This is what more than 80 percent of Americans believe. The CBS News-New York Times poll released on Thursday revealed an unsettling truth: 81 percent of the participants feel that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”

A year ago, only 69 percent of the respondents believed that, while in 2002 only 35 percent were convinced that the direction was wrong.

The poll was based on telephone interviews conducted from March 28 through April 2 with 1,368 adults throughout the country. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The respondents were selected randomly by a computer from a complete list of more than 42,000 active residential exchanges across the country. The exchanges were chosen so as to ensure that each region of the country was represented in proportion to its population, according to The New York Times. They applied the random procedure within each household, where one adult was designed to be the respondent for the survey, the newspaper added.

According to the New York Times/ CBS News poll, nearly three in 10 respondents declare they are very concerned that they or someone in their household might lose their job in the next 12 months. Most of them say that the country’s best years of good jobs are gone.

A report on unemployment is expected to be released by the Labor Department within a few days.

The opinions differ when it comes to politics. Democrats and independents are more likely to express a concern about U.S.’s future, while most Republicans say life conditions are improving slowly but surely.