Look at that Federal Reserve graph again. The divergence between “own financial well-being” and “national economy” started rather large—and then, in 2020, it became absolutely humongous.

Yes, there was a pandemic. Yes, people were locked in their houses, reading news about a deadly virus. Yes, they were alerted to the closure of thousands of businesses and the flash-freezing of the U.S. economy, even as the federal government bailed out firms and households with loans, eviction moratoriums, suspended student-debt payments, and several rounds of checks. But then the economy improved in 2021, and Americans got even more pessimistic. This shift can’t be explained by the fact that evaluations of the national economy are highly partisan, and that Republicans, for example, lost confidence in the economy when their guy left office. No amount of Democratic optimism made up the difference.

Something deeper is happening. Even outside economics and finances, a record-high gap has opened up between Americans’ personal attitudes and their evaluations of the country. In early 2022, Gallup found that Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in personal life” neared a 40-year high, even as their satisfaction with “the way things are going in the U.S.” neared a 40-year low. On top of the old and global tendency to assume most people are doing worse than they say they are is a growing American tendency to be catastrophically gloomy about the direction of this country, even as we’re resiliently sunny about our own household’s future.