Since the mid-1950s, research has suggested that happiness in life is shaped like a curve.

It starts from adolescence to early adulthood.

From about the middle of the second decade of life, happiness begins to decline due to multiple obligations. The feeling of happiness starts to increase again after 60 years.

However, it seems that this curve as a shape no longer corresponds to today’s reality. Young adults are no longer as happy as older adults.

They are not even as happy as middle-aged people. This is the conclusion of a new survey conducted in Great Britain.

The reasons why young people feel happy – or at least until now we thought they were happy – happiness researcher Tobias Ess from Witten Herdecke University describes them as follows: “It is the youthful happiness of expectation, of expectation.

Teenagers and young people want to try things, they want to grow, they like to take risks and they like adventure.”

Global crises and social media

But today young adults and teenagers no longer experience this early phase of happiness. In contrast, the period of adolescence and young adulthood is characterized by anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence about the future.

And this is not due to the restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. The measurements had already started in 2011.

Tobias Es explains why young people find it increasingly difficult to see the future with optimism: “Let’s think about global crises, environmental destruction, wars, but also the depreciation of values, the threat to democracy, the threat to personal security, but also the share of social media.».

The result is that the world as a whole is increasingly perceived as hostile, and this reduces the feeling of happiness, according to Tobias S.

Women are more unhappy

Constant comparison with others on social media leads young people to often feel “less than”.

They focus on their shortcomings and develop fears about real life. “We see that people find it more and more difficult to go to the doctor for example, because they take everything or many things into a virtual reality.”

Young women even seem to be particularly unhappy, especially between the ages of 18 and 25.

The British authors of the study speculate that the reason is that girls and young women feel very insecure about their bodies because of the content of social media.

The figures are also based on US data from the National Health Service CDC.

They find a very large increase in feeling hopeless before the age of 25, and this is also because young people today have less self-confidence and a less positive view of the world. The phenomenon is also found in many other large countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Meanwhile from 2020 to 2023 a very large data bank covering 34 countries has been created. And in these 34 countries the data also shows that young people today are not as happy as one would expect at their age.

Edited by: Maria Rigoutsou