Six in 10 American adults expect a declining quality of life in five years

Six in ten American adults now look five years down the road and see a life worse than the one they have today. That is a verdict revealing that hope has become a partisan commodity, traded on the whims of elections rather than rooted in the reality of daily life, but it is the lowest level of optimism this nation has recorded in nearly two decades of asking the question.

These results come from the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, which draws on data gathered over four quarterly periods, based on 22,125 interviews with U.S. adults from a probability-based panel representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The Gallup data is plain enough.

In 2025, just 59.2% of U.S. adults expect to be living high-quality lives in five years. That figure has fallen 9.1 percentage points since 2020, which translates to roughly 24.5 million fewer Americans who believe tomorrow holds anything better than today.

Most of that slide came between 2021 and 2023, but even as the pandemic receded into memory, the numbers kept dropping. Another 3.5 points between 2024 and 2025. The trend line does not waver. It does not bend. It simply descends.

What is driving this? The answer is not complicated, though it is uncomfortable. High living costs. Financial struggle. The kind of daily arithmetic that leaves families choosing between groceries and heating, between rent and medicine. Inflation peaked at 7% in 2021 and eased only grudgingly to 6.5% in 2022, but the prices never came back down. They simply stopped climbing as fast. For the average American, that is small comfort. The sting of a dollar that does not stretch remains.

The political breakdown is instructive, and not in a way that flatters anyone. From 2021 to 2024, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all dropped about five points in future optimism. National challenges like a pandemic and inflation did not care which box you checked on your ballot. They hit everyone. But 2025 told a different story. In the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, Democrats tumbled another 7.6 points. Independents edged down 1.5. Republicans held steady.

This is not a mystery. It is a mirror. When the White House changes hands, hope shifts with it. Between 2020 and 2021, Democrat optimism grew by 4.4 points while Republican optimism dropped by 5.9. They canceled each other out in the national average, but the underlying truth is unmistakable: hope has become a partisan commodity, traded on the whims of elections rather than rooted in the reality of daily life. And that is a dangerous thing for a country that once believed its future was always brighter than its past.

The broader measure of American well-being, what Gallup calls the “thriving” rate, now sits at 48%. That is down more than 11 points from the 59.2% high recorded in June 2021, when vaccines were new and the end of the pandemic felt near. The current estimate is the sixth lowest out of 176 measurement periods since January 2008. The only times it was worse were during the Great Recession and the darkest days of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here is the part worth noting. In 2020, the thriving rate plunged because people rated their current lives terribly, but they still held out hope for the future. That hope actually reached near-record highs that year, a testament to the stubborn American belief that things would get better. That belief is now gone. The current life ratings have not fallen to pandemic lows, but the future ratings have cratered. People are not despairing about today. They are despairing about tomorrow.

The demographic details add another layer. Black adults have historically been the most optimistic of any major racial group in the country, but they suffered the greatest erosion in hope between 2021 and 2024, hit hardest by inflation’s unequal toll on food, housing, and healthcare security. In the past year, Hispanic adults saw the steepest decline. The groups bearing the heaviest burdens are losing faith the fastest. That is not coincidence. That is consequence.