Don’t Isolate Yourself This Holiday Season
“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
The polls before the 2020 election were an inaccurate predictor of the vote—some wildly so. Many polls badly underestimated the number of people intending to vote for Donald Trump. One explanation is the “shy voter” hypothesis: People were reluctant to tell pollsters their true voting intentions, because they feared opprobrium for their support of Trump.
This is not a new phenomenon, and, indeed, academic research shows that “shy voters” can render polls highly inaccurate. And this may well be the case for “shy holiday-haters,” few of whom admit they dislike the holiday season but—I believe—are lurking all around us.
Amid the cheer of this time of year, there are always rumblings of holiday discontent: the crass materialism; the Christmas decorations in stores going up right after that “roughly one-in-twenty Americans (4%) say there is nothing about Christmas or the holidays they look forward to, except perhaps the end of the season.” And as respondents told a few years later, Thanksgiving and Christmas are two of the three “happiest days” of the year (the third being Independence Day).
