Correlation is Not Causation, But Something is Driving American Despair

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Henry David Thoreau

I received a quiet letter, a multi-page outline of one man’s quiet desperation. Isolation, lonely, pressure, failure—these were the words used to describe his interior pain. I pored over the pages of mid-life existential angst, and so much of the language was familiar. The letter was a simple piece of the American gestalt, evidence of the crushing weight of the American experience.

As I wrote yesterday, America is plagued...