Team Southpaw spent our summer talking to Americans about money. Not just how much they have or what they’re spending, but what it actually feels like to manage their lives right now.
We created the American Strain study because I felt like there was a piece of the story we weren’t getting from the usual economic indicators. We can track inflation, unemployment, consumer confidence and household income, and obviously all of those things matter. But they don’t tell us what happens when the numbers hit someone’s actual life.
One of the findings I keep coming back to is this: 52% of Americans say that from the outside, their life probably looks more stable than it feels. The same percentage say they sometimes pretend things are fine financially when they’re not.
Our qualitative research made those numbers much more real. One woman told us, “I think people look at me like I have it all together. I am good at hiding reality from the world.” People see her smiling and helping others. They see the car she drives. What they don’t see, she said, is the mileage on it.
That gap between what we can see and what is actually happening underneath it shows up all over this research.
It’s also one of the reasons we created the Southpaw STRAIN Index. Rather than assuming income tells us how someone is doing, the Index incorporates measures of stability, tradeoffs, resilience, anxiety, and income flexibility. We designed it to identify four groups: Thriving, Stable, Managing and Under Pressure.
But something pretty remarkable happened when we applied it to our survey data: out of 1,499 Americans, only two qualified as Thriving. Nearly everyone else fell somewhere on the continuum from Stable to Under Pressure: 29% were Stable, 36% were Managing and 34% were Under Pressure.
I don’t interpret that to mean everyone in the US today is miserable or on the brink of financial disaster. Far from it. But it does suggest that some degree of financial strain has become so pervasive that a life largely free from it was almost nonexistent in our sample.
Another important observation: those categories aren’t necessarily visible from the outside.
That’s important for businesses because we have access to more customer data than we’ve ever had. We know what people buy, how often they buy it, what promotions they respond to, where they live and a thousand other things about them. But we can still completely misunderstand their lives.
A consumer can continue buying your product while quietly cutting something else. Someone with a good salary can be worried about whether they’ll ever retire. Someone who looks like they’re “doing fine” can be one car repair away from a serious problem.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to share more of what we learned from American Strain, including some findings that surprised me and some that I think should make brands and organizations reconsider what they think they know about the people they serve.
Because one thing I’m convinced of after doing this research is that what we can see is only part of the story.
About the research: American Strain is a mixed-method research study conducted by Southpaw Insights in partnership with Gazelle Global, Qualzy and Everything in Moderation. Fieldwork was conducted from May–July 2026 and included an online Listening Lab, a survey of 1,499 Americans—including a nationally representative sample plus readable augments of Black, Hispanic, LGBTQIA+ and disabled Americans—and six in-home and in-community ethnographies.
