Perhaps it’s a side effect of our unprecedented wealth , leisure, and comfort. Perhaps it’s the result of so many broken social promises, our imperial misadventures, or the general coarsening of our national spirit and discourse. Whatever the cause, something is wrong. You can see it in how we speak to one another. You can see it in how we react to national and local crises. From the very top to the bottom, we are clearly a miserable people , allowing our general dissatisfaction with life to spiral into outright contempt for fellow human beings.

This week alone has played host to a stream of unusually cruel invective and ugliness, shared first at the lowest rungs of social media and then mainstreamed by major news publications.

Over the weekend, the international community scrambled to rescue five passengers from a submersible, the Titan, after it lost contact with its host ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The Titan was supposed to tour the resting site of the Titanic. Sadly, all five passengers, which included a wealthy businessman and his son, a retired French naval officer, and a British "adventurer," died in the dive.

Though it was heartening to see the international community pool its combined resources in an effort to rescue the Titan and its crew, the accompanying commentary on U.S. social media and in newsrooms was decidedly disheartening — unusually vitriolic, even by today’s low standards.

The New Republic, for example, published an especially tasteless news report titled, "OceanGate CEO Missing in Titanic Sub Had History of Donating to GOP Candidates." As if a few political donations — and the alleged donations are few, some dating as far back as 1979 — are germane somehow to the news of what went wrong this weekend with the Titan. Elsewhere, the Associated Press accused its readership of not caring about the immigrants who died recently when their ship sank off the coast of Greece, suggesting readers care only when wealthy people are lost at sea. Other newsrooms saw the Titan disaster as an opportunity to settle entirely unrelated scores. Yahoo! News and the Daily Beast, for example, attempted to blame the tragedy on tech billionaire Elon Musk, drawing a nonexistent thread between his Starlink company and OceanGate. Starlink has exactly nothing to do with the Titan or how it communicated with the surface.

"Next time some rich white person wants to take Sam Alito on an expensive trip, please take him to see the Titanic," MSNBC contributor Elie Mystal cracked on Twitter.

This is not normal behavior. It’s sociopathic. And there’s much worse.

Indeed, if you think the above examples are bad, they’re nothing compared to what maladjusted social media users have said this week regarding the Titan five. The deluge of sneering, jeering quips cheering the crew’s agonizing demise is enough to convince even the harshest skeptic that the United States does indeed have a serious mental health crisis. So much contempt and so much vitriol, and all because the Titan victims were — wealthy? Because a ticket on the Titan cost roughly $250,000 per person? For this reason alone, they are taking joy in the death of total strangers?

Consider the following verses, tweeted this week by self-declared "feminist, blacktivist, LGBT ally," and poet Kyla Lacey: "Dying in an ocean as deep as your pockets … in a vessel as tiny as the shanty houses you turned your noses up at. ... In a darkness as expansive as your ego … going to see the final resting place of the souls whom you disturbed with your curiosity, but they still eagerly welcomed you." Lacey doesn’t know any of the Titan victims, one of whom was only 19 years old. She doesn’t know the first thing about their character or quality. She quite simply invented characters just so she could hate them. And for this, she has been rewarded with 21,000-plus retweets, 139,000-plus likes, and 7.9 million views.

Remember, the people cheering the Titan disaster genuinely consider themselves to be the "good guys," crusaders for the poor and the working class. "Good guys" indeed.

As USA Today opinion contributor Daniel Darling put it, "Amazed in a distressing way at the lack of concern for the human beings trapped in the submarine."

Speaking of invective, President Joe Biden this week casually threatened citizens, the people he swore to protect, with total annihilation at the hands of the military.

"I'm a Second Amendment guy," the president said during a fundraising event Tuesday in California. "And guess what? It doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want. It says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own. Even during when it was passed, you couldn’t own a cannon."

At the time of the Second Amendment’s writing, there were no federal or state laws barring cannon ownership. Further, the text of the Second Amendment says nothing about cannons. But anyway.

"You know, I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is — you know, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots," the president continued "Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15."

This is not normal stuff. Worse, this isn’t even the first time that Biden has leveled this exact warning, threatening oh-so-casually to incinerate his fellow countrymen should they run afoul of the regime. This is not politics as usual. This is the stuff of a disturbed and unhealthy people, a people wracked with misery and anger. A culture in which it’s normal to fantasize about killing one’s political opponents over sharp disagreements is not a culture of a happy and well-adjusted people. It is a culture with deep rot and sickness.

And things will only get worse until we recognize and acknowledge the sickness. Until we work to root it out and cure it, it only gets worse from here — much worse.

Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.