Most Americans are happy with their own lives, not the country’s direction – with one big caveat

At a time when the pandemic is slogging toward its two-year mark, stock market volatility is roiling investors and decades-high price inflation is cutting into consumer purchasing power, 17% of Americans say they are satisfied with the country’s direction, according to the poll of more than 800 people taken in early to mid-January.

Yet even when big picture problems can make a dent in their life — like disrupted holiday flights amid the omicron variant surge or soaring grocery bills — 85% of poll participants said they are satisfied with their own lives.

The 68-point difference between satisfaction with personal lives and the country’s direction was down from a 71-point divide that Gallup found one year earlier. The new poll matches other gauges finding downbeat moods on large-scale issues, like a consumer confidence survey that fell in January.

Personal satisfaction appears to be waning. The 85% who said they were satisfied with their own lives is five percentage points below Gallup’s record high of 90% in 2020. (Keep in mind, pollsters performed that survey in January of that year, roughly two months before the World Health Organization deemed COVID-19 a global pandemic.)

There’s a big caveat to those satisfaction ratings. Different income levels appear to make it easier to find personal satisfaction, the poll suggests — another reminder of the pandemic’s harsh glare on income inequality.

Though majorities of Americans said they were personally satisfied, households making at least $100,000 were one and a half times more likely than households making under $40,000 to say they were “very satisfied” at a personal level.

That’s 61% compared to 39%, with 52% of people making between $40,000 and $99,999 saying they were “very satisfied” with their personal lives.

Lumping in the people who said they were “somewhat” satisfied with the way things were going for them, 93% of the top-income participants said they were satisfied. It was 87% for middle income and 75% for low income participants.

It might be harder for lower income families to draw a dividing line between their mood looking in and their mood looking out, when, for example, they were more likely to be front-line workers facing the pandemic’s early risks and inflation is now particularly tough on their budgets.

However, people making under $40,000 were the most likely to say they were satisfied with the country’s direction — even though like everyone in the poll, they were predominantly dissatisfied.

One quarter said they were satisfied with the country’s direction, versus 12% of middle-income and 15% of high-income participants.

One money-minded guess as to why? A tight labor market that’s voracious for workers and pushing up wages.

A new real-time tracker on income inequality from economists at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the tale. The average adult income for Americans grew 7.6% during 2021, adjusting for inflation. For the bottom half of the income ladder, incomes grew by 11.7%.

That’s the third highest growth, behind the 12.7% income growth for the country’s one-percent and 13.9% for the country’s top 0.1%, the tracker’s data shows.