New Year’s Eve, the Gallup poll released its annual survey on Americans and the level of satisfaction with their personal lives.

Eighty-four percent of Americans say that they are satisfied with their personal lives at this time, including a solid majority who say they are very satisfied. The personal satisfaction level contrasts sharply, though, with the low level of satisfaction Americans express with the way things are going in the US at this time.

Because two weeks ago, two weeks prior to New Year’s Eve, Gallup released a poll that said that 70% of these same people think the nation’s headed in the wrong direction.

Now, what do you do make of this?

Eighty-four percent satisfied with their personal lives, 70% think the country is going on in the wrong direction. There is a simple explanation for this. It’s an explanation and it is very simple.

Everybody’s lives — 84%, yep, solid majority, very satisfied, hunky-dory, things couldn’t be better.

“But I watch the news every day and I see housing crisis and mortgage crisis and subprime crisis, the credit crisis and Wall Street, everybody is losing their house but me and everybody is losing their car but me.”

So it’s the Media, with the success at creating the doom and gloom.

Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“It is to suggest that the never-off eye of modern political media leaves the impression that nothing good is possible. If progress happens, as with the surge in Iraq or a new therapy for cancer, it must be diminished by ‘analysis,’ listing four things that could ‘go wrong.’ As a way to absorb the way the world works, this is depressing. Good things happen. Get over it.”

Henninger closes the column this way: “A reader of this column, Richard A. Fazzone of Potomac, Md., recently got these matters as well focused as I could, so with the presidential trenches waiting, he gets the final speech: ‘There is no Great Depression, no WWII, no Cold War, no racism as it was in the 20th Century or before — no really big problem or solution. Unless something changes, voters want practically nothing from government, or more precisely, relatively few want the same thing, and without political consensus, a democracy does little or nothing new. In one respect, Mr. Henninger is correct to observe that “in American politics, ambiguity is all you get,” but that may say enough. As another new year begins, we might consider ourselves fortunate for ambiguity, rather than the opposite and what would accompany it.'”

Meaning, we just don’t know how to feel good because we don’t trust it. Too many of us are fearful of happiness, too many of us fearful of success. When it happens to them, “This can’t be real. I don’t deserve this. This isn’t going to last,” because they don’t want to work hard enough to keep it. Or they just don’t trust it. And some people, when they’re happy, “Oh, no, this is not right, I don’t deserve to be happy. There’s nothing going on to make me happy. Why do I feel so good? It can’t be.”

Then you turn on the TV, watch the Media, you get validated, you shouldn’t be happy.

So people have fears of success, fears of happiness, and then when others around them are happy and optimistic, guess who has to do the explaining?

The happy and the optimistic are the ones challenged. “What are you so happy about”

When, in truth, the way it ought to happen, what are you so miserable about? You’re an American. What in the world are you so depressed about? Why are you so unhappy? You live in the United States of America. Being miserable and unhappy, seems to be a majority opinion, and if you’re miserable and unhappy, then you can be sympathized with.

If you’re happy and optimistic, odds are you might be resented.

Why is that?