, Americans have moved to the suburbs partly to avoid the city. While the suburban lifestyle certainly has faults, would Americans choose to leave the suburbs and move elsewhere? New Urbanists offer an interesting alternative: maintaining single-family home but having denser suburbs which would hopefully have richer community interaction. Interestingly, this article does not call for people to leave the suburbs but perhaps to adjust their expectations about what the suburbs can actually offer.

More broadly, the article sets this up as an issue of out-sized expectations. The American Dream offers much but also seems to leave people wanting more and more. How about a slightly different question: is the end goal of adult life happiness and/or satisfaction? One way to deal with the issue of the American Dream would be to scale back our expectations so we are more satisfied with what we have. Another way to deal with the issue is to wonder if pleasure (measured as happiness or satisfaction) is the ultimate goal in life.

(A note about Psychology Today: I am not a regular reader so my observation may be silly or obvious. But this article, and a few others I flipped through, were quite “pop” and short on academic analysis.)