You would think, with prices as high as they are, that Americans would have tempered their enthusiasm for shopping of late; that they would have pulled back spending on luxury items; that they would have sought out budget and basic options, bought smaller packages, fewer things.

This is not what has happened. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent, after accounting for higher prices, in October, the most recent month for which the government has data. Online shopping jumped 7.8 percent over the Thanksgiving long weekend, more than analysts had anticipated. The sales of new cars, dishwashers, cruise vacations, jewelry—all things people tend to give up when they are watching their budget—remain strong. Consultants keep anticipating a recession precipitated by the “death of the consumer.” Thus far, the consumer is staying alive.

People hate inflation, just not enough to spend less: This is one of the central tensions of today’s economy, in which things are going great yet everyone is miserable. And in some ways, Americans have nobody to blame but themselves.

Three years ago, the pandemic gnarled supply chains around the world, leading to shortages of many consumer goods. At the same time, the American government transferred roughly $1.8 trillion to households in the form of generous unemployment-insurance benefits, an amped-up child tax credit, stimulus checks, and delayed or forgiven student-loan payments. Less supply, more demand—it was a recipe for higher costs.

Costs really rose. A dozen eggs went for $1.33 the summer after the pandemic hit; the price topped out at $4.83 last winter. Gas prices nearly tripled. Used cars started trading for as much as or even more than new cars. The cost of leasing an apartment surged. The cost of buying a house went up even more.

[Rogé Karma: The 1970s economic theory that needs to die]

More recently, prices have been driven up, if more slowly, by the strong labor market. The unemployment rate is as low as it ever gets and has been for some time, with labor shortages in a number of sectors: air-traffic control, education, retail, trucking, police and public safety, nursing, plumbing, and electric. The tight labor market has forced employers to pay workers more, boosting wages, particularly at the lower end of the income spectrum. Real hourly earnings for workers in the tenth percentile of wage distribution went up more than 8 percent in the past three and a half years, the economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew found. And average wages have grown faster than average prices.

Sticker shock is real. And in surveys, people say that they are trading down because of cost pressures. But in fact they are spending more than they ever have, even after accounting for higher prices. They’re spending not just on the necessities, but on fun stuff—amusement parks, UberEats.

People just have a lot of money on hand. More broadly, they seem to be less likely to change their purchasing habits in response to price shifts—even when budgets are leaner. A raft of recent studies have found that American consumers have become less price-sensitive in recent decades. Households are using fewer coupons. People are spending less time mulling over what to buy when they’re shopping.

Why? Maybe because, although prices of many consumer goods are higher than they were a few years back, they’re still much, much more affordable than they were a few decades ago, thanks to globalized trade and manufacturing advances. (The price of a television has dropped more than 90 percent since the late 1990s.) Your grandparents might have gone to three different grocery stores to get the best deals. Would it really be worth it for you to do the same now? Maybe not. Especially not if you have a job. It used to be much more common for one partner in a marriage to make the money and the other to raise the kids and spend the cash. Today, working-age women are only a little less likely than men to be employed, giving them less time and energy to pinch pennies.

Another theory: Consumers might have become more brand-loyal, less willing to trade Coke for Squirt or Nike for Sketchers. Perhaps that is because companies have gotten better at tailoring products to people’s tastes. Perhaps it is just inertia: People get more stuck in their ways as they get older, as the average American has. You’ll pay more for Starbucks coffee because you always get Starbucks coffee.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Why Americans hate a good economy ]

It should be good news that Americans are better off than they were pre-pandemic. It should be good news that people can afford more, even if prices are high. But then why is everyone so mad about prices? Higher prices are just vexing, making people do mental math every time they shop. Economists point to other psychological factors too: People seem to think of their swelling bank accounts as a result of their own hard work, but consider cost increases someone else’s screw up. Nor do average consumers see inflation as something that might benefit them by, say, eating away at the value of their mortgage payments.

People want to blame Joe Biden for their bills. They want to accuse stores of gouging them (though the evidence for “greedflation” is scant). The strange truth is that most people really are in a more comfortable position, even if they’re not happy about it. It’s not like a weak economy, stagnant wages, crummy consumer spending, and cheaper stuff would be better, after all.  

This year, the 29-year-old Ghanaian American singer-songwriter Amaarae took, to use a technical term, a big swing. With a voice of feathery beauty and songs blending R&B, hip-hop, rock, and Afropop, she had already earned buzz for her 2020 debut album, The Angel You Don’t Know. On the follow-up, Fountain Baby, released this past June, she pushed the scope and detail of her music, channeling the dirty swagger of Rihanna and the global futurism of Missy Elliott. Amaarae cheekily boasted in a behind-the-scenes video that she’d soon have a “10-times platinum, worldwide hit,” adding, “I’m about to be on my Taylor Swift shit.”

So when I met with her at a hotel restaurant during New York Fashion Week in September, I was unsurprised to see her looking the part of a pop star. She showed up in chunky biker boots (vintage Chanel) and a red-lettered tank top emblazoned with her own slogan: SEXY, HOT & SLIGHTLY PSYCHOTIC. That she was ambitious was obvious—but I wanted to know how ambitious. What were her career dreams?

“I would love to go into soundtrack curation,” she told me, adding that she adores animated films. “If I ever have kids, just thinking about the future, it would be a more relaxed kind of job.” She brought up the Rock’s voice-acting role in Moana, a movie his own daughter watches. “That’s something that he can really share with her,” she said. “I think that’d be so fire.”

This was not exactly the response I’d been expecting. It sounded like a plan for retirement, not world domination. Amaarae made Fountain Baby with hopes of becoming “as big as Beyoncé,” she said, “but over time, I’ve started to realign those goals.” The album is the most acclaimed musical release of 2023 according to Metacritic, but it hasn’t generated major hits or made her a household name. She’s giving the album “12 to 18 months” to “reach the masses,” but she’s also thinking about what’s next.

Such practicality might seem antithetical to the bad-bitch persona that she and so many young performers clearly seek to embody. But part of the modern hustle is not getting too attached to one idea of success. A generation of musicians, raised studying popular culture through screens, has arrived in the public eye with fully formed aesthetics and a smart sense for how to play the music industry’s games. Our era of twitchy attention spans and fractured audiences, however, has made the very concept of stardom fleeting and hard to define.

One of the big storylines of the year in music has in fact been a dearth of new voices to unite the masses. In August, Billboard reported that record-label employees were feeling “depressed” about their inability to break artists in a big way; though social media regularly vaults unknown talents into the spotlight, the oversaturation of the music marketplace makes it tough to build on the momentum from a fluke hit. Also in August, The New York Times ran a much-discussed piece about pop’s “middle class.” The designation referred to singers such as Troye Sivan and Charli XCX: Their sounds and attitude evoke the likes of Madonna or Michael Jackson, but their followings are about the size of a good indie band.

So far, Amaarae is another example of that class. Two years ago, a remix of her song “Sad Gurlz Luv Money”—from her debut album—sparked a TikTok dance trend involving smooth arm movements and wobbling knees. But she told me she generally finds her era’s music to be uninspiring: Precious few artists seem to be taking risks anymore. When recording her second album, she thought a lot about Britney Spears’s Blackout and the oeuvre of Ye (formerly Kanye West)—landmark mass-market entertainments of the 2000s that oozed provocation and polish. Her vision for Fountain Baby: “It’s cinematic, but it’s still hip-hop.”

She likened the album’s creation process to reaching the famed “10,000 hours” benchmark for mastery of a trade. Amaarae had been making music since she was a teenager, learning from YouTube tutorials and using ripped software. But she wanted to take charge of the professionalized, collaborative process that record-industry titans use to create hits. At songwriting camps in Los Angeles and in Ghana, she assembled teams of musicians to throw around ideas. In one session, the R&B veteran Babyface taught her about his method of counting syllables for each line of lyrics—a lesson in rigor that led her to rewrite what had been a more-or-less-finished album.

[Read: The age of pleasure is here]

Far from feeling committee-tested or formulaic, the resulting album is ornate, employing intricate rhythms, Arabic scales, and diverse sounds: harp, emo guitars, sampled gunshots. The most distinctive ingredient is her high, soft coo, which tends to be described as a “baby voice.” In conversation, Amaarae speaks in a husky drawl, punctuating her sentences with “bro.” But when singing, she plays a character—that of “a very naughty child that shouldn’t say certain things,” as she put it to me.

This happy embrace of artificiality is part of the point of the music. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Counterfeit,” repurposes a clanging beat that Pharrell and Chad Hugo created for the rap duo Clipse in 2006. Amaarae first ripped the beat from YouTube, then enlisted a Congolese band to re-create it on traditional drums and kora. To write the song’s lyrics, she asked Maesu, one of her songwriting partners, to come up with lines about breast augmentation. (She added gleefully that her collaborators, mostly “tough guys,” allow themselves to get “super feminine” in the creation process.)

For all of the album’s eclecticism, however, she didn’t want it marketed as anything but a collection of general-interest bangers. “Fountain Baby is a pop album above all else,” read an info sheet sent to journalists. “It should not be pigeonholed solely as an ‘Afrobeats’ project.” Amaarae was born in the Bronx, and since her youth has split her time between the U.S. and Ghana. But early in her career, media coverage tended to focus on the Ghana portion of her biography, which missed the point of what she’s doing: “I think that African music right now is popular music,” Amaarae said.

She mentioned “Calm Down,” a collaboration between Selena Gomez and the Nigerian singer Rema that’s been one of the biggest hits of the year. A few nights before we’d talked, it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Afrobeats. The category was brand new, and some Afrobeats fans online expressed annoyance that the accolade went to a song anchored by an American celebrity. But Amaarae said she saw the win as important, even though it revealed a “necessary evil”: “If you want to break into [the American mainstream], you’ve got to go and get the pop stars.”

She alluded to pressures from her label to find a pop star of her own to team up with. “I’m like, Bro, give it time,” she said. “I’m making it a real point to say that I am going to make one, or multiple, of these songs hits on my own.” Every day, she was noticing more reviews and more comments about her music online. “Slowly but surely, it’s spreading,” she said. (A month after we talked, she had her second TikTok hit with the Fountain Baby track “Angels in Tibet,” which inspired more dancing.)

As we got up to leave the restaurant, a young man sitting at the bar stopped us. Eyes wide, he showed Amaarae his phone: He’d been listening to Fountain Baby on the way in, and he had tickets to see her on tour next year. Outside on the sidewalk, she told me that this sort of encounter was becoming more common. “It’s kinda throwing me a little bit,” she said. “This is what I mean about the slow burn.” I said farewell and turned to leave—just as another stranger approached, looking starstruck.

One of the greatest obstacles that an independent candidate faces when running for president is ballot access. Each state has its own requirements for names to appear on the ballot. In Tennessee, it’s 275 signatures; in California, it’s more than 200,000; in Iowa, a statewide caucus can be used instead of signatures. Winning ballot access across all 50 states is a massive undertaking for an independent candidate, which can cost $20 million to $30 million and begins up to two years before Election Day. Because of campaign-finance laws, for decades, only someone who was independently wealthy, like Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg, could plausibly run as an independent.

Campaign-finance laws place limits on the size of the contributions an individual can give to a federal political campaign or party committee. The maximum individual contribution to a campaign is $3,300, so a candidate who can’t self-fund would have to raise maximum contributions from 10,000 donors, or smaller contributions from an even larger number, simply to get on the ballot.

[Lora Kelley: RFK Jr.’s wild-card run]

But in 2010, the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United infamously declared that “corporations are persons,” and so allowed a flood of money into politics. For the first time, both individuals and corporations could contribute to super PACs. Unlike regular old political-action committees, the supers didn’t have caps on the size of the contributions they could receive. The committees can spend as much as they please, as long as they don’t donate directly to candidates or coordinate their expenditures with political campaigns. And Citizens United also opened the way for some nonprofits—registered as 501(c)(4)s—to receive unlimited contributions from donors who don’t need to disclose their identity, and then spend it on advocacy or pass it along to overtly political super PACs. For the past decade, we’ve lived the result of Citizens United, as big money has entered politics and big politics has invaded every facet of American life, polarizing our society.

Citizens United is a well-known story. But another court case, decided two months later, is also transforming American elections, although it has received far less attention: Unity08 v. FEC. The case was brought by Unity08, an organization that in the 2008 presidential election sought to put a Republican and Democrat on the same ticket to bring the country together. Unity08 didn’t get very far. When confronted with the challenge of raising money for ballot access, an effort that involved my late father, the organization folded. When Unity08 sued the Federal Election Commission, its complaint stated that contribution limits “would hamper its ability to engage in core political speech, such as petitioning and other ballot access activities.”

The ruling, in favor of Unity08, found that the organization was not subject to regulation as a political committee so long as it didn’t favor any single candidate. Although Unity08 was at this point defunct, the ruling created a breach in one of the walls the two major parties have used for decades to prevent independent candidacies. An entity like Unity08, dedicated to creating the infrastructure for an independent candidate to run, could now raise unlimited funds to put a candidate, to be named later, on the ballot.

No Labels, organized as a 501(c)(4), has raised more than $30 million according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings. It is using these resources to “offer our ballot line to a Unity presidential ticket if the American people demand it,” according to its website. If Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, were to run for president, it probably wouldn’t be under the banner of a minor party—like the Greens or Libertarians—or as a straight independent. Instead, he’s more likely to try to take advantage of what No Labels has done. Regardless of your politics, it’s worth paying attention to the group’s efforts. The organization it has created has the power to break the grip that the major parties have maintained on presidential politics for generations, a grip that has delivered ever more unpopular candidates.

Even as our politics becomes more polarized, the number of Americans who identify as Republican or Democrat has been eroding for years; a historic plurality of Americans, 49 percent, now identify with neither party. This shift away from the two national parties mirrors the disaggregation occurring throughout American society. The two parties once wielded near-exclusive financial power in the political process; Citizens United upended that. And the power that the two parties wield over the ballot has been significantly diminished by Unity08 v. FEC as well. If Manchin decides to run for president, his candidacy will be the first to combine the power of Unity08 and Citizens United. But it’s unlikely to be the last.

[Read: The states where third-party candidates perform best]

In business terms, the combination of Unity08 with Citizens United has allowed for the creation of political entities that act like special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. These “blank-check companies” are formed by investors with expertise in a particular sector who raise capital in advance to be deployed when an opportunity arises. SPACs existed for decades before their popularity soared recently, with $3.5 billion raised in 2016 and $162.5 billion in 2021. If the two parties continue to nominate unpopular candidates, they could find themselves fending off an increasing number of “political SPACs”—and they may not all be centrist in inclination, like No Labels. Well-funded ballot-access initiatives could form on the far left, the far right, or anywhere in between. If there’s one thing we’ve seen in a post–Citizens United world, it’s that well-heeled corporations and individuals are happy to pump money into politics, particularly presidential races, when they believe they will get a return on their investment.

The amount of money spent in presidential elections has ballooned in the past 40 years. In the 1980 election, spending by Republicans and Democrats combined totaled $60 million—roughly $200 million adjusted for inflation. By contrast, the 2020 election saw $4.1 billion in spending—that’s a 2,050 percent increase. Comparatively, $20 million or $30 million seems like a drop in the bucket, potentially a far more potent deployment of resources than an ad buy on Facebook or some television commercials in Iowa.

The way Americans pick presidents has consistently evolved, from the first televised presidential debate, in 1960, to the first binding party primary, in 1972, to the proliferation of mail-in ballots in 2020. What No Labels has created might have an impact far more profound than any candidacy it enables. No Labels has shown that there’s a way to fund ballot access, one of the greatest barriers to entry for any independent presidential candidate. Whether it will save our system of government remains to be seen.

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The typical career is about 80,000 hours long, or one-sixth of the average person’s waking life. One would love to be deliriously happy for all 80,000 hours. But, alas, we’re not. And the economic-news industry loves nothing more than to remind us of it. In fact, for the past three years, finance media have become so desperate to explain the state of workplace misery to their audience that they’ve often ignored facts, logic, or basic common sense.

In 2021, finance journalism couldn’t stop talking about the “Great Resignation.” Judging by the ample coverage, it appeared that workers everywhere were smashing their laptops and machines in a bacchanal of joblessness. This was all hooey. In reality, more Americans were just breaking up with their old employers to get higher-paying jobs. In professional sports, when star athletes sign larger contracts with different teams in the offseason, ESPN doesn’t call it a “great resignation”; it calls it “free agency.” And that’s what the economy’s Great Resignation really was: a welcome free-agent period for low-income workers looking for higher wages.

Several months later, in 2022, the false idea that Americans were resigning en masse grew into a larger narrative that—to quote both The New York Times Magazine and the economic analysis of Kim Kardashian—“no one wants to work.” Here, again, the vibes were strong and the evidence was weak. Every month, hundreds of thousands of people were joining the workforce, unemployment was nearing multi-decade lows, and one measure of job satisfaction hit an all-time high. Sure, work is terrible sometimes. But of all the years to soft-launch the theory that “nobody wants to work,” this was among the strangest times to do it.

Undaunted, finance media moved on to another bogus trend, as Bloomberg and other news outlets published dozens of articles and podcasts tracking the surge of “quiet quitting” in the labor force. In theory, quiet quitting marked an epidemic of employee boredom and disengagement. And, to be sure, people commonly feel bored and disengaged at work. But again, to the extent that this was any kind of novel or rising trend, there was little empirical meat on the bone. Private surveys and federal data showed that, in a hot labor market, the average worker was roughly as engaged with their work as they had been five years earlier.

The fake unhappiness trend is still going strong. This year the narrative is that workers are more miserable than ever.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an instantly viral essay entitled “Why Is Everyone So Unhappy at Work Right Now?” The article shot to No. 1 on the Journal website, where it remained for several days. The essay’s popularity is fully understandable: Complaining about your job is the oldest job. Long before modern work satires such as Severance and Office Space, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, complained that the gods kept plenty for themselves and pressed men into hard labor, and the Bible asks, “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?”

But the point of this Journal article was that everybody is “so” unhappy “right now.” Where’s the evidence? The authors cited a new workplace report by Gallup, which allegedly shows that the number of U.S. workers “who say they are angry, stressed and disengaged is climbing.”

Now let’s take a closer look at that Gallup report. For the past 23 years, Gallup has asked American workers questions about their jobs: Are you satisfied? Are you engaged? Is this a good time to find a job? Do you have opportunities to use your skills? In most of these answers, it’s very hard to see that anything new or interesting is happening.

In 2013, 30 percent of U.S. employees said they were engaged at their jobs. For a few years, the number bounced around the low-to-mid-30s. Today the number is 32 percent. In 2013, 35 percent of American workers told Gallup that opportunities abounded for them to do “more of what they do best.” In 2023, that number is unchanged. In 2013, less than 40 percent of Americans said it was “a good time to find a job.” Today, almost 60 percent of Americans say so.

Did your eyes sort of sleepily glaze over those numbers? Well, that’s the idea. Americans keep telling Gallup that work is consistently blah, not that they’re more and more miserable.

The real story, to the extent that these surveys are accurate, is that American workers are astonishingly happy and engaged compared with the rest of the rich world. The same international Gallup survey finds that employee engagement in the United States is higher than in Australia, Canada, and every country in Europe, and more than six times higher than in Japan.

Even the authors of the Journal story acknowledge that another survey this year by the Conference Board found that employee satisfaction just set a new record high—as it has for the past 12 straight years since the Great Recession.

Could one make the argument that, actually, American workers are happier than they’ve been in decades? Yes. And don’t just take my word for it. The very same Wall Street Journal published exactly that take in a May 11 exclusive entitled “Workers Are Happier Than They’ve Been in Decades.” Best of all, that article claimed that the “the happiest workers” in the country included “individuals working in hybrid roles,” while the November article (yes, in the same newspaper!) claimed that the “isolating aspects of hybrid work” were responsible for making workers especially unhappy.

What do we make of the fact that the same news outlet concluded, within a seven-month period, that Americans were both “happier than in decades” and “so unhappy right now” in articles that both pointed to the same survey and workplace phenomena? If you were defending the Journal, you might note the slight uptick in the unemployment rate since May, or the decline in the quit rate, to show that something major has changed in Americans’ experience of work in the past 200 days.

But trend journalism isn’t really about capturing a statistical truth. It’s about indulging reader anxiety by saying not only Everyone is feeling what you’re feeling, but also This moment is special, and you’re special too. By validating the fears and stresses of workers and managers, these articles succeed as a form of therapy, which is all the more powerful because it is discovered not on a counselor’s couch but in the business section, where it carries a patina of statistical authority.

The truths here are old and familiar. Work is work: mostly necessary, often boring, frequently annoying, occasionally insulting, and sometimes rewarding. The media keep inventing a new lexicon every few months to explain this consistent state of affairs, and readers lap it up, because we demand fresh language to communicate to ourselves the stale drudgery of the 9-to-5. I can live with it. Fake economic-trend spotting might not be one of the world’s 1,000 most important problems. It’s just wrong.