Young people are now unhappier than those in middle age, a new study has found.
For decades, researchers noted the midlife “unhappiness hump”—whereby people begin young adulthood relatively happy, which declines into middle age as feelings of despair peak around age 50. Happiness then increases again into retirement.
However, Gen Z is so unhappy that they have upturned that pattern, the global study found.
Why it Matters
The research raises concerns about the well-being of Gen Z, which includes those aged roughly from 12 to 28, who were found to be more prone to feelings of despair and anxiety than other generations at the same age.
CDC data found that poor mental health had risen among young men from 2.5 percent in 1993 to 6.6 percent in 2024. Young women’s self-reported poor mental health rose from 3.2 to 9.3 percent in the same period. Additionally, a 2023 Gallup survey found that just 15 percent of Gen Zers reported their mental health as excellent, a substantial drop from the prior decade, when 52 percent of Millennials in the same age group reported theirs as excellent.
What To Know
The central finding of the study was that the midlife misery hump has disappeared, authors David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu wrote in their paper, “The Declining Mental Health of the Young and the Global Disappearance of the Unhappiness Hump Shape in Age.”
Instead, Gen Z face “a sort of ski slope” where misery diminishes as people grow older, “driven entirely by a growth of mental ill health amongst young people,” Alex Bryson, one of the authors of the study, said.
Gen Z has faced some unique challenges as a generation. They were the first to grow up entirely immersed in the digital age of social media, many spent much of their formative teen and college years stuck at home due to the COVID pandemic, and a poll earlier this year found that Gen Z carries the highest average personal debt of any generation.
But it’s smartphones that Bryson believes may be the prime cause of their higher reported levels of misery.
“There’s been a lot of discussion, quite rightly, about screen time, smartphones, the arrival of a fast broadband internet, and the role that that might be playing,” he told The Times of London.
“There’s increasing evidence of not only a correlation between the intensity with which you engage with your screens and mental ill health, but also of some causal impacts. But of course, that’s not the whole story.”
Fellow author Blanchflower branded the findings a “global crisis” and called for immediate action, such as banning smartphones in schools and encouraging young adults to return to in-person social events.
The authors reported they analyzed pooled data from 44 countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.
What People Are Saying
Professor Blanchflower told The Times of London, “We started out seeing this in the US, where we initially found that despair — where people say that every day of their life is a bad mental health day — has exploded for the young, especially among young women. We then found the same in the UK. And we have now seen that all around the world.”
Arthur C. Brooks, the host of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast, wrote in The Atlantic, “Given the well-documented increase over the past decades in diagnosed mood disorders among adolescents and young adults, we might expect that left side [younger adults] to be pushed down in newer estimates. And sure enough, this is exactly what the new GFS study finds, in the U.S. and around the world: The flourishing scores don’t fall from early adulthood, because they now start low; they stay low until they start to rise at the expected age.”
What Happens Next
The study authors have urged immediate action to help the young generations, including restrictions on smartphones and policy attention to youth mental health.
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