Young Adulthood Is No Longer One of Life’s Happiest Times
Young Adulthood Is No Longer One of Life’s Happiest Times
The U-shaped curve that pegged youth and old age as the happiest times of life has changed
as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of "third places" (places that aren't school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around... our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain't a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything
The loss of 3rd places as you mentioned is huge. When I was a kid we at least had malls, where you could still hang out and roam about without having to actually buy anything. Nowadays, there's next to nowhere to just exists without spending money (unless you live outside of cities/suburbs).
I lived outside of cities/suburbs, and there was nowhere to hang out either.
I believe that Mr. Galloway addresses most of the problems in his Ted Talk: How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future | Scott Galloway | TED
Actually, the article didn't say young people were doing worse. The reason that youth is no longer one of the "happiest times" is because the study showed that people only do better and better as they age. So where before your youth would be comparatively happier to your mid-life crisis, they're saying we just get happier and happier into midlife and old age.
This pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.
also look at the graph in the article, the yellow line representing 2024 is signifigantly lower before 35 than any point on the blue line representing 2005-2018
That sounds the same as it was for Millennials.
As a person who's not a young adult anymore I'm not sure how or if it ever was. My young adulthood was full of angst, rumination, poverty, debt, etc. Looking back there were definitely good things that I miss, but I'm in such a massively better financial and mental place these days that I can't imagine going back.
Yet another opinion piece to remind me that blocking posts by domain can't come soon enough.
"Opinion piece"? Did you read it?
Did you? Sure, it quotes a study, but its otherwise a bunch of quotes from one of the study authors, an author who has a definite idea of what to blame:
Smart phones, and nothing else. Let's hope he's better at conducting studies than he is at staying abreast of current events, but yeah, this non-sense is close to cream-of-the-crop for the
Scientific Americanlivescience.com "articles" that are always cluttering my Lemmy feed. Okay, so I confused one site for another, but we should demand better of more respectable sites, as well as round-filing the utter garbage.
Middle aged ain't much better.
my young adulthood was the happiest i had ever been; being middle aged sucks.
I think my 30s would have been great if I hadn't developed horrible, genetic, chronic medical conditions basically as soon as I turned thirty.
Facts.
ITT: A bunch of folks who didn't read the article.
The article didn’t say young people were doing worse than before, which it seems like all of you assumed.
The reason the study found for why youth is no longer one of the “happiest times” is because they showed that people only do better and better as they age. So whereas before your youth would be comparatively happier to your 'mid-life crisis', they’re saying that crisis doesn't occur anymore and we just get happier and happier into midlife and old age. So your younger days didn't get worse, they just aren't as great in comparison because the rest of your life gets so much better as time goes on.
Sounds crazy, I know. But that's what the article was actually saying.
That's part of it, but the charts also show higher despair and lower satisfaction among younger people. For example:
Thank goodness at least I personally am a happy young adult.
I'm planning on being one in another 20 years or so
Never experienced that so-called 'happy'. What is it? Is there still some left?
It's this thing that lots of money gets you.
Yeah, no
"No longer"? I'm still waiting for the happy.
There is no definitive consensus on the driver of the decline in happiness and rise in unhappiness among young adults, though Blanchflower believes the trend is driven by cell phone and social media usage. “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.”
Regardless of the cause, however, “this is a global problem,” Blanchflower says. “We’re past the point of measuring. We should be out doing pilots, trying to figure out what might work. We should be trying to come up with solutions.... Tell me what we can do to help these young people who are in trouble.”
Lol this dude sounds super out of touch. There are a whole lot of societal and economic factors around the '00s and '10s that are likely contributing.
Fuggin' "cellphones" sounds like a typical boomer answer.
Also, there is likely some lag time between a population's perception of traumatic or disturbing events and the onset of despair. I know that learning more about the financial crises around the late '00s did not help my mental health and only really occurred some time after in the mid '10s as people had time to analyze the root causes of these issues.
The continual deathmarch of climate change, growing awareness of the exploitation of the working class, and the reactionary violence and hate bred by right wing fanatics and politicians which surged beginning in the early '10s are all contenders for massive, culturally debilitating, trends. Lol "cellphones".
Smart phones and social media are obviously amplifiers of these issues and are part of the problem, but the quote is remarkably reductive and does not address the root cause of what makes the information communicated through cell phones and social media so disheartening. Maybe we are given poor context for the quote and maybe it was something Blanchflower said in passing during the interview, but, still, not a good look.
Funny, no mention of late stage capitalism
I don't know if people have just gotten meaner over time or if that is how it has always been, but there are a lot of people who are very unpleasant to interact with, both on and off the internet. It can be stressful trying to interact with new people because it's a dice roll on whether they're friendly or condescending.
Anyway, just my observation. I don't know if that has anything to do with social media, but it wouldn't surprise me I guess.
A lot of environments on the internet basically reward hostility. Any kind of engagement gets stuff promoted in the algorithms, including negative engagement, so anything the starts a fight gets put in front of everyone else. That'd mean that people are more likely to see hostile people regardless of whether there are actually more of them than before
That only accounts for online interactions though, so maybe it's not as strong an explanation as I think if offline interactions are similar
Offline, I've seen an increase in hostility after the pandemic. Mainly, people just being rude or outright hostile to each other in public. Completely anecdotal, of course, but it was less common prior to the pandemic and all of this weird political landscape.
I would like some of that "happy" please. It sounds nice
It's always funny how triggered some people get whenever there's even the hint of a suggestion that their precious smartphones might be problematic.
Yeah it's the technological tool that's the problem. Definitely not rising cost of living, political insanity, civil unrest, climate change, the slow stripping away of rights, war. But sure the problem is some nerd swiping up on their phone or playing video games or watching Netflix or literally any other distraction from hell world.
Big tech are absolutely evil pieces of shit beholden to the economic system that allows them to thrive to the detriment of humanity, but to blame a magic brick in your pocket like "yeah THIS, this must be why everyone is miserable (especially youth because please think of the children)" is just an incredibly narrow way of thinking, albeit a somewhat effective boogeyman, to distract from gestures broadly how badly we've fucked up and how much worse it's getting as the century progresses.
The worst part is the title is probably wrong.
Weird article. I think if in your middle aged years you are the most unhappy, its because you have not made the right decisions for yourself. Too many people chase the things they are told will make them happy rather than what they like and know made them happy. Doing what you are "supposed" to do. Alternative paths have their hardship but for me at least, I don't have the kind of complaint I hear from others. You always have to make some kind of compromise...
It is also the time in people's lives where they have the most responsibility. Even if you've made the right choices in life, that's when people are their busiest.
But my point is that, that is due to one's choices. You don't actually have to get married, have kids, get on the career treadmill. But also some do not even get to have these choices, so have no choice but to follow a non-traditional path. People with disabilities, people who living in places where they are displayed due to political instability, poverty, war etc.
Someone growing up in Ukraine right now, probably wont consider this to be the happiest time in their lives. A person with a disability struggling to establishing independence over even basic life activities. People who just say f--k it.