Young Adulthood Is No Longer One of Life's Happiest Times

Is the u shaped curve just a proxy for financial condition?

Young people starting out didn’t make much but eventually earned more saved and could look forward to a house and affording a family

The U curve is lowest when career starts plateau or decline, financial demands for college couple with a mortgage, and then once kids launch and mortgage is paid off (because you could afford to buy in your 20s), happiness rises.

Comparing eras' difficulties is ultimately meaningless. When you're an adolescent, everything is new and for the first time (more or less). You have nothing to compare it to. Every decision you make has the potential to shape your entire life, except you don't know which ones. Nothing will ever feel like that again.

Everything else is just a footnote.

I think it's crucial to find out why this is happening. "Other than cell phones, I don’t have anything" is not good enough as a conclusion. It's the most obvious thing, but it could have numerous other reasons.

It should be possible to extend this research with other factors. There must be a few participants that rarely use smartphones and the internet. Do they show the different results?

If the source is the internet (social media, online videos, ...) we really need to learn more about this. What exactly makes it that harmful.

Hey, Gen Z. Gen X here. I personally think this whole "young adulthood is the happiest time of your life" is some sort of bizarre Boomer artifact, and certainly wasn't in play in the late '80s or '90s. I was told that repeatedly when I was a teenager, but it certainly wasn't the case for me or most of the people I knew when I was a young man, 35 years ago. We were all totally blindsided by how bad the high school experience was, and for many of us, the college experience was bad as well.

The good news is that as we became independent from our families and the institutions that we were committed to, and found paths in our work and family life to be productive, the majority of us became totally normal, functional people. Would I say "happy"? Sometimes but certainly not always - for almost all of us. Life has its way, with health and work and family issues that larger social or economic issues will never have any influence over, regardless of the era you grow up in.

But this article says that people are least happy at 50. So, I'm 50. Am I happy? Not, like, happy happy. But am I OK? Yeah, sure, I've figured things out, have my own family, it's all turned out OK.

Am I happier than any point in young adulthood in the late '80s and early '90s? Absolutely.

This whole "best years of your life" as a teen or young adult thing is... nonsense. It has nothing to do with the possibilities of the human experience. For some people? Sure, let them have their fun. But I don't want to sound like Dan Savage, but, for everyone, it can get better. Chart your own path, work it out for yourself.

As an anecdotal data point, I’m happier than in my early and mid 20s, and I have hope for my 30s.

Obligatory "please do not discount suvivorship bias in your results".

It has apparently escaped the notice of the authors of this article that in 2022 we had just begun to recover from a once-in-a-century global pandemic that lasted two years, killed eight million people (so 30% more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust), left countless thousands living with debilitating long-term symptoms, and permanently deprived an entire cohort of once-in-a-lifetime formative experiences, like graduating high school or going to the prom, and also left them with vastly greater uncertainty about their future financial prospects. Furthermore, if you are 17, then all of that represents a much higher percentage of your conscious experience than if you're 50 or 70, so why on earth would anyone be surprised that 17-year-olds in 2022 report lower life satisfaction than 17-year-olds from 2005-2018?

Furthermore, the rest of the variation is highly questionable. The vertical scale on the graph is compressed. The actual difference in the alleged U is only about 0.1, or 3% of the absolute scale value of 3.3. That is a tiny difference. I'd frankly be surprised if it was even statistically significant, let alone indicative of an actual underlying systemic change.

So I'm calling shenanigans here.

UPDATE: I searched for "pandemic" rather than "COVID" so I missed this:

> Later, as he put it, he “thought that everything was COVID.” Now, Blanchflower says, he sees that was an error. “COVID extended trends that had existed before,” he says.

But the data presented do not support this conclusion at all. There are no "trends that had existed before" in the data since all pre-covid data is grouped together in a single data set.

From the article conclusion :

> “What you need here is something that starts around 2014 or so, is global and disproportionately impacts the young—especially young women,” he says. “Anybody that comes up with an explanation has got to have something that fits that. Other than cell phones, I don’t have anything.

I don't now maybe seing consequences of global climate change with your bare eyes and noticing most of boomers are in full denial might be a at least a "small" contributing factor? Maybe even more than cell phone if I may dare?

Youth are happier with more regimentation and now they have less. Adults are happier with less regimentation and now we have... less!

It's tough to be a kid in an increasingly diverse and changing society. Especially when they are on the forefront of that cultural transformation and have to face relentless attacks from a large part of the adult establishment. We probably need new and different ways to teach and engage with kids, but instead the conversation usually ends up about phones or pronouns. Like when people used to complain about too much TV and violent video games. These specific obsessions distract from the actual issues, which is and has always been about making mental health a core focus of our society.