Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in more than half a century, and they’re not having children.

According to new data from the General Social Survey highlighted by former Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham, just 19 percent of Americans last year said they were “very happy,” down from 31 percent, nearly a third, three years before. Twenty-four percent in 2021 said they were “not too happy.”

Americans are also having fewer children than ever before, with the nation’s birth rate falling for the sixth consecutive year in 2020 to its lowest ever. Just 3.6 million babies were born, according to CDC statistics, down from 3.7 million the year before.

In 2020, a Morning Consult survey showed 1 in 4 adults cited climate change as a motivating reason to remain childless. A study published by The Lancet in September found nearly 40 percent of Gen Zers aged 16-25 across 10 countries including the United States, said climate change made them hesitant to have kids. Many Americans of childbearing age are even preemptively self-sterilizing.

As civic institutions hollow out, breeding a generation of isolated millennials content to quarantine in their bedrooms and live online, the underlying message a depressed and childless society sends is that life is so miserable, who would want to live it? The planet so exhausted (it’s not), who would want to receive it? And if the baby has down syndrome, might as well abort it.

A happy population is one that flourishes with procreation, so enamored by its miracle that it chooses to pay it forward with pride so that future generations may experience the same gift. That no matter its trials, life is worth living, and it’s worth bestowing onto others.

Instead, life’s rejection of the unborn out of spite for an allegedly evil and crumbling civilization is a signal of deep-seated anguish on the rise today.

Full story at The Federalist.