For nearly five decades, one metric remained remarkably stable. Every year or two, the General Social Survey — conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago and one of the nation's longest-running and most widely cited social research instruments — asks Americans how happy they are, and from 1972 through 2018, the balance between those reporting being "very happy" and those saying they are "not too happy" barely shifted. Then the pandemic arrived — and the numbers collapsed.

Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, has spent several years tracking this trend. "It's a huge change," he told Fortune. "It always can come back more, and we hope that it does. But so far, it's like a net of minus 20, which is utterly unprecedented."

The 2020 decline measured 25 points, and the recovery since then has been only five points. Peltzman contrasted this with the previous major shock most Americans experienced: the Great Recession, which he said "was maximum 10 points, and came back right away."

Money Is Not the Explanation

The instinctive reaction is to point to economic pressures, but Peltzman argues the picture is more complex. While grocery bills and gasoline prices have climbed sharply, an affordability-driven explanation would only hold if the Americans being squeezed the hardest were also the unhappiest.

Peltzman's data shows the reverse. The groups that fell the furthest after 2020 were those who had the most happiness going in: white, high-income, college-educated, and right-leaning Americans. "The affordability business is not an upper-income kind of concern," he said. "It's a lower-income kind of concern, and the upper-income people have been hit hardest in the happiness crash."

"Any story which says that it's inequality," Peltzman added, "those kind of stories are not consistent with the facts."

A Happiness Divide Along Marital Lines

Married Americans remain, on balance, happy. Unmarried Americans — roughly 45% of the adult population — are now, on net, unhappy.

"The only people who are positive, where there's a clear positive balance in happiness, are married people," Peltzman said. "We have a happiness-segregated society by marriage."

A natural follow-up question is whether this simply reflects a declining marriage rate skewing the data. It does not. The marriage rate has been essentially unchanged for 15 years. "It's 55/45, and it's been that way," Peltzman noted.

Marriage rates did fall over a longer period, from the 1970s through the early 2000s, and Peltzman found in an earlier paper that this decline accounted for most of the gradual happiness slide observed before the pandemic. However, that trend had already plateaued well before 2020. The country's married-versus-unmarried split at the onset of the crash is the same split that exists today.

What shifted is not how many Americans are married, but how much more difficult it now feels to be unmarried. Married people largely held their ground, while unmarried people experienced a sharper decline.

"If anything, the unmarried were hit a little bit more," Peltzman said. Married respondents moved from roughly +30 to +50 in the happiness balance, while unmarried respondents went from near breakeven to approximately -15. Even so, he cautioned, "you can't infer what's causing what."

In a separate paper titled The Anatomy of Marital Happiness (2025), Peltzman found that the marital happiness premium holds across nearly every demographic he tested: age, race, income, education, and sexual orientation. The result aligns with a large body of social science research that has consistently identified marriage as one of the strongest demographic correlates of self-reported well-being. Cohabiting couples receive a smaller version of the same boost — about 10 points. "Happy people get married, and married people become happy," he said. "So don't run out and make any personal decisions on the basis of this."

Young Adults and the Erosion of Social Trust

Brad Wilcox, senior fellow and director of the Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), pointed to economic pessimism as a likely contributor to rising unhappiness, noting that young people fear inflation and housing costs have placed the American Dream out of reach.

"But the negativity bias of social media and declines in socializing, dating, and marriage loom larger in this happiness crash," Wilcox added. "That's because, objectively, young adults' social ties have declined much more than their economic position in recent decades."

An IFS chart constructed from the same General Social Survey data highlights why young adults warrant particular attention. From 2000 through 2019, the share of people reporting "not too happy" across every age group fell within a narrow range of roughly 10% to 15%. But from 2021 to 2024, the figure for adults aged 18 to 35 surged to 26%, compared with 20% for the middle-aged and 21% for adults 56 and older. Peltzman noted, however, that younger respondents tend to be a highly volatile group.

Peltzman's research also identified one additional data point that moved in tandem with happiness: whether Americans feel that others treat them fairly. That figure collapsed in the same year and on the same scale as the happiness drop. "It's like the social glue is coming apart," he said. The observation tracks with a broader recognition of declining social connection in American life, including a 2023 public health advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General warning of a national epidemic of loneliness and isolation and its attendant risks to mental and physical health. Whether subsequent GSS data confirms a lasting structural shift or captures a slow recovery still in progress remains an open question for researchers in the field.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.