If America Is Such A Happy Place, Why Is The Suicide Rate Up 34% Since The Year 2000?

In the years ahead, poverty is likely to get a whole lot worse in this country

What in the world has happened to us? Despite our ridiculously high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, America is a deeply unhappy place.

When I was growing up, there were no “smart phones”, the Internet did not exist, if you wanted to buy something you had to actually go to a store and hunt for it, and most vehicles were pieces of junk that completely broke down after a few years. Today, we have hundreds of television channels, we have more movies than we could ever possibly watch, video games have become wildly creative and there is an app for almost anything that you could possibly need on your phone just a few clicks away. We are literally drowning in entertainment, and yet we are far less happy than previous generations. In fact, the CDC says that the suicide rate in the United States has risen by 34 percent since the year 2000…

Men who work in construction and extraction had the highest rates of suicide in the United States, according to a reportpublished Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For women, suicide rates were highest among those who work in arts, design, entertainment, sports and media.

From 2000 to 2016, the suicide rate among the US working-age population — people 16 to 64 — increased 34%, the report says.

It greatly saddened me to learn that construction workers and miners have the highest suicide rates in the entire country. My grandfather was a construction worker, and he took great pride in his work. In fact, I still have a wooden bowl that he made for me sitting on my desk as I write this article.

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