It used to be that middle age was the time in one’s life were unhappiness and depression started to creep in, but in recent years, that has definitely changed.

Instead of kids reveling in the “best time of their lives” during high school and college, far too many find themselves spending quality time in a therapist’s chair instead.

Dartmouth professor David Blanchflower authored a paper (that has yet to be peer reviewed) that reveals kids today have a long and uphill struggle toward being happy.

“There are at least 600 published papers suggesting that happiness is U-shaped in age and, conversely, that unhappiness is hump-shaped in age. Across a variety of datasets and measures, the finding of a midlife low has been consistently replicated.”

Things have changed, and it’s not good news for young people.

“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.”

This is all the more shocking when you realize that the previous U-shape curve was pretty much universal. It was steady across cultures and societies, no matter their wealth or government or language.

“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. 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.”

The trend has also been seen in ape society, which suggests that, prior to 2017, it was just part of what it meant to be a hominin. We should be happy when we are young and old, and grumpy in the middle.

This sudden downturn in the mental wellbeing of young people has made happiness closer to a straight line, with happiness being highest as an old person and lowest on the cusp of adulthood.

“It sort of shocked us. 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.”

One in nine young American women report having a bad mental health day every single day. Young American men are slightly happier, with one in fourteen reporting the same thing. More young people are visiting psychologists or admitting themselves for inpatient psychiatric stays than ever before in history.

The negative relationship is evident in 80 countries across the world, though it is most prominent in the United States.

“I have exactly the same pattern in 43 countries that I’ve looked at already. This is kind of scary. We should have been doing something about this years ago.”

For all of his data, though, Blanchflower (and everyone else) are stumped as to why this massive change has taken place.

“It’s not caused by COVID. COVID simply extends trends that had started in 2011. What you need here is something that starts around 2014 ro so, is global and disproportionately impacts the young – especially young women. Anybody that comes up with an explanation has got to have something that fits that. Other than cell phones, I don’t have anything.”

It sounds like we’ve got to get to the bottom of things first.

Otherwise, we definitely can’t attempt to fix it.

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