In 2025, it’s a fair question to ask.
Are we okay?
It’s the kind of question that shows up late at night, in quiet moments, or in texts to friends that go unanswered a beat too long. It's hard to tell what’s normal anymore: feeling stretched thin, anxious, angry, disconnected or just…numb.
So we asked.
Through Civic Pulse, Murmuration has surveyed over 22,000 people to understand how Americans are really doing. We asked about how they’re feeling, what’s stressing them out, what gives them hope, how connected they feel to the people and places around them, and more.
This includes two deceptively simple questions:
“Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”
“All things considered, how satisfied are you with how things are going in this country?”
The contrast in responses was striking: 71% of people said they’re satisfied with their own lives, while only 25% said the same about the country’s direction.
This split isn’t new, but it remains revealing. We see it clearly in current Civic Pulse data, and Gallup has been seeing a similar gap for nearly 40 years across satisfaction with life and direction of country. Americans are often more optimistic about their personal circumstances than the broader systems around them. How messy depends. Critically, Americans’ views of how the country is doing are correlated with partisan identity. Intuitively, satisfaction rises when their party controls the White House and drops when it doesn’t. Personal life satisfaction remains relatively stable across party lines.
In other words, home is fine, the world is a mess.
But, this baseline number matters. It sets the emotional tone for everything else—how people engage, vote, trust, and show up for one another. And the signal we have here is that the personal and political are drifting further apart, and in that space, something strange is showing up in our open-ended data: a meaningful share of people, especially those who are struggling, can’t name any reason they feel the way they do.
Just... nothing.
It’s a reminder that for many people, civic discontent doesn’t necessarily spill over into private despair. But the inverse could also be true: perhaps satisfaction with life doesn’t always mean people are hopeful about the future.
Life Satisfaction, by the Numbers
We zoomed in on six big areas people brought up when talking about life satisfaction: family, health, finances, relationships, life (general reflections), and one very curious outlier—“nothing.”
Family Is the Constant
Family came up over and over, across every group: those satisfied with life (30%), those neutral (23%), those struggling (23%). About a quarter to a third of all respondents mentioned family, either as their source of joy or their primary stressor.
Some people offered moments of quiet pride:
“I am able to spend time with my family and take care of my son.” – 41-year-old Hispanic female from Commerce City, CO
Others opened a window into deep personal hardship:
“Husband left me after 19 years ignoring me have no job got 2 kids to raise haven't worked in 7 years” – 56-year-old female with high school education from Gainesville, GA
In both cases, family isn’t just a backdrop to life—it is the terrain. It doesn’t simply sit behind people’s experiences; it shapes their path, structures their decisions, and influences how they see the world. When people encounter a policy or political message, they often evaluate it first through the lens of how it might affect their family: its safety, stability, values, and future.
Health and Finances: Always Present
Health and financial stress cropped up with predictable consistency—roughly 15-17% of respondents across all demographic groups mentioned health, and 13–16% brought up money.
A few direct quotes tell you a lot about where people’s heads are:
“Everyone is healthy so that’s major.” – 62-year-old female with $50K household income from Melbourne, FL
"I am able to eat 3 times a day and have a roof over my head" – 28-year-old Asian male from Long Beach, CA
Even in an era of inflation and political anxiety, many people measure satisfaction in basic terms: I’m alive, my body works, my people are okay.
The Curious Case of “Nothing”
One of the most striking occurrences in the data was how often people said nothing—as in, there’s no reason they feel satisfied, or no reason they’re dissatisfied, or there is but they are unsure of what to attribute it to. We heard this from about 4% of people overall, with a clear trend across satisfaction levels.
This is worth sitting with:
14% of dissatisfied respondents gave “nothing” as their reason
8% of neutral respondents did the same
Only 1% of satisfied respondents said “nothing”
In short, people who are unhappy are more likely to feel blank. That’s not just discontent—it’s disconnection. It’s not a protest; it’s a shrug.
This might help explain something deeper: that some of the most disengaged Americans aren’t just tuning out politics… they’re tuning out everything.
The Direction of the Country
When it comes to the direction of the country, most aren’t feeling great:
That means more than three-quarters of Americans aren’t convinced we’re headed in the right direction. But what are they actually concerned about?
Politics. Politics. Politics.
Three powerful themes emerged when we asked people why they’re dissatisfied with the direction of the country:
A sense that the system is broken (26%): Corruption, division, and media spin. As one person put it, “There is very little improvement going on. The people in charge are dedicated to making things worse in business and government.” Another wrote, “I’m tired of all the hatred and the things that evolve from it.”
Economic strain (27%): Not abstract stats, this is about groceries, rent, and jobs. “The price of everything has gone up but paychecks stayed the same.” And more starkly: “It is impossible to live.” But even here, it can be societal: “Our economy is going down and everyone cares more about themselves than our country as a whole.”
The political climate (47%): Nearly half of all dissatisfied respondents blamed either the outgoing Biden administration or the incoming Trump one (as a reminder we are covering data from November 2023 through March 2025). As recent examples: “Too many things going on with the new presidency that are making things unstable.” Or, “I cannot believe that the majority of the country wanted to elect a criminal who lies almost continually.”
Among respondents who said they are satisfied with the direction of the country, nearly half (45%) credited the incoming presidential administration. Another 40% didn’t point to any specific policy or person, but instead shared a steadier kind of optimism: faith in the country’s resilience, a feeling that things are stabilizing, or just a sense that, finally, we’re moving in a better direction.
Final Thoughts
One of the biggest takeaways for me is this: being “satisfied” doesn’t always mean people are hopeful. And being “dissatisfied” doesn’t always mean people are fired up to do something about it.
In both camps, we found people who are disengaged, resigned, or simply blank. Which raises some important questions:
What’s the role of personal resilience in a time of public pessimism?
Can private contentment coexist with collective disengagement?
If “nothing” is what people are left with, what does that say about everything else?
Real people. Real data. Real stakes. Let’s keep going.