Young People Are Not OK, and It’s Definitely Those Bloody Phones
Actually, no, that’s hardly the whole story
Most young and young-ish people I’ve talked to lately seem to have given up on life.
The hairdresser who cuts my hair. The people I meet at the local leisure centre. The friends that, like me, try to stay afloat but find it harder and harder to do so.
London, where I live, has become near-unliveable for young people in the last couple of years. My brother, who lived in Toronto until recently and now lives in Miami, tells me pretty much the same story.
Unless you either got lucky landing a lucrative and stable job, still have your parents bankrolling your life — you’d be surprised how common this is in certain social circles — or have a wealthy relative who died recently, you likely dread stepping out of your house because you know that might cost you more than you can afford.
To be honest, I’m not even sure I have conversations with fellow Millenials and Gen Z — I’m on the cusp of the two cohorts — that do not involve worries about how things are and how much worse they could get.
According to the latest World Happiness Report, people under 30 in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and a few other countries in the West are now experiencing the equivalent of a… mid-life crisis.
And if you were to believe countless think pieces on the decline of young people’s mental health — written almost exclusively by people who are definitely not in the same boat as us — this is mostly (or even solely) because of those bloody phones we’re all so addicted to.
That’s hardly the whole story, though, is it?
This is the first year the World Happiness Report, a publication that conducts global surveys to report how people worldwide evaluate their own lives, has divided the data by age groups.
But it’s not just people under 30 in the West who struggle to maintain a positive outlook on life nowadays.
The report found that those born before 1965 — the Baby Boomers — were, on average, much happier than those born since 1980 — Millennials and Gen Z. And while for people in the older generations, life evaluations rise with age, for the younger ones, they decline. With each year. For people born between 1965 and 1980 — Gen X — age had little effect on happiness.
However, past research has frequently shown the opposite trend. According to the report, which also separated their old rankings by age, in 2010, young people were much happier than those in midlife. Other studies from a decade or two ago also found that it’s the younger generations that feel overall more upbeat about their lives than the older ones.
And yet here we are, with something quite different happening.
But this isn’t the case globally.
The World Happiness Report also included country rankings for each age group, and there are places, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, where people under the age of 30 score significantly higher on the happiness index than those aged 60 and above. Meanwhile, in countries like the UK, the US, and Canada, to name a few, the rankings for the old are significantly higher than those for the young.
Out of the 143 countries in the report, the US now ranks at number… 62 for young people but 10 for the oldest group. This shift has, unsurprisingly, driven the US out of the top 20 happiest countries overall for the first time since reporting began. Canada ranks just a few spots higher for the young and the old than the US — 58 and 8, respectively.
The UK places 32 for the under-30 age group, but that’s still more than ten places lower when only the views of people aged 60 and above are considered. It also dropped in the general rankings from 19th to 20th happiest country.
But none of this is particularly surprising. It’s no secret that Baby Boomers across the Western world, who report the highest levels of life satisfaction, enjoy a level of wealth virtually unknown in human history, with those in the US now controlling 72% of America’s wealth. In contrast, younger generations are struggling to tick any of the boxes on society’s milestones list, like buying a house or starting a family.
As the Intergenerational Foundation charity commented on the report:
Young adults are being hit from all sides by a toxic combination of government policy, a housing affordability crisis, stagnating wages, and a high cost of living.
No wonder their generation is experiencing unprecedented levels of mental ill-health as their futures look so bleak.
So, how exactly do phones fit in with all of that?
It would be naive to say that modern technology, like phones and social media, has no impact whatsoever on our well-being.
Recent studies find that social media algorithms tend to target people’s vulnerabilities and then exploit them through increasingly more extreme and, hence, more entertaining and possibly addictive content.
If you’re a young man, and especially if you’re interested in topics like masculinity, self-improvement and addressing loneliness, you’re likely being shown posts that objectify, devalue and discredit women, which could eventually end up radicalising you into various misogynistic online communities, known collectively as the ‘manosphere.’
And these, in turn, perpetuate ideas that can harm your mental health. Not to mention the impact this rise in online misogyny then has on women and girls, including in the offline world.
Meanwhile, if you’re a young woman, you’re likely being exposed to anti-ageing messages in ways that didn’t really exist before, which only makes the pursuit of beauty even more laborious and costly. (And the beauty ideal even more unattainable.) You’re also at a high risk of various forms of online gender-based violence, like cyber-stalking, reception of unwanted images or sexually explicit content and non-consensual dissemination of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.
There’s also the danger that comes from unrestricted and unsupervised usage of phones and other devices by children. Some estimates suggest that Gen Alphas — born after 2010 — now spend more of their free time online than in reality, including in spaces that might not be safe, like virtual reality.
All of this is bound to have some impact.
However, countless studies also show that general phone usage is a poor predictor of mental health issues such as stress, anxiety or depression. There’s also no established correlation between the amount of time we spend using phones or other devices and an increase in mental health problems.
Modern technology might mirror and sometimes even exaggerate the issues that exist in real life, but it certainly doesn’t seem to play the main part in robbing us of our well-being. It’s the survival getting harder and harder that does.
And the reality is that no amount of screen-free time will magically erase the medical, student, or credit card debt many of us are saddled with. Or make housing and other basic necessities more affordable. Or cure us from the burnout and chronic stress we experience from putting in long hours at companies that couldn’t care less if we died tomorrow, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we work hard enough one day, it will get better.
To some, the online world is actually a much-needed respite from the grim reality of our world. From feeling that no matter what we do or how we do it, the future looks bleak. And, also, on fire.
To the surprise of no one, the World Happiness Report has ranked Finland as the happiest country overall for the seventh year in a row.
However, if you only consider its young people, Finland ranks seventh, with Lithuania taking the top spot, followed by Israel, Serbia, Iceland, Denmark, and Luxembourg.
If you’re wondering what sets Lithuania apart, the answer might lie in an ambitious ‘social model’ reform passed by their government in 2015, which set out to improve the labour market, upgrade social benefits, and reform social security. Today, Lithuania is among the most affordable countries in Europe. It also has one of the lowest levels of house price-to-income ratios and the highest homeownership rates in the OECD, with over 9 in 10 households owning their home outright.
(In comparison, only 50% of adults in the UK own their homes. In the US, that percentage currently stands at 65%.)
Other countries that made it to the top of the happiness rankings for young people are also among the most committed to ensuring that their citizens have better lives through robust social policies. One of my cousins studied in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he truly loved every second of his experience. He’ll likely move back there someday, too.
And sure, while owning a roof over your head, not having to work yourself to death to survive or feeling that if anything were to happen to your employment or health, you’d be in big trouble isn’t everything, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest it would alleviate the majority of young people’s worries. Money is hardly the most important thing in life, but if you think it doesn’t matter, you were never really poor.
Sadly, the dominant narrative here tends to be quite different. It shouldn’t be up to the employers or, heaven forbid, the government to fix systemic issues and, you know, pay people a living wage or intervene when that’s not happening. No, it’s up to the individuals to work harder and harder and figure it all out on their own, with the help of numerous books, podcasts, and articles that (allegedly) teach us how to be well, happy, and successful.
Well, if that were the case, and all that advice truly worked, surely the countries that are the biggest consumers of these products and services — the US and Canada top that list — would also be among the happiest.
But they aren’t, are they?
The author and writer Kirsten Powers recently wrote about this very topic in her newsletter Changing the Channel, and as she succinctly points out:
The fact is, happy and healthy people don’t just happen.
They are created by the culture in which they reside.
Blaming the screens won’t get us far. Neither will pretending that efforts made at an individual level can help us overcome massive systemic problems. (Or that we should ‘just wait for older generations to die’ so we can inherit all that Boomer wealth.)
And while it’s depressing to see how many young people report unhappiness today, there might be a silver lining to this, too.
The more disillusioned we become with the reality of our hyper-individualistic, capitalist society, the less incentive we see to back this system and the norms that guide it.
And, eventually, the more likely it becomes that one day we’ll succeed in changing all of that.
I'm a big fan of your use of adverbs, yay! As a former "Londoner" and former young person I can vouch that things started going downhill after 2016. I moved to Ireland and the housing problem is probably even worse than in the UK due to a shortage of available homes. As consumers and citizens we do hold a certain amount of power and I'd love to see that more in action (especially around elections). We can all be the pain in the a**e (British spelling 😎) of capitalism and privatisation, and all those policies that favour landlords, large investors, lobbies and so on. I really enjoyed reading your article.
Wow- I live in a country (Canada) with a low happiness level amongst my age group- that's depressing.