I Have Known America For Twenty Years. Something Has Gone Missing.
I first set foot on American soil in 2005. I worked & lived in Michigan. I traveled across states. I felt something that I had never quite felt anywhere else on earth. An energy. A belief. A palpable sense that anything was possible here. That the American dream was real. That this was a place where a human being could arrive from anywhere with nothing and become something extraordinary through the sheer force of their own will and their own effort.
Few years later, I moved back to India, but I have made several trips to America since then. Across different states, different cities, different decades of my life. I went to America most recently after an eight year gap, visiting California multiple times and then New York and Washington DC. Standing at the 9/11 Memorial. Standing at the World War 2 Memorial. Walking the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Sitting in yellow cabs & Ubers listening to drivers who have lived here for decades tell me what they see changing around them.
And I need to tell you honestly what I felt.
Something has changed.
Not in the buildings. The skyline of New York is still one of the most breathtaking human creations on earth. Not in the roads or the airports or the infrastructure. Not in the surface of things.
Something deeper has changed. Something in the energy of the people. Something in the faces on the streets. A heaviness that was not there before. An exhaustion that goes beyond tiredness. A disconnection that is visible even in a city of eight million people packed together on an island. You can be surrounded by more human beings per square foot than almost anywhere else on earth. And feel completely alone.
I am not a political analyst. I am not a geopolitical expert. I am a spiritual seeker who has spent last 10 years studying what ancient India understood about the inner life of human beings. And what I am about to share with you is not political commentary. It is a spiritual diagnosis. Offered with the concern a country and people I have known across two decades of my life.
I. What America Was
To understand what has changed you must first understand what America actually was. What it represented. Not just to Americans but to the entire world.
America was built on an idea. This is what made it unlike any civilization that had come before it. Most nations were built on land, on bloodline, on centuries of inherited culture and accumulated tradition. America was built on a sentence. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Written into its founding documents at a time when most of the world still lived under kings and emperors and the idea that every human being possessed inherent dignity and inalienable rights was considered radical and dangerous.
That idea drew the world to American shores. Generation after generation of people who had nothing but hope arrived and found that hope was enough to build a life. Scientists fled persecution in Europe and found laboratories and funding and freedom. Artists came from countries where expression was controlled and found a culture that celebrated creativity. Ordinary working families arrived with one suitcase and three generations later their grandchildren were doctors, engineers, teachers, leaders.
The American dream was not a myth. It was real. And its reality changed the trajectory of millions of lives across the world.
I felt that reality when I arrived in 2005. The optimism was in the air itself. The belief that tomorrow could be better than today. The extraordinary generosity of ordinary American people who would help a stranger, who would share what they had, who genuinely believed that their country was a force for good in the world.
That America existed. I witnessed it. I lived inside it. And I carry it with me.
Which is why what I witnessed on my most recent trips is very disheartening.
II. What I Saw — Twenty Years of Witness
I want to speak carefully here. Because I am not interested in painting a picture of doom. I am not interested in the kind of criticism that tears something down without offering anything in its place. What I am about to share, I share as a witness. As someone who has the specific advantage of having known this country across twenty years of change and therefore can see what someone living inside it every day perhaps cannot.
The faces are different. This is the first thing I noticed, and it is the hardest to quantify but the most impossible to dismiss. In 2005 there was an aliveness in American faces that I remember distinctly. An engagement. A forward leaning energy. People seemed to believe they were going somewhere. Today there is a tiredness that sits behind the eyes of so many people I encountered. Not the tiredness of a long day’s work. The deeper tiredness of people who are working harder than ever and feeling less and less certain about why.
The homelessness has multiplied in ways that shocked me. I remember the streets of American cities in the 2000s and early 2010s. And then I walked those same streets in 2024 and 2025. The scale of human beings living on sidewalks, in doorways, in tents under highway overpasses, is something I was not prepared for.
The drug addiction crisis is visible in the streets in a way it simply was not twenty years ago. The racial tension feels rawer. More easily ignited. More present in ordinary interactions in ways that feel new and different.
A cab driver in New York warned me not to enter certain areas of the city. Not because of traditional crime. But because of a social fracturing that has made parts of one of the world’s greatest cities feel unsafe in new ways and mostly inhabited by illegal migrants.
A dear friend of mine who has lived in America for 35 years, a woman who is as connected to this country as anyone I know, said something to me quietly over dinner in Washington DC that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She said America is going down. And when I asked her why she said it is losing itself. Not to any external enemy. To its own internal confusion about what it actually is and what it actually stands for.
A civilization can lose itself without losing a single battle. It simply drifts from its own deepest values. Quietly. Gradually. Until the drift becomes visible in the faces of its people.
III. What America’s Own Data Is Saying
I want to be very precise here. Because everything I am about to share comes not from my personal observation but from America’s own official data. From America’s own government bodies and research institutions and medical authorities. These are not my numbers. America generated them itself. And they are telling a story that demands to be heard.
771,480 people experienced homelessness in America in 2024. This is the highest number since the government began tracking it. It represents an 18 percent increase in a single year and is 34 percent higher than it was a decade ago. Among those without homes are nearly 150,000 children, representing a 33 percent increase from the previous year. Families with children saw the sharpest rise of any group, up 39 percent. This is not a peripheral problem. This is a central civilizational failure happening in the open, on the streets of the most powerful nation on earth.
105,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2023. Nearly 80,000 of those deaths involved opioids. The DEA seized enough fentanyl in 2024 to kill 367 million people. Not 367,000. 367 million. This crisis did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a specific combination of systemic neglect of mental health, a culture of numbing pain rather than understanding it, and the profound inner emptiness that drives human beings to seek relief from themselves by any means available.
42.7 percent of American adults have obesity. America is the most obese developed nation on earth. At least 1 in 4 adults in every single US state has obesity. Nearly 15 million children carry this condition. This is not simply a dietary problem. It is a symptom. Of stress. Of comfort eating. Of the relationship between emotional pain and physical consumption that a culture without inner tools for managing suffering will inevitably develop.
America’s own Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic. Half of all American adults were already experiencing measurable loneliness before COVID began. Loneliness is now more widespread than smoking, diabetes, or obesity as a public health concern. Being chronically lonely is as dangerous to human health as smoking fifteen cigarettes every single day. Young people aged 15 to 24 now spend 70 percent less time with friends in person than they did just two decades ago.
These are not the numbers of a civilization that is flourishing. These are the numbers of a civilization that has built everything on the outside and quietly forgotten the inside.
IV. The Mental Health Epidemic
Mental health is where the data becomes most urgent and most impossible to look away from. Because mental health is not an abstract statistic. It is the lived inner experience of human beings. It is what it actually feels like to be alive inside the most powerful civilization on earth. And what it feels like, according to America’s own data, is increasingly unbearable.
One billion people globally are living with mental health conditions. America, despite its extraordinary wealth and its extraordinary access to healthcare, ranks among the highest. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in America, affecting 40 million adults. And yet fewer than half of those affected receive treatment. Not because treatment is unavailable. Because something deeper than treatment is missing.
The loneliness data deserves to be read slowly. Half of all American adults experiencing measurable loneliness before a global pandemic even began. The Surgeon General of the United States, the country’s highest medical authority, issuing a formal advisory about loneliness as a public health crisis. Comparing the health impact of chronic loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes every day. This is not a minor inconvenience being medicalized. This is a fundamental failure of human connection in the most connected society in human history.
A civilization that produces 5G internet, artificial intelligence, social media platforms connecting billions, and still has half its adult population experiencing measurable loneliness has not solved the problem of human connection. It has replaced it with the performance of connection. And the human soul knows the difference. Even when the mind does not.
You can have ten thousand followers and no one who truly sees you. The loneliness epidemic is the proof that technology can connect everyone to everything except themselves.
V. The Lost Generation
I need to stop here. And speak directly about America’s young people. Because this is the part of the data that I find most heartbreaking. And most urgent. Because it is not just a crisis of the present. It is a crisis of the future.
40 percent of American high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Read that again. Not occasionally sad, and not sometimes low. Persistently & consistently as a baseline state of being. 40 % of an entire generation of young Americans waking up every day inside a heaviness that they cannot name and cannot shake.
1 in 5 American high school students seriously considered suicide in 2023. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14. Between 2014 and 2024 the suicide rate for young Americans aged 10 to 24 rose by 56 %. 57 % of teenage girls show symptoms of depression. The American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. Emergency room visits for self harm among young people rose from 0.6 percent in 2011 to 2.1 percent in 2020. These numbers have no historical precedent. None.
These are not numbers about a small vulnerable minority. These are numbers about an entire generation. A generation that was handed more material comfort, more technological capability, more freedom of expression, more access to information than any generation in human history. And is suffering at rates we have never seen before.
I want to ask the question that the data demands we ask. Why?
Why would the most materially equipped generation in human history be the most psychologically unwell? Why would young people who have everything their parents fought to give them be unable to find reasons to want to be alive?
Because they were given everything external and almost nothing internal. They were given devices but not direction. Connection but not depth. Information but not wisdom. Freedom but not meaning. They were never taught to sit quietly with themselves. They were never given tools to navigate their own inner landscape. They were never offered a framework that answered the question underneath all the anxiety. The question that every young human being is actually asking beneath the surface of every scroll and every like and every desperate comparison on a screen.
Who am I. And what am I here for. That question was left unanswered. And when it goes unanswered in enough young people simultaneously, the data we are seeing is exactly what you get.
This is not a mental health crisis. It is a meaning crisis. And no medication, no therapy app, no wellness trend will solve a meaning crisis. Because meaning cannot be prescribed. It can only be discovered. And the discovery requires going inward. Which is precisely what this generation was never taught to do.
VI. Action Without Awareness
This is the phrase that came to me most clearly during my most recent visit to America. Action without awareness.
I have never seen a more action oriented civilization on earth. The speed. The productivity. The relentless forward momentum. The extraordinary capacity to build, to innovate, to create, to solve external problems with breathtaking efficiency and creativity. America’s ability to act is genuinely one of the most impressive things human civilization has ever produced.
But action without awareness is like a car with a powerful engine and no steering wheel. It goes very fast. In whatever direction the momentum is already carrying it. Without the capacity to pause and ask whether the direction is right. Whether the speed is wise. Whether what is being built is actually serving the deepest needs of the human beings doing the building.
The obsession with material achievement. With productivity metrics. With quarterly results. With external success measured in possessions and positions and the performance of a life well lived rather than the actual living of it. This has produced an extraordinary outer civilization. And a deeply impoverished inner one.
The ancient Indian tradition understood something that America has not yet fully learned. That the outer world is a reflection of the inner one. That a civilization which develops only outward will eventually produce exactly what America’s data is showing. Not because external achievement is wrong. But because external achievement without inner development is incomplete. It is half a civilization. Brilliant on the surface. Hollow underneath.
America mastered the how of everything. How to build. How to grow. How to produce. How to compete. How to win. And somewhere in that mastery lost touch with the why. Why are we building this. What is it actually for. What does a genuinely good human life look like beyond the accumulation of things and the achievement of status. What does it mean to be truly alive rather than simply productive.
These are not soft questions. These are the most important questions a civilization can ask. And a civilization that stops asking them eventually discovers, through its own data, that something essential has gone missing.
VII. The Superpower’s Missing Responsibility
America claims the role of world leader. And for much of the twentieth century that claim was genuinely earned. The America that helped rebuild Europe after World War 2. The America that stood against totalitarianism. The America that produced the scientific and technological breakthroughs that transformed the quality of life for billions of people across the world. This was a country exercising genuine leadership. Not just power. Leadership.
Genuine world leadership means leading by the quality of your own house first. It means demonstrating that the model you are offering the world actually works. Not just militarily. Not just economically. But humanly. It means that the country asking the world to follow its values is itself living those values in visible, measurable, honest ways.
And this is where the gap has become impossible to ignore. The country that positions itself as the moral compass of humanity has 771,000 people sleeping on its streets. The country that champions human dignity has 105,000 of its own people dying from drug overdoses every year. The country that preaches freedom has a generation of young people who are persistently sad, chronically lonely, and dying by suicide at rates that are rising every decade. The country that tells the world how to govern itself is fighting internal divisions so bitter and so deep that the very idea of a shared American identity has become contested ground.
This is not how a mentor leads. A mentor leads by example first. By being what it is asking others to become. Power without that example is not leadership. It is dominance. And dominance without moral authority always eventually collapses under its own weight.
There is also the approach of my way or the highway in its relationships with the rest of the world. The assumption that American interests are automatically synonymous with global interests. That decisions made in one capital are automatically wise and automatically just and automatically deserving of the world’s compliance. The world is watching. And the world is drawing its own conclusions. Not out of hostility. But out of the simple observation that a country whose own internal data reveals such profound human suffering may not be the most reliable guide to human flourishing for the rest of us.
VIII. Not Religion. Spirituality.
I want to be very precise about something because it is the most important point in this entire piece.
What is missing in America is not God in the religious sense. America is among the most religious countries in the developed world. More Americans believe in God and attend religious services than citizens of almost any other wealthy nation. Religion is not what is missing.
What is missing is spirituality. And the difference between these two things is everything.
Religion tells you what to believe. Spirituality teaches you how to know. Religion is largely external. A set of doctrines, practices, institutions, and authorities that stand between you and your own direct experience of the sacred. Spirituality is internal. It is the direct, personal, lived experience of your own deepest nature. Of the consciousness that you actually are beneath every role you play and every story you tell about yourself.
What America is missing is the inner life. The capacity and the willingness to go inward. To sit quietly with oneself without immediately reaching for a screen or a substance or an entertainment or a distraction. To ask the questions that cannot be answered by any search engine. Who am I beneath everything I do and produce and own and perform. What is this awareness that reads these words right now. What does genuine human flourishing actually feel like from the inside rather than what it looks like from the outside.
These are not exotic questions. They are not Eastern questions. They are not questions that require adopting any religion or any belief system or any cultural identity that is not your own. They are the questions that Thoreau asked when he went to Walden Pond and read the Bhagavad Gita there. They are the questions that Emerson asked when he studied the Upanishads and wrote about the Over-Soul. They are the questions that America’s own greatest minds have always been drawn to.
Ancient India built the most sophisticated and rigorous inner science the world has ever produced. The Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Kashmir Shaivism. The Bhagavad Gita. These are not religious texts in the way the word religion is commonly understood. They are maps. Precise, systematic, empirically derived maps of the inner landscape of human consciousness. Built by people who turned the same quality of rigorous inquiry inward that modern science turns outward.
Schrodinger kept the Upanishads on his desk. Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita at the moment of the first nuclear test. Jung spent years studying Indian philosophy and called it the most complete psychology ever developed. Thoreau carried the Gita to Walden Pond. The greatest minds of Western science and culture have been quietly going to India’s inner science for what their own tradition could not fully provide.
What they found there is what America needs now. Not as religion. Not as the adoption of any foreign cultural practice. But as the recognition that the inner dimension of human life is the foundation of everything else.
A civilization that builds only outward, without building the inner lives of the human beings at its center, will eventually produce exactly what America’s data is showing us. Because the outer world is always, without exception, a reflection of the inner one.
IX. The Dream Is Not Dead. It Is Waiting.
I want to end where I began. With love.
The American dream is not gone. I do not believe that. I cannot believe that. Because the idea at its heart is too powerful and too true to simply disappear.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The pursuit of happiness. Not the performance of it. Not the accumulation of the external conditions that are supposed to produce it. The actual pursuit. The genuine searching. For what genuine human flourishing actually is and where it actually comes from.
The Founding Fathers of America were pointing at something deeper than material success when they wrote those words. Jefferson read widely in philosophy. Franklin was a genuine intellectual. These were men who had thought carefully about what a human life is actually for. And what they pointed at was not comfort. Not wealth. Not power. It was the fullest possible expression of human potential. The life lived from the inside out rather than the outside in.
America mastered the outside with breathtaking brilliance. The skylines that take your breath away. The innovation that has changed the world. The extraordinary capacity of the American human being when they are truly alive to their own potential.
What the data is showing is not that America has failed. It is that America has been building with one hand while the other hand remained unused. The outer hand built magnificently. The inner hand, the one that builds meaning and connection and wisdom and genuine peace, has been largely idle for two centuries.
The world our children inherit is being shaped right now. In every decision being made today. In every economy that contracts. In every ordinary family that pays a price they never agreed to pay. In every young person who goes to sleep tonight carrying a sadness they cannot explain.
Look at the children in your life tonight. Your own. Your nephew. Your neighbor’s child. Any child whose face you know and love.
And ask yourself honestly.
Is this the world you want them to inherit?
The America that figures out how to use both hands simultaneously will not just be the most powerful nation on earth. It will be the most genuinely admired one. Not because of its military. Not because of its economy. But because of what it demonstrates is possible for human beings when they develop both the outer and the inner with equal seriousness and equal courage and equal creativity.
That America is still possible.
The dream is not dead.
It is waiting.
For America to remember not just what it wanted to build in the world.
But what it wanted to become inside itself.
And when it remembers that, the world, which has always looked to America with a complicated mixture of admiration and frustration and genuine hope, will look again with something simpler and more powerful.
Recognition.
That this is what genuine leadership looks like.
From the inside out. 🙏
This piece is offered with love. For a country and a people I have known for twenty years and genuinely believe in. Not as criticism but as the honest mirror that only a true admirer holds up. Because the world needs America at its best. And America at its best has always been capable of something extraordinary.
Sadhavi Khosla
on X | SadhaviSpeaks on Substack & YouTube.