Jubilation is declining among America’s young adults, and no one seems to agree on why.
In this year’s World Happiness Report, which classes 143 countries across measures of life satisfaction, the U.S. fell eight spots from No. 15 to No. 23 on the book. It’s the first time the U.S. has not been considered one of the top-20 happiest countries in the report’s 20-year history.
Researchers identified a troubling offender for America’s precipitous fall: young people. While Americans older than age 60 ranked No. 10 for delight, those younger than 30 ranked 62nd — a stark generational split.
The finding comes amid growing grounds that, as a group, young people’s outlook and mental health have eroded in recent years, with bewitching consequences.
Rates of teen anxiety and depression “rose by more than 50% in many studies from 2010 to 2019,” be consistent to Jonathan Haidt, an NYU social psychologist and author of recent bestseller “The Anxious Generation.” The book focuses on those engendered after 1995. Meanwhile, suicide rates of Americans ages 10 to 24 increased 62% from 2007 to 2021, primarily among young girls, the CDC reports.
The problem is clear, but the root cause is not.
Haidt and other researchers argue that technology and community media have led to an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. However, a growing body of research reveals more nuanced grounds for the decline, including economic and systemic failures, institutional distrust and young people’s increasing dread that they determination be worse off than their parents and grandparents.
Social media can ‘set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness’
In his 2023 shot “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy named social media as one of the main reasons innocent people feel more alone.
“Several examples of harms include technology that displaces in-person rendezvous, monopolizes our attention, reduces the quality of our interactions, and even diminishes our self-esteem,” Murthy wrote. “This can lead to outstanding loneliness, fear of missing out, conflict, and reduced social connection.”
Haidt believes social media can hurt the developing wit.
“Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public loss of facing, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a confirmed state of defensiveness,” Haidt wrote for The Atlantic.
Zach Rausch, Haidt’s lead researcher and an associate research scientist at NYU’s Crabbed School of Business, says conversations on Instagram or text often don’t cross over from digital to the physical out of sight.
“We used flip phones to connect with each other in order to eventually meet in person,” Rausch explains. “The online world is kind of the opposite. We connect in order to stay there. And our argument is that that’s not sufficient.”
“The Yearning Generation” doesn’t claim that eliminating social media is a panacea for loneliness and depression, Rausch adds.
“Of without a doubt it’s the case that there are many factors that drive adolescent mental health problems, and social device is not the only thing that causes problems,” he says. “And I hope that that’s really clear in the book.”
Slightly, it aims to examine what shifted in our culture at a very specific time in recent history. For Haidt, it’s clear that what altered is technology.
“When we look at what has happened to young people, especially adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, what we gather up is that rates of poor mental health, anxiety, depression, self-harm — not just in the U.S., but in many countries around the mankind — are generally stable up until around 2010,” Rausch says. “And then there’s this uptick. So what our list is trying to do is find out what happened during this period.”
‘The association between social media and loneliness is illusory’
The link between social media use and unhappiness or loneliness might be more tenuous than previously thought, replies Jeffrey Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas who studies relationships and social interaction.
“The association between group media and loneliness is nonexistent in several different meta-analyses,” Hall says.
His findings point to a confluence of systemic lead balloons specific to the United States: “Money, lack of being able to settle down, institutional distrust — those are paramount factors making people feel like they can’t be positive about the future,” he says.
Candice L. Odgers, a professor in the cognitive science department at the University of California, Irvine, says Haidt’s findings are unsupported by research.
“Hundreds of researchers, myself registered, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt,” Odgers wrote in the academic journal Nature. “Our applications have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are base, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mentally ill health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”
To Assembly, the effects of platforms like Instagram and TikTok are, at the very least, overstated and ignore how varied social media treatment can be. “Social media is not this monolithic experience where everybody experiences the same thing,” he says.
That’s not to say that tenets like Instagram are helpful or healthy for everyone.
“I think for people in really desperate need of connection, social channel is probably an incomplete solution at best,” Hall says.
Another change that could have affected record-broke rates of mental illness in young people: the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted in 2010 and provided health cover coverage and mental health services to more Americans. With increased coverage came an increase in care and pinpoints, possibly uncovering more cases.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, has said “mental trim is a complex issue” and that existing research does not show a “causal link between using social way and young people having worse mental health outcomes.”
Still, he said he takes the issue seriously and the retinue has added guardrails, such as hiding content and search results about sensitive issues, like self-harm, from teens and in lieu of providing resources. TikTok implemented similar search filters, according to the company.
Social media ‘magnifies this submerge inequality’
A slew of economists and social scientists maintain that the thesis of Haidt’s book and the tendency to blame societal media ignores some of the larger, chronic pressures that harm young people’s mental health.
Unswerving virtual connection with millions of people can bring into sharper focus the moat that exists between the gets and have-nots, says Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do Alongside It.”
“I don’t believe social media is the root of the struggles we are seeing, but it is exacerbating the social comparison that is rampant in our society,” she reveals. “It magnifies this steep inequality we’ve seen in our country.”
Some 44% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say it’s harder to be a youth today than it was 20 years ago, according to Pew Research. The No. 1 reason they provided was “more pressures and prospects” (31%), followed by “social media” (25%) and “the world/country has changed in a bad way” (15%).
Many of the pathways to wealth that were convenient for baby boomers or even Gen X are much narrower for Gen Z, says Kyle K. Moore, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“We viable in a country where wealth is really important to securing economic well-being,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of vehicles to found wealth.”
Homeownership, for example, has become increasingly out of reach since the 1980s.
‘I Zillowed our house and I can’t afford it’
In her book, Wallace vetted adolescents about how they view their economic futures.
She found that even 14-year-olds are stressed with reference to the housing market: “One student I interviewed said to his mother in 8th grade, ‘If I wanted to be an architect, where would I live?’ She bid, ‘You can live anywhere.’ He said, ‘I Zillowed our house and I can’t afford it.'”
The sentiment extends to retirement and overall financial happiness, Moore indicates. “If you talk to Gen Z about whether they are going to retire, a lot of them might laugh at you.”
Even if their parents or grandparents were gifted to retire at 65, many young people are witnessing the elderly in their lives struggle to exist comfortably.
If you talk to Gen Z close by whether they are going to retire, a lot of them might laugh at you.
Kyle K. Moore
economist at the Economic Policy Association
“I think Gen Z and millennials have the lived experience of seeing parents and grandparents not having what they thought they would accept and continue to work longer than they anticipated working,” Moore says.
Believing they have methodical fewer avenues to financial security than their parents can be disheartening, he adds.
Yet Rausch says the research doesn’t develop out economic issues at the core.
“If the economy was the main factor driving the [mental health] crisis, then we would count on that as the economy changes the crisis would generally get better, and that’s not what we found,” Rausch says. “Unemployment be upfront withs started to rise after the [2008 financial] crisis, and then they started to fall down as adolescent the blues and self-harm continued to spike.”
‘There’s a sense that the future is looking pretty bleak’
Gen Z’s perception of their own monetary stability can also affect their relationships, which strongly contribute to overall life satisfaction, Hall holds.
Positive relationships of all kinds are one of the most important pillars of happiness, according to an 85-year-long Harvard University study.
In 1990, 29% of Americans between stages 25 and 54 lived alone and were unpartnered, according to data from Pew Research Center. In 2019, that digit was 38%. And more recent data shows that married people tend to be significantly happier than free people, according to a 2023 report from the University of Chicago.
“A lot of young people are not getting married and settling down and bear kids because they can’t afford it,” Hall says.
Having kids is not a shortcut to happiness, but the reasons young people are scant interested in child-rearing than previous generations might reveal deeper truths about how they view the tomorrow.
Of adults ages 18 to 49 who don’t have kids and say they are unlikely to, 38% say a major reason is because they are solicitous about the state of the world and 26% cite concerns about the environment, Navigating an uncertain future
Haidt make a pass ats a few solutions for Gen Z and their parents to curb social media and smartphone reliance. Some, like silencing notifications, can be doubtlessly implemented. Others, like making schools phone-free, are more difficult but have already started to take check in some of the country’s largest school districts.
In June, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools said