Nostalgia can be a trap. Gazing back fondly at some half-remembered, possibly fictitious version of the past is a surefire way to feel dissatisfied with the present and fearful for the future. What might be more constructive than looking backwards, though, is looking around—at the people who seem to be thriving in other versions of the present. This is partly why the most recent World Happiness Report is such a hard pill for Americans to swallow.

The annual report, conducted by Gallup World Poll researchers, saw the U.S. plummet this past year from #15 to #23 in terms of global happiness. This result reflects the current state of a country beset by constant political chaos, widespread pessimism, and rising suicide rates. In response to America’s poor showing, Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox aim to address the conditions that created it with their just-launched, bipartisan Restoring the Common Good Initiative. 

“Our goal is to try to get political leaders to start asking bigger, more fundamental questions, like what makes up a good life,” Senator Murphy said in an interview with Semafor. To that end, the aisle-crossing pair is holding a series of roundtable conversations this summer with social activists, journalists, and think-tank research fellows to generate ideas that might help the U.S. move up in the World Happiness rankings. But what can the U.S. government do to make its citizens’ lives happier?

“I think there’s a feeling of division and distrust, along with loneliness and fragmentation,” says Gretchen Rubin, best-selling author of The Happiness Project and creator of the podcast, Happier. “And so, an initiative like this could be terrific if it identified ways to help people come together and build a sense of trust and neighborliness.”

While America has slid down in the rankings, Finland has topped the World Happiness Index for seven years running. Some of the reasons Finland’s residents report feeling generally happy have to do with the country’s low rate of income inequality and high levels of social support—most prominently, its publicly funded healthcare system. While these kinds of big-picture solutions might materially improve Americans’ lives, they’re already the subject of contentious political fights within the U.S., and have been for a long time. Noble as this new program may be, it won’t be what ultimately breaks the logjam on revolutionizing America’s healthcare system.

What it might be able to accomplish, though, is translating the positive behavior model of a bipartisan initiative into occasions that get people with opposite beliefs to rub elbows. Rubin suggests that finding common values can be an antidote to division. If the government poured funding into community projects around the country, it could get large groups of people working together to clean up a riverbank or build a new playground—additive tasks that transcend politics.

“If you’re working toward a common value,” Rubin says, “there’s a feeling of, ‘Well, maybe you think this and I think that, but we both think it’s important that our children have attractive, safe places to play.’”

It need not all be manual labor, either. Rubin suggests investing more in local events that seem likely to draw diverse crowds and families. Dog parades, music festivals, public picnics—anything that might entice online enemies to talk in person and discover their mutual multidimensionality. Better yet, these events could emphasize the communal identity shared by each city’s residents, an implicit reminder that they are not defined by their political leanings.

“I’m from Kansas City, where the one thing everybody can agree on is that barbecue is extremely important,” adds Rubin, who is now based in New York City.

Of course, the bipartisan initiative isn’t just about finding ways to inject more happiness into Americans’ lives, it’s also about addressing their anxiety.

“There’s no question that anxiety is substantially worse than it was even five years ago, and in young people especially,” says David H. Rosmarin, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is the founder of the Center for Anxiety. “It’s not just that we’re diagnosing more, there are a lot of objective behavioral indicators of emotional stress.”

As proof, Rosmarin cites a sharp increase in incidents of self-harm, along with the same troubling suicide rate that was part of the impetus for Murphy and Cox’s project.

Some of the reasons for these rising rates, according to Robert Gebbia, CEO of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, are the shortage of mental health workers, lack of compliance for mental health parity laws, and the difficulty of finding a provider—let alone a provider that accepts one’s insurance. The result of all these issues is that more people who need treatment end up going without it. The most effective action the government could take toward tamping down the suicide rate would be to come up with viable, efficient solutions to those issues, but Gebbia also recommends increasing support for crisis-response services and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. He does point out that the Biden administration released last week the 2024 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, an effort to address this issue head-on.

As for the millions of Americans who suffer from anxiety but are not actually in crisis, Rosmarin thinks they might benefit from a broad shift in perspective. Rather than find ways to reduce their anxiety, he wants them to find new ways of dealing with it.

“I think that we need to level-set what it means to have mental health, and understand that certain feelings of distress are actually normal,” he says. “When people have anxiety today, they assume immediately that something’s wrong with them, as opposed to understanding that there are certain levels of distress that are just part of being human.”

In the years since the beginning of the pandemic, use of anti-anxiety prescriptions has soared among Americans. While many of those taking medication are indeed plagued by overwhelming anxiety, Rosmarin claims that the threshold for being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder should be higher. Rather than risk overmedicating the U.S. population, he suggests that the Restoring the Common Good Initiative could find creative ways to promote emotional resiliency through the medical and educational systems.

But if dealing with anxiety may hinge on a matter of perspective, so too might happiness. 

Perhaps the mere act of becoming involved in a project with the goal of making Americans happier can make someone’s attitude a little sunnier on its own.

“When you are contributing to a solution, in my observation, you tend to be more optimistic,” says Rubin. “If you’re registering people to vote, you feel more optimistic about the government. If you’re working in climate change action, you tend to feel more like it’s fixable. Whereas people who are on the outside and don’t participate may feel powerless and controlled by things they have no presence in, which, in my observation, tends to make you feel worse.”

So much of the news constantly beamed into our phones perpetuates a feeling that Things Are Getting Worse. On the other hand, watching one’s community improve can convey the opposite. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you see any one element of your community markedly improve, it perpetuates the possibility that other things might do so as well. Suddenly, it feels like Things Are Getting Better. Even more so, if you’re involved in making it happen.