A new analysis of personality surveys is putting the weight of data behind some things we all know — the alleged “pandemic” broke the minds of millions.
The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch analyzed data from a set of longitudinal surveys of personality characteristics and found an unprecedented decline in positive, pro-social traits such as extroversion and conscientiousness, along with a huge spike in neurotic thoughts and behavior. Those changes were quite obviously tied to the social, cultural, and governmental upheaval wrought by the hysterical response to the Covid-19 virus.
The Financial Times analyzed data from a years-long set of surveys measuring the personality characteristics of respondents. Personality is measured on something called the Five-Factor Model: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The findings are grim. Burn-Murdoch noticed that conscientiousness — doing your duty and following through on promises — was starting to decline noticeably in 2021 and 2022. In addition, traits such as neuroticism (negative feelings such as rumination, anxiety, and despair) started to increase, while agreeableness was trending down.
A few years on, it’s even worse. And while the surveys showed that both older and younger people shed some pro-social traits and adopted more anti-social qualities, it is young people who stand out in the charts like a sore thumb. This is no surprise to any adult in Generation X or older; we’ve all noticed the lazy, hostile, and insouciant “who even cares” attitude of young people. They may be adults in body but they have the minds of children.
Substack writer Aaron M. Renn dug into the Financial Times article and its associated data to illuminate the problem. Take a look at the charts Renn excerpted. The data measuring personality changes among various age groups show an astonishing drop in the trait conscientiousness in people ages 16-39. Those between 40 and 59 also lost their sense of duty, but not nearly as sharply. Perhaps unsurprisingly, respondents aged 60 and older stayed nearly constant.
Then notice the increase in neuroticism. The 16-39 set is depicted with a sharp red line going up. Again, this comports with observable reality. While older people whistle past the graveyard with sayings like, “Oh, that’s just kids, and they’ll snap out of it when they get out into the real world,” they’re not “just kids” and they haven’t snapped out of it. The rate of neuroticism in this cohort, already highly elevated compared to older people, jumped markedly from the period 2014 through 2024. At the same time, the young cohort’s scores on agreeableness plunged.
It’s not just “cherry-picked social media meltdowns,” although the proliferation of public tantrums and screeching harassment-cum-mental-breakdowns caught on video is obvious. These things aren’t happening “on Facebook,” they’re happening in real life in the three-dimensional world. This video of a Portland woman shrieking like a banshee because a guy walking his dog bought the pooch instead of adopting it would have been unthinkable in the normal world of just 10 to 20 years ago. But anyone who has lived in a blue state or city will tell you that these meltdowns are real.
Lockdown Devastation Remains
The very fact that one must justify putting “pandemic” in quotation marks is another data point. Nearly everyone, including the rational, the skeptical, the conservatives, and the libertarians, glibly refers to the respiratory illness of 2020 and 2021 with the word that, prior to then, was used only for dire and deadly plagues. “Pandemic” has always referred to actual plagues, like Europe’s black death, which wiped out between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population, depending on your source.
That never happened in 2020. No uber-deadly virus, unlike anything seen since the 14th century, ravaged the land or killed an unprecedented number of people. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. What happened, medically, was something like a bad flu year, with the elderly and sick (as always) hurt the most.
What happened socially and politically was a crisis that pushed America and the first-world West into blatant totalitarianism. While our cousins in the U.K. and Europe are tame and accustomed to being controlled by their governments, Americans faced the abrogation of their constitutional rights to free speech and bodily autonomy to a degree unseen in living memory. State governors issued blatantly illegal “stay indoors” orders. As just one example, in Vermont, Gov. Phil Scott signed an executive order barring state residents from walking outdoors with anyone who did not live in their household. We all know what the military and President Joe Biden did (not to mention countless corporate employers) to strong-arm Americans into taking unproven vaccines.
Alarming Social Acceptance
It’s not all inside your head; it’s all inside their heads. Look around you now, especially if you live in a left-leaning area. You see zombified people who have lost the ability to engage in small talk, obey simple traffic rules (like stopping for red lights), and who erupt in histrionic tantrums at the smallest disagreement. In blue areas of New England, where I live, grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants are still operating with half (or less) the staff they had in the Before Times. People — especially young people — seem to have simply decided it’s not safe or desirable to work. What staff you can find in a home improvement store glare at you in a surly manner if you dare ask where to find a staple item. “Um. . . if we had it it would be like over there,” is what counts in 2025 as customer service.
That video linked above is no longer a rare event, but we must not become accustomed to it. The neurotic and self-centered, emotionally unstable behaviors all around us look like the behaviors found in what psychiatry calls Cluster B personality disorders. These are deeply ingrained, largely immovable character traits that are narcissistic, emotionally deranged, and destructive to the person with them and everyone around him or her.
As a former leftist raised in a home headed by a mother with a severe Cluster B personality disorder, I am alarmed at the rising social acceptance of behavior that is as abusive as it is disconnected from reality. Looking at the American populace, I see the destructive wreckage of my childhood becoming normalized, even validated and praised as “authentic” and “living their best life.”
None of this is normal, and if we allow it to become so we are digging our own graves and pulling the dirt in on top of ourselves.
