Most people go through different periods in their life where they are happier, more worried, sadder, filled with despair, and many other emotions. Of course, on a day to day basis, people experience a wide range of emotions, but when taken as a whole it has long been possible to predict with good accuracy what the overall ‘mood’ of someone will be based on their age and gender.

This is where the concept of a midlife crisis comes from. As people reach the middle years of their life, they often experience a shift in overall emotions that leads them to make drastic changes like switching jobs, getting divorced, having an affair, or any number of other things. In a recent paper, which was published in PLOS One, however, these standards seem to be changing.

In the past, researchers knew that people’s well-being and what they call ‘illbeing’ would be shaped like a hump when graphed. In the paper, they said:

“The well-being U-shape in age and the hump-shape in ill-being has been described by one of us as ‘among the most striking, persistent patterns in social science’. This is no longer the case. Instead, subjective ill-being falls with age, in the United States, the United Kingdom and in 42 other countries. In the United States and the United Kingdom, we can show that this change has come about because the mental health of the young has deteriorated compared to that of older people. It seems reasonable to infer that the same underlying changes account for the age pattern in illbeing we observe across the world in the Global Minds data for 2020–2025.”

While getting rid of the midlife crisis may sound like a good thing, the reason it is going away definitely is not. The study suggests that the mental health of young people is already dropping rapidly, well before they reach that midlife point. The researchers come from Dartmouth College, University College London, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

In it, they find that there is a measurable decline in wellbeing among young people throughout the world. To show this, they looked at survey data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1993 and 2024 as well as from an ongoing UK Household Longitudinal Study going from 2009 to 2023. In total, data from well over 10 million people was collected.

The data collected shows that where there used to be a ‘hump’ on the charts, it has been replaced by a downward trend throughout the adult life of those who responded.

It is not likely going to be a surprise to most people that there is a mental health crisis in the world, and especially with younger generations but this study does help to provide concrete data behind it. Whether it will be used to take action that can help people to improve their wellbeing is a whole other question.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.