Our high school years were, many of us may have been told, the best days of our lives. But that’s no longer the case, according to a new working paper from Dartmouth University Professor David Blanchflower and colleagues – and the formerly inescapable “U curve” of well-being is now more of an uphill struggle towards happiness.
“There is a literature of at least 600 published papers suggesting that happiness is U-shaped in age and, conversely, that unhappiness is hump-shaped in age,” Blanchflower wrote last month in an article regarding the findings. “Across a variety of datasets and measures, the finding of a midlife low has been consistently replicated.”
“But not anymore,” he continued. “Now, young adults (on average) are the least happy people. Unhappiness now declines with age, and happiness now rises with age – and this change seems to have started around 2017. The prime-age are happier than the young.”
It’s hard to overstate how universal the U-shape happiness curve was. It had been evidenced in just about every human society tested, from advanced and wealthy countries to developing nations; it was seen in the English-speaking and non-English-speaking world; in places with high and low life expectancies, high and low levels of democracy, irrespective of average earnings or GDP or Gini ratio.
“I found evidence of the nadir in happiness in one hundred and forty-five countries, including one hundred and nine developing and thirty-six developed,” Blanchflower wrote in 2020, in one of his many papers on the phenomenon. “I found it in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australasia, and Africa […] I have a well-being U-shape for every one of the thirty-five member countries of the OECD. I have it for 138/193 member countries of the United Nations.”
So fundamental is the U-shape pattern that you don’t even need to restrict yourself to human societies to see it – the trend has even been seen in populations of great apes. It was, it appeared, an inescapable part of being not just human, but hominin: to be destined, seemingly by biology, to be happy when we’re young and old, and grumpiest in the middle.
Until now.
Thanks to an unprecedented downturn in the wellbeing of young people, the U-shaped happiness curve is now closer to a straight line, with life satisfaction highest at the end and lowest at the beginning of adulthood.
“[It] sort of shocked us,” Blanchflower said in a lecture on his findings earlier this year. “All of a sudden, […] [we] started to actually observe something going on, which was a rapid decline in the wellbeing of young people – particularly for young women, but the trends for young men were the same.”
“There were changes in the data that we really had never seen before,” he added.
Today, he explained, around one in nine young women in America report every day of their lives as being a bad mental health day. For young men, the figure is lower – but at around one in 14, it’s still very concerning. The team found huge rises in young people visiting mental health services, being hospitalized for self-harm, and even attempting suicide.
And while the phenomenon was first seen in data from the US, subsequent studies by Blanchflower and colleagues showed the problem to be far more widespread than just one country. So far, in fact, this new negative relationship has been found in more than 80 countries across the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe.
“I have exactly the same pattern in 43 countries that I’ve looked at already,” Blanchflower said. “This is kind of scary […] we should have been doing something about this years ago.”
So what’s behind the global downturn in youth happiness? Here’s the kicker: we don’t know.
None of the easy answers seem to fit. The change is “not caused by COVID,” Blanchflower stressed; “COVID simply extends trends that had started in 2011.” It’s probably not the labor market either, since wellbeing in the young seems to start decreasing right around the time the job market picked up.
“What you need here is something that starts around 2014 or so, is global and disproportionately impacts the young – especially young women,” Blanchflower told Scientific American. “Anybody that comes up with an explanation has got to have something that fits that.”
“Other than cell phones, I don’t have anything.”
The paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, is available on the SSRN server.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help and support are available in the US at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1-800-273-8255. In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. International helplines can be found at SuicideStop.com.
An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024.
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