Lives of despair?

In the last few years, there's been a lot of discussion of the rise of "deaths of despair" (drugs, alcohol, and suicide) among white people without a college degree.  Often it is assumed that they are an indicator of the feelings of the group as a whole--"deaths of despair" are an extreme manifestation of a widespread malaise among the "white working class."  But I haven't seen any systematic attempt to look at this issue, so I turned to the General Social Survey, which contains a number of questions on general feelings about people and life.  I have coded each question so that higher numbers represent more positive or optimistic feelings.  There were sixteen; I show figures for seven of them, and briefly mention the trends for the others.

Satisfaction with your financial situation:

 

People with a college degree have become a little more satisfied, those without less satisfied, so the gap between them has increased.  That is reasonable given the increasing gap between the earnings of the two groups.  Assessment of how your income ranked relative to others showed a similar pattern.

Change in your financial situation over the last few years:

Pretty much parallel.  Looking more closely, the gap between people with and without college degrees seemed to grow a bit in the 1970s and 1980s and then decline a bit.

For job satisfaction, beliefs about the chance of losing your job or how hard it would be to find a comparable job if you lost yours, there was not much change.  

Beliefs about whether your children will be better off than you are:

This one only goes back to 1994, but there may be some tendency for people without a college degree to become more optimistic relative to people with a college degree.  There was a question about how your standard of living compared to your parents', and the trends were similar.

Then there was a question on whether people get ahead by their own hard work or lucky breaks and help from others.  I counted hard work as the optimistic answer. 

A clear divergence after about 2008:  people without college degrees becoming more positive and people with degrees becoming more negative.  Well, this is unexpected. 

This post is getting pretty long, so I will stop here and finish it in a day or two.